How to Downgrade WordPress Safely

Updating a site is as easy as clicking a button. But moving in the other direction? Impossible. 

Chances are, you’ve hunted for a way to downgrade to a previous version of WordPress on wp-admin, but have come up empty. 

Wouldn’t it have been great to have a backup to restore at this point? 

That’s a deliberate choice. Downgrades are generally undesirable for security reasons. 

However, you’re stuck and you need to downgrade. You’ve come to the right place. 

No need to hire a developer or worry about damaging your site permanently. We’re here to help.

TL;DR: Downgrading WordPress back to a previous version is tricky. Because it is a manual process—which can cause your site to crash—this is an excellent time to backup your site. Plus the next time you need to downgrade WordPress quickly? You won’t need this article.

Why do you need to downgrade WordPress?

The most common reason you want to restore any part of your WordPress site is that the update caused your site to crash.

In fact, you could have several legitimate reasons: 

• The latest update caused your site to crash and you need to restore it. 
• An old plugin or theme is not maintained or supported anymore, and therefore is no longer compatible with WordPress.
• You need to test on an older version. 
• A backup that needs to be restored was taken during an older version of WordPress.
• The web host setup (mostly PHP) is not compatible with the latest version.

However it is important to remember that this should be a temporary measure only.

WordPress updates bring in security fixes, patches for vulnerabilities, feature improvements, and much more. They are exceedingly important, and we will be repeating this a lot. 

Was it the WordPress update that crashed your site though? 

There is a chance that WordPress isn’t at fault at all. 

Your first port of call should be to look for an errant plugin or theme that is not compatible with the update. 

For instance, when Gutenberg was launched, it broke so many sites. This wasn’t because Gutenberg was flawed—regardless of what people like to say. The fact is that plugin and theme developers were just not equipped to handle the update and took a long time to become compatible with the latest version.

Step 1: Make sure downgrading WordPress is successful

Before starting a downgrade WordPress, there are a few precautions you should take. For instance, plugins can trip up a downgrade, and thus break a site beyond repair. 

1. Take a full backup of your site: If anything goes wrong with your site during the downgrade—yes even if it is broken already—you need a backup. 

2. Disable plugins: As great as plugins are at extending functionality, they also increase complexity. Downgrades are already uncharted territory. Make it easier by removing as much complexity as possible. If you can’t access wp-admin, use FTP to access the site files and rename the plugins folder. 

3. Check the PHP version: There is a possibility that you may have to change the PHP version as well. However, this is up to your web host, as it forms a part of their setup. You will have limited control with this; some web hosts will allow you to set the PHP version from your hosting dashboard or cPanel, whereas others will require you to write into their support.

To check which version of PHP is enabled on your site, go into Tools, and then Site Health on your wp-admin dashboard.

There, click on the Info tab, and scroll down to Server. Click to expand the section, and you should see a value against the PHP version. Make a note of this.

Next, check the support version chart to ensure that your target WordPress version is compatible with the PHP version on your site. 

4. Test the downgrade on a staging site first: Before making any changes to your live site, use a staging site to test out the WordPress downgrade thoroughly. This step will prevent downtime on your live site.

Pro-tip: Only ever downgrade to the last WordPress version.

Step 2: Downgrade WordPress to a previous version (3 ways)

There are different ways to downgrade the WordPress version on your site. Depending on your access to the site, you will need to pick the method that works best for you. 

If you have access to wp-admin, we recommend using a plugin because it is easier and less prone to errors.

🔥 The easiest way to downgrade the WordPress version on your site would have been to restore a backup. If you have a BlogVault backup already, log into your dashboard, and restore WordPress from there.

Option 1: Using a plugin

We will be using WP Downgrade to downgrade WordPress. 

Our test site has WordPress 6.0.1 installed, and the site server has PHP version 8.0 installed. 
As per a compatibility check, we can only downgrade our test site safely to WordPress 5.6. Anything lower and our test site will experience a critical error.

