If you’ve spent any time in the CSS module of AWP (Accelerate Website Pages), you’ve probably noticed a “Reset” button tucked near the bottom of the settings panel. It’s the kind of button most people avoid clicking — not because they need it, but because they’re not sure what it actually does.

That hesitation is fair. Reset actions in WordPress plugins can mean very different things depending on the tool. Some wipe out content. Some undo months of configuration. Some are harmless. So let’s clear it up: here’s exactly what happens when you reset AWP’s CSS settings, in plain terms, with nothing left to guess about.

What “CSS” means inside AWP

Before talking about the reset, it helps to know what the CSS module actually manages. When you run a personalized optimization on a page, AWP works out which CSS rules are needed immediately to render what’s visible on screen — this is often called “critical CSS” — and which rules can be safely loaded a moment later, after the page has already painted. That’s “deferred CSS.”

This split matters for a well-known performance metric: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), which measures how long it takes for the biggest visible element on a page — usually a hero image or heading — to finish rendering. Loading only the critical CSS upfront, and pushing the rest to load afterward, tends to help pages paint sooner because the browser isn’t stuck parsing a giant stylesheet before it can draw anything.

To make this work, AWP stores a few things:

• Configuration options — your safelist and blocklist of CSS selectors, breakpoint definitions, footer selector rules, and cache toggles.
• Per-page optimized CSS — the actual critical, deferred, and footer CSS that was generated for each individual page or post, saved as post meta so it can be served instantly without recalculating it on every request.

Both of these live in your WordPress database. Neither of them is your theme’s original CSS file — they’re AWP’s own working data, built from your theme’s styles.

What Reset actually deletes

When you click Reset in the CSS module, AWP removes:

• All CSS module configuration options — safelist entries, blocklist entries, breakpoint settings, footer selector configuration, and any cache-related toggles you’ve set.
• All stored optimized CSS for every page and post — meaning the critical CSS, deferred CSS, and footer CSS that had been generated and saved against your content.

That’s the entire scope. It’s a clean wipe of everything the CSS module has learned and generated, so you’re starting from a blank slate the next time you configure it or run an optimization.

What Reset never touches

This is the part worth being precise about, because it’s the part people worry about most.

Resetting the CSS module does not touch:

• Your posts and pages — their content, blocks, and formatting are completely unaffected.
• Your theme — no theme files, template parts, or theme CSS are modified or deleted.
• Your media library — images and other uploads are untouched (that’s managed separately by AWP’s Images module).
• Any other AWP module’s settings — resetting CSS doesn’t reset Images, Asset Delivery, or other unrelated modules.

In other words, Reset only removes what AWP itself generated and configured for CSS delivery. It never reaches into your actual site content or theme files. That’s by design: everything the CSS module does happens at the output layer, layered on top of your site rather than baked into it, which is exactly what makes it safe to undo.

What your site looks like right after a reset

Immediately after a reset, there’s no optimized CSS left for AWP to serve. So your site simply falls back to what WordPress does by default: it loads your theme’s full stylesheets, the normal way, without any critical/deferred splitting.

Nothing breaks. Nothing looks different from a design standpoint — your site should look exactly as it did before you ever installed AWP, because that’s precisely the state you’re returning to for CSS delivery. The only thing you’ll likely notice is that pages may render similarly to how they did pre-optimization, since the critical-CSS shortcut that helped early paint is no longer there until you optimize again.

When it makes sense to reset

A reset isn’t something you’ll need often, but there are a few honest reasons to use it:

• Starting fresh after a big theme or design change. If you’ve redesigned significant parts of your site, old critical CSS rules may reference selectors that no longer apply the way they used to. A reset clears that out so your next optimization builds accurate rules from scratch.
• Troubleshooting a visual issue. If something looks slightly off after optimization — a flash of unstyled content, a misplaced element — resetting lets you rule out stale CSS data as the cause. Turn optimization off, confirm the page renders normally on plain WordPress output, then re-optimize.
• Cleaning up before reconfiguring. If you’ve been experimenting with safelist or blocklist entries and lost track of what’s active, a reset gives you a clean configuration to rebuild rather than untangling old settings.

Re-running optimization afterward

A reset doesn’t disable AWP or end your ability to optimize — it just clears the slate. Once you’re ready, you can reconfigure your CSS settings (or leave the defaults) and trigger optimization again. AWP’s Exchange Server will re-analyze your pages’ public output and generate fresh critical and deferred CSS, which the plugin then stores and serves the same way as before.

Because none of your actual content or theme files were ever touched, there’s nothing to “restore” — you’re simply generating new optimization data against the site that was there all along.

The bottom line

Resetting AWP’s CSS settings is a scoped, reversible action: it deletes CSS configuration and stored optimized CSS, and nothing else. Your pages, posts, and theme remain exactly as you built them. If you ever want to walk back a CSS optimization entirely, a reset gets you there safely — and running the optimization again afterward is just as easy as the first time.