There is nothing worse than writing a great piece of content and losing all your hard work. Thankfully, WordPress can come to the rescue, with its great revisions feature that lets you restore previous versions of an article, compare two versions and even restore an auto-saved version of an article if your browser crashes.
When writing content, WordPress will automatically save a draft of your article approximately every minute. This will not, however, save it as a revision version to allow you to restore it at a later date. To have WordPress save a revision that can be restored, select the “Save Draft” button if you are still writing your content, or the “Publish” button if your content is ready.
Here’s how to restore a previous version of your post.
- In the Post Settings panel (right sidebar), look for the Revisions section.
- Click the revision number to open the revision history.
- A comparison screen will appear, showing the differences between the current and previous versions.
- Use the slider at the top or the Next/Previous buttons to browse through revisions.
- If needed, click Compare any two revisions to see detailed changes.
- Once you find the version you want, click Restore This Revision.
- WordPress will revert the post to the selected version.
- Click Update to save the restored version.
Autosave in WordPress
Autosave in WordPress is a built-in feature that automatically saves your work every 60 seconds while editing a post or page. This helps prevent data loss in case of a browser crash, internet issues, or accidental tab closures.
If WordPress detects a difference between your current version and an autosaved version, it will display a message allowing you to restore the autosaved content.
- Click View the Autosave to open the autosaved version.
- WordPress will show a comparison between the autosaved version and the current version.
- If the autosave contains the content you want, click Restore This Autosave.
- Once restored, click Update or Publish to save the changes.