Did you know that WordPress comes with a built-in feature that allows you to undo changes and revert to an earlier version of the post. This feature is called posting reviews or just reviews .
Most of us make mistakes when writing. Sometimes you may want not to delete what you wrote earlier. Reviews allow you to fix this by going back in time and undoing changes.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily undo changes in WordPress through publishing reviews.
What is the published review ?
WordPress comes with a powerful system for storing review history for every post or page you write.
For each draft you work on, WordPress automatically saves a temporary review. This type of review is called autosave.
WordPress automatically stores a save every 60 seconds. It also automatically replaces the older version with the new autosave.
The autosave feature helps you restore the content if something goes wrong before you can save it. For example, if your browser crashes or your computer hangs while typing, you can restore the latest draft from autosave.
WordPress also saves post reviews every time a user clicks the Save, update, or publish button. Unlike autosave, these revisions are stored permanently in the WordPress database.
You can locate, browse, and reference any of these reviews from the Edit Post screen.
Useful workflow features like these are what makes WordPress the most popular blogging platform on the planet.
However, let’s take a look at how to use the post reviews feature to undo changes to WordPress posts and pages.
Why you should use a post review ?
Almost every WordPress user can benefit from post reviews. Writing great content requires a lot of tweaking and tweaking. Post reviews allow you to view your process and take a comprehensive look at how your post is developing.
You can then switch between the different states of your draft, make changes, and make your essay perfect for publication.
For multi-author WordPress sites, post-reviews allow editors to easily manage the works of multiple authors. You can find out who made changes to an article, What changes he made, etc.
However, let’s take a look at how to use post reviews to improve your WordPress posts and pages.
How to use post reviews to undo changes in WordPress?
WordPress displays the number of revisions under the “document” panel on the page editing / publishing screen.
You can find it on the right side of the Post editor screen. Clicking on “reviews” will take you to the reviews posting screen.
The Post review screen will show you the last review of the post with a slider at the top. Scrolling the button on the slider will take you to previous reviews of the post.
The changes made in each revision will be highlighted in green and pink. At the top, you can see the user who made these changes, time and other information.
WordPress will also let you know if the review is an autosave or a draft.
You can use the next and Previous buttons to navigate between reviews.
In addition, you can check the box at the top that says “Compare any two reviews”. Doing this will split the slider button into two, and you can take each button to a different review and compare the difference between two far apart reviews.
To restore a previous copy, you can simply click the Restore This Revision or Restore Autosave button.
WordPress will restore the selected review as your current post review, and you can then save it as a draft.
Keep in mind that restoring to an earlier version will not delete the latest version of your post. Instead, WordPress will store it in the database as another review.
Using post reviews with the old WordPress editor
In case you have not upgraded your WordPress to Gutenberg and are still using the old classic editor, you will find the post reviews in the profile box for the post on the right panel of the page / post editing screen.
To view the reviews of the publication, you can simply click on the “Browse” link next to the number of reviews. Apart from this, the reviews of the publication work similarly in both Classic Editor and Gutenberg.
Selecting or deleting reviews of posts in WordPress
All reviews of the publication are stored in your WordPress database. Due to this, many users are worried that too many reviews can slow down their websites.
That’s not true.
WordPress skips publishing reviews when database calls are made on the front end. It only searches for reviews on the post’s edit screen, or when you’re already browsing reviews.
WordPress allows you to control the number of reviews you want to keep for an article. To limit post reviews, just add this code to the wp-config file.php for your WordPress site
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1 |
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10 ); |
Don’t forget to replace 10 with the number of reviews you want to keep for each post.
You can also delete old post reviews. If you are sure that you will never need these revisions, here’s how to delete them.
First, make a new WordPress backup of your site. This will allow you to restore your website if something goes wrong.
Next, you need to install and activate the WP-Optimize plugin . For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install the WordPress plugin .
When activated, go to the WP-Optimize “database page and check the box next to the” clean all post reviews “option.
Now click on the “run optimization” button to delete all post reviews. You can uninstall the plugin after deleting the reviews.
Note :
deleting reviews will not prevent WordPress from saving reviews for your future posts.
We hope this article helped you understand how to use post reviews to undo changes in WordPress .