How to Manually Downgrade WordPress to The Previous Version?

We all know, WordPress is an online open source website creation tool written in PHP. The easiest and most powerful blogging and website Content Management System(CMS) in existence today. In this tutorial, we will learn how to downgrade the WordPress to the previous version. We can see WordPress update notification in WordPress dashboard when a new version is available we can update the WordPress from there. Also, you can activate auto update or upgrade and it will be upgraded to a new version when a new version is available. Assume that your favorite WordPress plugin is not working after updating to the latest version. There may be a compatibility with the plugin and new version. This is a major problem. Probably we could temporarily disable the plugin to resolve this issue. Assume that plugin is your most favorite plugin and you don’t like to disable this plugin. You do not worry about this situation. We have an alternative solution for this problem. One of the most recommended solutions is to downgrade WordPress to the previous version.

Please do following steps to downgrade WordPress to the previous version.

1) Make a current backup of the site.

Before proceeding downgrade, you should take a current backup of that WordPress site.

There is a lot of plugins to take a current backup of the WordPress site. Also, take backup of current databases.

If you are using cPanel for your host, you can simply take full cPanel backup by using cPanel.

 

2) Deactivate all WordPress plugin.

Login to WordPress dashboard >> Plugins then select “Deactivate”.

 

Then select the checkbox “Plugins” and click “Apply”.

 

Or you can disable plugin via command line if you have shell access to your document root.

Login to the server via SSH and navigate to your document root of the WordPress site and run following command to disable the plugin.

cd wp-content/

mv plugins plugins_back

 

3) Remove current WordPress file.

Remove all WordPress files from document root except “wp-content” folder and wp-config.php

If you have SSH access, run following command to remove current wp files.

Login to server and go to document root of WordPress.

mv wp-content ../

mv wp-config.php ../

rm -rvf wp-*

 

4) Upload previous version WordPress file.

You can download the previous version of WordPress file from here.

https://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

If you have SSH access, perform following steps to download and upload wp files to document root.

Go to https://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

and copy download link from there.

Login to the server and go to the document root.

Then run following commands.

To download WordPress file.

wget https://wordpress.org/wordpress-4.8.3.tar.gz

Extract downloaded file.

tar -xzvf wordpress-4.8.3.tar.gz.

Move wp files to document root.

mv wordpress/wp-*  .

Remove wp-content file.

rm -rvf wp-content

Move previous wp-content folder and wp-config.php to document root.

mv ../wp-content  .

mv ../wp-cofig.php .

Change permission to your owner.

chown -R your-username:your-username  ./*

 

This is the workflow to downgrade WordPress to the previous version.

1) Remove or rename wp folders and files except wp-content and wp-config.php

2) Upload all WordPress file of previous version except wp-content and wp-config.php files.

 

If you need any further help please do reach our support department.