Imagine you log into your WordPress site and notice in the dashboard that you have a plugin update notification.
You know it’s important to always stay current with the latest version. So you select the “update” link for the plugin.
Only to see the new update has caused issues on your site.
Yikes!
Now what do you do?
If you have the WP Rollback plugin installed, you can quickly downgrade to an earlier version of the plugin.
Read on to discover how it works.
WP Rollback
Best practice with WordPress is to always stay current with the latest version of WordPress themes and plugins.
But when you need to revert back to a prior version, the free WP Rollback plugin makes that process easy.
Rather than:
- Finding and downloading the earlier plugin/theme zipfile version
- Unzipping the plugin file to your laptop/digital device
- Using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload the earlier plugin/theme version files
WP Rollback allows you to quickly downgrade to an earlier version with a couple of steps.
How It Works
After installing and activating the WP Rollback plugin, a new Rollback option is added to each plugin in the list of plugins and to each theme in the list of themes.
When you select the Rollback option, you’ll be presented with a screen where you select the version to restore.
After selecting Rollback and confirming your choice, the plugin or theme version you selected will be added to your site.
Why I Like It
Why use WP Rollback?
It doesn’t happen often, but there are times that a plugin or theme update will cause some issues on your site.
And who wants to spend all that time and effort to manually restore an earlier version?
WP Rollback makes it straightforward to downgrade a plugin or theme version.
What You Need to Know
WP Rollback is safe to use on your WordPress sites. But always test the rollback functionality on your staging or development site before using it on a live site.
And as is best practice with WordPress: always have a site backup before updating your site.
In addition, there are a few other things to know about WP Rollback:
- It only works with WordPress.org themes and plugins. If you have a premium theme/plugin or a Github theme/plugin, the rollback option is not available. Instead, a message displays that a rollback is not available.
Generate Pro premium theme displays no rollback message - It uses the publicly available version of the plugins/themes on WordPress.org.
- Documentation is maintained on a GitHub wiki, not on the plugin page.
Summary
I shared this plugin with our Metro Detroit WordPress group a couple of years ago and one of the members replied back to me:
I wish I knew about that last week. It would have saved me a lot of headaches when I updated the plugins on my site.
If you’re looking for a quick way to downgrade your plugin/theme version on a publicly available WordPress.org theme or plugin, WP Rollback makes your job a lot easier.
Have you used WP Rollback? Has it saved you time?
