How to Reset Your WordPress Database to Default Settings

Key Takeaways

this video is brought to you by monster insights in this video I'll walk you through how to reset your WordPress website back to default settings this is a question that we get asked a lot in our wpbeginner engage Facebook group if you're not a member go over there and sign up this is a great resource for people to ask questions and get help on their WordPress website and if you see here this comes up quite often and so let me walk you through how you can do this well head over to our wordpress dashboard this is the website that we're going to reset and you see here I have some posts if we go into our media area I also have a lot of images that I have on here you can see we have some plugins here and when I go to my installed plugins you'll see the plugins that I have installed and then finally when we go to our themes area we'll see we have a couple of themes here and if you're like a lot of people you might have several more here so let's go through the process of getting a fresh install without deleting and reinstalling WordPress we want to head over to our plugins area and click add new we're using a particular plug-in for this I want to search for a plug-in and we're searching for WordPress database reset WordPress database reset this is the one we want so let's go ahead and click install now and then once you install it make sure you stick around to activate it as always if you want to completely reset everything and you're not concerned about whatever you have on your site I think it's still a good idea to go ahead and do a backup of your website simply because something happens and we always tend to need that one thing on our site so go ahead and do a backup of your website and we'll link in the description below on an easiest way to backup your site once you back it up and then you can slash everything and kill everything that you want once it's installed you'll see this WP database reset and you can either go here or if you need to go and come back you can always find it from your dashboard going down to tools and go to database reset so let's click on that you see right over the gate it says it does not do a backup anything that you do change will be permanent so if there might be a slight chance that you'll need anything on here go ahead and do a backup and you see that there's a drop down so you can choose which ones that you want to reset or keep if you're wanting to keep all of your information then you would want to select everything except for your posts but for this tutorial we're going to just reset everything back to factory settings or back to WordPress clean installation so we're going to click select all tables and this will bring them all in now you see that there's a check mark here it says that you selected all the options table you selected the options table reactivate current theme and plugins after reset if you're wanting to reset your theme as well then you want to deselect that and basically it will reset your theme to what the current WordPress installation theme is so that will let you remove any kind of theme settings that you've made changes to and then you see here because we selected the users table the original wpbeginner admin that's the admin user will be restored so if you have a lot of authors and things like that then those will be removed as well and then to finalize this they make you type it in a code and this changes every time to make sure that you are okay so that you're not accidentally doing anything you can click reset table and once we click OK it'll go through the process and then we'll have to log back in and now you see over on the left I don't have a lot of those plugins if we go to our posts we only have our hello world when you see under pages we have our sample page and our privacy page that comes with WordPress as well if you go to appearance we now have the 2020 theme activated and this one is here but is not active same thing with the plugins if we go to plugins all those plugins are still there it won't remove them because a lot of people like to reuse plugins that they have installed but it does deactivate them and now you can go in and choose which ones you need to remove completely and which ones you want to reactivate so you can do that I would say that when it's time to reactivate any plugins one of the ones you'll want to use and one of the ones you'll want to keep is monster insights it is a great plugin to connect to your Google Analytics so that you'll know exactly what's happening with your website you'll know what type of traffic is coming what your top performing pages are what your top performing affiliate links are if you have affiliate program and it does a great job of putting all of that together on the page so you can see everything right from your dashboard to get started simply head over to muster insights comm and make sure you use promo code WP be VIP to get 50% off monster insights and now that your website is set back to the original settings you have a clean slate to work with