1. First, install and activate WP Downgrade from the Plugins menu on your wp-admin. 

2. Click on Settings, and then on WP Downgrade to get to the plugin’s settings. 

You’ll see an instruction to get the exact release number for your target WordPress version.

This is important. Get the number from the provided link, and insert into the textbox. 

3. Click on Save Changes. You should see a message appear that says you need to go to Update Core to complete the process. Click on the button to proceed. This will take you to the Updates menu. 

4. You should now see a new button under the section heading: You have the latest version of WordPress. In our case, the button is Re-install version 5.6, as this was our selected target version. Click on the button to proceed. 

5. On reloading wp-admin and visiting the Updates menu, you should see that the active version is 5.6.

If you want to keep this version for a while, disable WordPress automatic updates. On our test site, major automatic updates were enabled. Click on Switch to automatic updates for maintenance and security releases only. to enable only minor automatic updates, otherwise, in 12 hours, your site will update automatically to the latest version again. 

Option 2: Using FTP

Reverting a WordPress version manually is very similar to installing it from scratch. The steps for using FTP and cPanel are very similar, so we’ve clubbed the instructions into a single section.

1. The first step is to download the target version from WordPress. For this tutorial, we used a site that was on a server that had PHP 7.4 installed, so our target WordPress version is 5.3.12.

2. Next, unzip the downloaded file on your computer. You will see a folder named wordpress.

3. Use an FTP client to connect to your site’s server. We’ve used FileZilla. You should see two panes: the one on the left is a file explorer for your computer, and the one on the right is the one on your site’s server.

4. Navigate to the folder with the unzipped WordPress installation. Drag the wordpress directory from the left pane to the right pane. This will start the copying process. It will take a few minutes to complete, so be patient. FTP is a slow transfer protocol.   

5. Once the directory has transferred, go into your root directory, where WordPress is installed. Most commonly, this will be the public or public_html directory. In our case, it is migratetester.dreamhosters.com. 

6. Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes directories from the root directory.

7. Then, go back to the wordpress folder, and move the wp-admin and wp-includes directories to the root directory. 

8. Next, gather up the loose files in the wordpress directory, and move those into the root directory. Make sure not to touch the wp-content folder and the wp-config file. Those should remain intact. 

9. Finally, go to the wp-includes directory, and find the version.php file. Make note of the number against the $wp_db variable. Then open up your site’s database, and look for the db_version value in the wp_options table. If these values are different, click the value in the database to update it to match the one in the version.php file. Save and exit.

Option 3: Using WP-CLI

You can use WP-CLI to downgrade to a previous version of WordPress as well. The steps are easy enough to do, however you do need to make sure that WP-CLI is enabled and working on your system. 

1. Find your site’s SSH credentials, and connect to your site using the command line. In most cases, the SSH credentials are the same as the FTP ones. 

2. Check the existing WordPress core version with the command wp core version. 

3. Find your target WordPress core version from WordPress releases. You will need the exact number. We’ve chosen 5.6 for our test site. 

4. Force downgrade the core version with the command wp core update --version=5.6 --force replacing 5.6 with your target version number. 

After the operation completes, you should see a success message saying your WordPress version has been successfully updated—even if it is a downgrade. 

Step 3: After you downgrade the WordPress version

Congratulations, you’ve successfully downgraded your WordPress version. Assuming you need the site at this lower version for a few days and you still want a functional site, there are a bunch of things you need to do.

• Visit your site and check all the pages: Any change can break your site—if it wasn’t broken already—and downgrading WordPress is as big as it gets. Visit your site and check all major pages, if not all. Check for missing images, broken formatting, malfunctioning forms, and so on. 
• Disable auto updates: To keep the changes you have made for more than 12 hours, you need to disable auto updates. If you aren’t worried about the minor releases, then you can do so from the Updates menu. If you require a very specific version of WordPress, then you will need to set constants in the wp-config file to disable minor WordPress updates as well. 
• Clear all the caches: This is to ensure that only the current version of your site is available to visitors. 
• Reactivate your plugins: Once you’ve ascertained everything is working like clockwork, enable your plugins and themes one at a time. This is important because any one of these could trip up your site. Doing them one at a time gives you a chance to check your site after each activation, and spot a culprit instantly.

