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Reverting WordPress Plugin Updates

Sometimes, while an update for a particular plugin might be rock solid, it might hinder the functionality of another plugin, so you end up having to roll that plugin back till you can fix the problem.

That means you have to either download the previous version of that plugin, extract it, and then upload it via ftp, which could take a really long time.

You could also upload the zip, and then use the web-based file manager to extract the file to overwrite the plugin update if your web host has that functionality, which would save some time, but it’s a bit more work.

What if, prior to any update, a snapshot of your db was taken (optional) and a copy of the current version of whatever you were updating was backed up on the server – all automatically. That way if the update created a problem, you could just “rollback” or “un-update”, and the update would be quickly reversed.

Maybe this is just me wanting to be lazy, but I think this would be a huge benefit to a lot of people, and I haven’t been able to find anything that does that. I’m pretty sure all the individual steps are doable, and I’ve seen several posts for at least the last 3 years, and the answer is always “no, you have to do it manually”

Now, it may not be feasible to automate restoring from a database backup, but in most cases, you only need to replace the plugin files to restore the functionality of the previous version.

There may be a solution for this that I haven’t come across, and there may be a reason this shouldn’t be done, but I think I’m going to try creating this solution. Any feedback is welcome.