When you have the template open in the site editor, before you would open the template editor to alter the template itself, to the left of the pencil “Edit” icon there’s a 3 dot icon. Click that. You will then have an option to Clear Customizations. Be very sure this is what you want, it’s not possible to restore your customization afterwards unless you’ve first backed up your database.
Thanks for your response – could you please clarify where I go to first to get to the template editor to make these changes?
Also, does this restore the entire template, or is it possible to just do on the one main I want restored?
From the dashboard at /wp-admin/, open the site editor by doing Appearance > Editor. Navigate to the templates section, then to the specific template you want to restore back to default. This is where you’ll find the 3 dot icon I referred to earlier.
The clear customization action only appears for theme templates you’ve modified. Your own custom templates only have actions to delete or rename.
Clearing the customization of one template will not affect other templates.
Thank you – however I didnt really want to reset my whole template, it was just the one front page that came with it, I wanted to restore. Do you know if there is a way to do this?
The Revisions function doesnt go all the way back to the original page.
The “whole template”? Do you mean the entire theme? Some people use “template” when they really mean “theme”. In other CMS systems they may be the same thing, but not in WP.
If your theme came with a front page template and you’ve modified it, clearing your customization will only reset that one front page template to how it was originally shipped. Your customization of other templates in the theme will remain unless you explicitly clear those as well, one at a time. There actually is no obvious way to clear all customization of all of a theme’s templates all at once.
I think the easiest way to do a full theme reset of everything would be to change the theme’s name (untested and not what you want anyway. I’m only mentioning it in case it helps someone else landing here by search).
