How Do I Reset My WordPress Site From Scratch?

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Starting your WordPress site from scratch might seem like an odd, or even drastic, thing to do. But for many reasons, might be completely necessary. For example, recently, I was playing around with themes and templates on my site and I managed to completely mess up the coding. It was beyond my capabilities to fix it and so I decided that the only solution was to reset my WordPress site. Luckily, it was quite near the beginning of my blog’s life, so resetting wasn’t really all that much of a hassle. Also, it allowed me to really consider what I wanted to do with my site and how I wanted it to look going forward.

There might be other reasons for wanting to reset your WordPress Site. For example, maybe you want to completely overhaul the look of your site, or change direction with your content or audience.

Whatever the reason for wanting to reset your WordPress site, I promise, it is 100% doable with just a few easy clicks.

Backing Up Your Existing Site

Whatever you do, don’t even think about resetting your WordPress site unless you’ve created a full back up of your site. When you reset your WordPress site, everything get’s reset. It’s like restoring your mobile to factory settings. Everything, and I mean, everything gets wiped.

There are a variety of plugins available which can help you with backups. But before you look at plugins, check your web host. Many hosting packages offer backups as part of the hosting service. I’m with Hostinger and as part of my package, I get daily backups. I can also create my own backups when needed. I have two live posts and two policies written, as well as my About page, which I didn’t want getting lost. So as well as backing up my site, I also copied and pasted the contents of these pages across to a Word document. This way, I knew that when I got my new site up and running again, I would be able to input these policies and blog posts with little effort.

WP Reset

There are quite a few options when it comes to reset plugins on the market. If you know what you’re doing, you don’t even need a plugin to reset your website. However, for most of us, plugins make WordPress and blogging life in general, a whole lot easier.

For my WordPress reset, I used WP Reset. This plugin has both free and premium features, but the free version was all I needed for what I wanted to achieve.

Step 1

First step, go ahead and find WP Reset in the plugin directory. Click ‘Install Now’ and then ‘Activate,’ on the plugin.

Step 2

Once installed and activated, click ‘Tools – WP Reset’ in the little box which pops up.

Step 3

Scroll down and type ‘reset’ into the box where prompted, and click ‘Reset Site.’

Step 4

Last chance to check that you’ve got everything backed up. If you’re 100% sure you want to reset your WordPress site, click ‘Reset WordPress’ in the box which pops up. A few seconds later, you will be looking at a brand new WordPress Dashboard which is yours to do whatever you please with.

Step 5 (the optional step)

In addition, or separately to a complete reset, you can also select ‘Tools’ at the top of the WP Reset plugin. Here, you’ll see that you can delete all of your themes, plugins, etc. You can also reset theme options. It’s completely up to you. Equally, you can skip this step if you’re happy to leave the plugins and themes which you have.

Want to delete your themes within WordPress and without the use of a plugin? Click this link for our handy how-to guide.

The final step

You can now navigate to your themes and plugins within you WordPress Dashboard and re-activate whichever ones you would like. If you have finished with WP Reset, you can now go ahead and deactivate and remove this plugin. This is a personal choice of mine as I hate having unused plugins cluttering up my Dashboard and blog.

This is now the exciting bit, as you can now start again building up your blog or website to however you want it to look!