Have you ever updated a WordPress plugin only to have the new version break your site?
This can be extremely frustrating and is one of the main reasons why many beginners don’t always update plugins.
In this video, we will show you how to rollback WordPress plugins like a version control system for beginners.
0:00 Intro
0:59 Installing WP Rollback
1:52 Using WP Rollback
2:29 Rolling back a Theme
3:21 What if you can’t access your site?
Related Links
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If you just updated your site with a Plugin or a theme and it broke your site Then I'm going to walk you through how You can roll it back or get back to a Working piece the first method is if you Can still access your site but you're Just it's not working like it should Then the first method will work for you Now if you can't access your site at all Then stick around for the next method Because that'll be for you so let's dive In throughout all of our videos we Always say it's the best practice to Keep your website up to date that also Means keeping your plugins and your Themes up to date but sometimes updates Can actually break your site it's not Always happen but when it does it's Really frightening so that's why we Always recommend that you create a Complete WordPress backup before Performing any updates the problem with Backups is maybe you've made some Changes to the site and you don't want To lose those changes when you restore From a backup but you still needed to Revert it back to where it was before Okay so if all this is happening what do We do the first thing you want to do is If you can access your site we're going To go in and install a plug-in is called The wp rollback so let's go to plugins Add new and what this will do is it will Help you roll back to a previous version
Of a theme or a plugin that you're using That you've downloaded from the Repository now if a premium theme has Broken your site then you'll want to Reach out to that premium theme support And say hey I need a previous version of It or I need help and that's part of What you're paying for with premium Version is for that support but this Will work if you've downloaded something From repository a free version and this Will work for you so let's go ahead and Install the wp roll up plugin and go Ahead and activate it as well And once it's installed you can see in The plugins area these are all of my Plugins that I have installed and if They have been installed from the Repository then I see a rollback area so That means that they can roll back to The previous version of that plugin Let's just say for an example I want to Roll back the BP code I can click the Rollback button and these are all of the Previous versions that I can roll back To since this is the installed version Let's just say we just updated from the Previous version let's go back to that And we'll roll it back it'll say hey are You sure we want to do this let's go Ahead and say yes let's do that and You'll roll back ideally this should fix Whatever issue just happened to your Site
Now what if it was a theme same thing Happens with the theme we can go to Appearance let's go to themes again as Long as you have a theme that is Downloaded from the site this is the Thing that is currently on our site so I'm going to click on theme details and Down at the bottom all the way over to The right it says rollback again if I Click on rollback it'll say okay which Version do you want again since this is The installed version we're assuming That was the previous version that was Probably better so we can click on that And say roll back again you'll get a Question hey are you sure you want to do This you sure you want to make any Changes make sure you make a backup in Case something happens so then we can Roll back as well and I'll just help you Get back to a working functioning Website right there Now what if you're not able to even Access your site maybe you're getting a White screen of death meaning that There's just no way you're even able to Get into your admin area if that's the Case you'll want to log into your Hosting provider so that you can make Some changes on the folder structure for Instance this is on Bluehost so I'm Going to log into my Bluehost account From here you want to go to your site You want to manage your site
We want to go to Advanced And we're looking for file manager Basically we need to go into the file Manager to make some changes This is my main area so I want to go to WP content We'll double click on that and we can Make some changes here so right here I Want to rename this And you can rename it anything basically We just want it to where it deactivates All of our plugins so I'm just going to Rename it deactivate rename the file Once you deactivate that then you should Be able to go back to your home page and We can go to plugins what we'll do is it Will automatically deactivate all of Your plugins so we can Click refresh and we see that there are No install plugins and that's simply Because the plugin directory is Completely changed so it's not even Reading any of them Once we deactivate all that you should Be able to log into your account once You log in if you can log in then that Means it's one of your plugins that's Wrong so when you come over to install Plugins they're all going to be gone Because your plugin area is missing you Want to come back rename this back to Plugins And because you can now log in We'll go back to our site let's click
Refresh and you should see all of your Plugins here but they're all deactivated So you can go in one by one and Reactivate each one and see which one is Causing the issue Same thing can be done with your theme Say your theme is what's causing the Problem then let's go back to our file Manager we go into themes For this you'll want to remove the theme So hopefully you know what the name of Your theme is that you're using for Instance we are using the 2020 so we're Going to right click and say rename Again you can rename it whatever Because we'll change that in a minute so Let's rename it and then you should be Able to log into your site now you log Into your site but if you go to the Front end then you'll see that your Theme is not working and it probably Looks a little funky if you go to your Dashboard go to appearance themes Then it'll try and attach a theme to it In this case since the 2020 was Deactivated it automatically did the Most recent 2022. But you can log in and now you can Figure out what's going on maybe update To the previous version of the theme That you want or what have you reach out To the company that did the theme see if They can help you with that but now you Can log into your site so you can get
Back to running it go back to my file Manager Rename it again so that I have it I'll Probably have to go in and reactivate it And I'm going to go ahead and update it So between all of those steps you should Have something that allows you to get Back into your site And if none of those work but you're Still getting something like say a white Screen of death and you can watch this Video next as we walk you through step By step on how to fix the white screen Of death and what might be causing it And I'll see you over there
