Sometimes after creating a WordPress website, you may want to change the niche because of a lack of ideas. To do so, you must reset your WP portal. Another reason why an admin may want to reset the website is that his/her site was hacked or has encountered a security issue. Resetting a WP portal ensures that every user-made change will be wiped off and you’ll start from the beginning. There are two ways to do so – manual method and using a plugin. Below, we’ve covered both methods:
Note: Before you reset your website, back up the directory and database of your WordPress site.
Delete all posts and comments: When you delete a post, the comment that was left by a visitor on the post will be orphaned. Thus, you will have to get rid of the comments. If your new portal is of a completely different niche, you may want to delete all posts. For example, if the previous website was about recipes and you want to reset this portal and launch a blog that will cover automobile news, the recipe posts would be useless. Thus, you will have to get rid of these posts. You can delete all posts from the WP admin area manually with the built-in WP bulk post/page selection tool or by running the delete from db_prefix_posts MySQL query.
Delete media files: You may have inserted images in the posts and pages to make them more informative or complete. WP saves the images you upload to the uploads folder in the wp-content directory. You must delete this folder to free up the space that old image files are occupying.
Delete custom database tables: When you install a plugin or theme, the theme/plugin may create a database table to store data. If you won’t be using the plugin/theme, get rid of the tables that the plugin/theme has generated. To do so, open the PHPMyAdmin tool or log in to your server via SSH. Select the database. If you’re logged in via SSH, use the drop MySQL command to delete the entire table. Here’s the list of WP database tables.
Delete users: WP lets administrators manage users. The user information is saved in the db_prefix_user table. You can delete the user from this table with the help of the WP user interface.
Remove pages from Google Index: The last step of resetting a WordPress site is to remove the pages from search engines. Google and Bing let users remove pages from their results with the removal tool. The tool is easy to use. When you enter the URL in the form of the removals tool and click the button the form shows, Bing/Google will remove the page from its index after a few hours or days.
Here are the 2 great WP plugins that will let you reset your WP portal for free:
Advanced WP reset
This plugin will ignore the files you or the plugins have saved/generated but will recreate the WP database. The username and password of the website administrator will remain the same. To reset WP with this extension, enter the word AWR asks you to enter in the search box, and click the “Reset Database” button.
WP Reset
The above plugin doesn’t have any option. It simply prompts you to enter a word and click the button. WPR comes with several options. It provides an option to delete all plugins, transient options, themes, posts, comments, cache, .htaccess file, etc. The plugin also allows you to create a snapshot of the DB.