Troubleshooting WordPress downgrade issues

The most common error you will see when you go back to previous WordPress version is a critical error. There are several causes for the error, which we will tackle by the process of elimination. 

Misbehaving plugin or theme

You won’t be able to glean too much from the error message itself until you enable debugging mode. 

To do so, use FTP to open the wp-config.php file. Once you’ve opened the file, change ‘false’ to ‘true’ in this line: define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false). Save and close the file, and exit FTP. 

Then, reload your site. The error message will have a little more information, and possibly a recognizable plugin or theme name. If so, log into FTP again, go into the wp-content directory, and rename the offending plugin or theme to something else. This will effectively disable it, and so solve the critical error issue. 

File transfer didn’t complete correctly

In the process of uploading the WordPress install to your site server, even if you lost network connectivity for a second, chances are some files may be corrupted. In this case, there is nothing you can do except reverse the process and start again. It is incredibly frustrating, but those are the breaks of working with FTP. 

Incompatible PHP version

If you can access wp-admin, then check the PHP compatibility with your WordPress version. If they aren’t compatible, you need to pick a target version of WordPress that is compatible. Alternatively, you can write into your web host’s support to change the PHP version. They may or may not accede to your request though, so have a plan B just in case.

Why you shouldn’t downgrade the site except temporarily

While we understand that there is sometimes a necessity to downgrade WordPress in the short term, it is just not safe to do so for long. 

• Updates bring improvements, security patches for discovered vulnerabilities, new features, etc.
• Keeping an older version of WordPress leaves your site vulnerable to hacks.
• The incompatibility will eventually catch up, as plugin and theme developers stop supporting older versions.
  

Things you could try instead of downgrading WordPress 

If you are recovering WordPress after a site crash or incompatibility, it is important to note that WordPress is rarely the cause of issues on a site. There are other troubleshooting methods you can try, before going nuclear with a WordPress downgrade: 

• Check plugins and themes
  • Deactivate plugins, and reactivate them one by one
  • Revert any updates that make have caused the issue
  • Finish any pending updates
  • Revert to a stock theme, and deactivate all others
• Check for PHP issues
  • Increase the PHP memory limit
  • Update or downgrade PHP version to match the WordPress version
• Check to see if your site is hacked
• Clear the cache
• Contact your web hosting provider

Conclusion

Downgrading WordPress is not a task for the faint of heart. There is a reason it isn’t an official option on WordPress itself: your site is always safer and better off with the latest version. 

Having said that, you may need to troubleshoot your WordPress site, and after exhausting all other avenues, your last resort may be to revert WordPress to previous version. We hope this article helped you do that successfully, and remember to always back up your site before making any changes.

 

FAQs

How do I downgrade WordPress to an older version?

There are 2 ways to downgrade to an older version of WordPress: 1) using the WP Downgrade plugin; or 2) installing an older version of WordPress manually. 

How do I downgrade my WordPress version in cPanel?

To rollback WordPress version via cPanel, download the target version from WordPress, unzip it, and upload the folder via File Manager on cPanel. Then, follow the instructions to manually install WordPress.

Can I downgrade my WordPress version?

Yes, you can downgrade your WordPress version. Sometimes, newer versions have plugins or themes that do not work perfectly. Downgrading can fix this issue.

How do I reset WordPress to the previous version?

To reset WordPress to a previous version, first backup your site. Then, download the older version from the WordPress release archive. Deactivate your plugins and replace your current files with the older ones. Finally, reactivate plugins and check if everything is working.