I am a clean freak, if there is no word like this let me explain what I mean. I hate clutter, both offline and online, I hate when I see update notification pending in my WordPress dashboard.
That is why I do it right away whenever I get notified of an update. I have been doing that for years and I have never faced any issue ever, until today, when I updated to WordPress 3.9, which brings pretty interesting features to the WordPress Editor section.
But it created problem for one of my Blogs where I did the update. The WordPress editor wasn’t showing any post, it only showed the title, and all other fields but the content area.
Now, there could be many reasons to it, when I did a Google search, I found many people had this issue but all had different solutions, most of them were quite complicated which ask you to change/add a line of code to one of the WordPress core files.
I later came to know that it was my theme that was creating some compatibility issue with WordPress 3.9 and that would only be fixed when the developer updates the theme, which means it can take few hours to few days.
It would be better to go back to the older version of the WordPress.
But how do we do that?
I came up with an easy solution for it, i.e. replace the WordPress files with an older version as this will bring the blog back to the older version of WordPress and things might work the way it used to a day before.
So, the process is quite easy, first deactivate all the plugins on your blog as they might create problem after you have replaced the core files of your WordPress.
You can download the older version of WordPress from the download archives.
No you can go to the File Manager in cPanel of your site.
After opening the root directory of site in File Manager, delete the ‘wp-admin’ and ‘wp-includes’ from the root directory.
[note]Important: Do not delete ‘wp-content’ it contains all your blog files (images, theme, plugins etc).[/note]
Upload the .zip file of older version of WordPress there and extract the files in the root directly itself.
The folder ‘wordpress’ will contain all the files of the older version of WordPress which has to be moved to the root directory.
Go to the ‘wordpress’ folder, select all the files and move them to the root of your site.
This will replace all the core files of WordPress of your blog.
Now you just need to login and you will be prompted to upgrade the database.
You will probably get back your blog in working condition just like it used to before the update.
You can then go and activate the plugins and start blogging.
This is an easy fix to any problem you face that has happened after updating your blog’s WordPress version.
I highly recommend that you check with the themes and plugins developers before doing the updates right away like me. You can also wait for a day or two and you will find what kind of bugs people are facing after the update because not everyone can afford to waste few hours for a goof up made by clicking a button.
