How to Recover a WordPress Site

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems used widely across the world. It is a free, open-source platform used for website creation. People with very little knowledge or even no knowledge of programming can use this tool to create a wide variety of websites. You can use it to create Business websites, blogs, articles, social networks, portfolio sites, resumes, e-commerce sites, and a lot more. With its simple procedures, WordPress is gaining increased popularity day by day. Recent statistics mention that among all the websites that are hosted today, around 40% are powered by WordPress. This means that if you visit any 3 websites randomly, at least one of them is powered by WordPress!

However, no matter how big or small your website is, it needs perfect maintenance. If you don’t maintain it properly, then a lot of things could go wrong. Your website may even go down! This may occur due to a lot of possible reasons – it may be due to a simple problem such as a small technical glitch or even due to huge problems like hacking. This may cause a lot of problems. You may lose a great deal of revenue, your reputation, and even some of your clients! If your site is down, there is a great chance that your clients will go in search of other sources. So, once your WordPress site goes down for any reason, the first thing you need to do is to try recovering it.

If you are looking for a solution to recover your WordPress website, then you are in the right place! We have listed a few trustworthy methods to help you recover your account. Just keep reading to find the perfect solution that complies with your needs. For those who want to recover WordPress account, we have a separate guide on that.

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Do you have a Backup of your WordPress Site?

It is very important to have a periodic backup of your WordPress site. This helps you protect your site and makes it easier to recover it if something goes wrong. There are a number of third-party solutions that provide backup services for WordPress sites. Or else, WordPress also allows plugins to backup your data to your Google Drive, Dropbox, or even Amazon cloud services. So, if you have a backup of your site, the process will be pretty simple and easy. For your information, having an XML backup file is not considered to be an actual backup. It is considered that you don’t have a backup file.

But, even if you don’t have a backup, don’t worry. There is also a method for you. Just that, the chances are a bit low and it is not sure that you will be able to recover your website completely. However, recovering a partial website is way better than a completely down site. So, in either case, continue reading to find the perfect solution that meets your queries.

Case 1 – You Have a Backup of Your WordPress Website

Now, if you have a backup of your website, then you can recover your website. However, the process is a bit lengthy and difficult. Here are a few methods that you can use to recover your WordPress site using a backup.

Method 1 – Restoring WordPress Backup with cPanel

If you are using a hosting provider that supports cPanel, then you can retrieve your site in the following method –

Log in to your cPanel account.
Move to the Files tab and click on Backup.
Once you entered the Backups, scroll down and find Restore a MySQL database backup.
Click on Choose File and select your *.sql backup or export file.
Click on Upload.
That’s it. You have uploaded your backup to your WordPress site.

Method 2 – Using Third-Party Plugin Services

Several third-party software provides you with WordPress site recovery services. However, not all of them are trustworthy. One of the most trustable backup restoring plugins is BlogVault (https://blogvault.net/wordpress-restore/). This platform provides you with a one-click restoration service. Here is how you can use BlogVault.

Open and log in to your BlogVault account.
Click on Databases.
Choose the Database that you want to recover. There is an option named Restore below it. Click on it.
That’s it. You have successfully restored your WordPress account.

This method is highly trustworthy and BlogVault gives you 100% assurance of account recovery. However, the main drawback of this platform is that it allows you to restore backups that were created only by BlogVault. This means that you cannot restore your WordPress site using BlogVault if your backup is made from any other website or plugin. So, if you are having a backup file created from any other platform, then this method does not suit you. You need to manually restore your files. Keep reading to find out how to do the same.

Method 3 – Manually Restoring your WordPress Site

Manually restoring a WordPress site without any restored plugins or services may be very risky. However, if you don’t have any plugins, then this is the only option that you can trust. Though it is very lengthy, it is definitely worth a try. In this method, you will make use of FTP, cPanel, and phpMyAdmin to recover your WordPress site. Here is how you recover it –

If you are storing your backup files in any cloud service like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Dropbox, log in to your cloud service provider and download your Backup file. The backup will be downloaded in zip format.
Log in to your cPanel.
Now, find and select a folder named public_html. Open the folder.
Select all the files in the folder and delete them. (If you check your website after this, it will display “This site no longer exists!”. Don’t worry about that).
Now, go to phpMyAdmin from the cPanel. Find your site’s database. It is usually of the form wp_site-name. If you don’t know what is the database, go to wp-config.php. It contains the details about your database.
Once you are sure that it is your site’s database, download a copy of it and then delete it. Deleting other files can get tricky. So be careful with finding your database.
This step can be performed using both cPanel and FTP. If you are using cPanel File Manager, then go to the public.html folder again. Upload the backup file (zip) to this folder. Click on the extract button on the top left corner. If you are using an FTP client, then you will have to manually upload each file from the zip into the same folder.
Now, go to phpMyAdmin again.
Upload the copy of your database to it’s original location again. However, if your website is hacked, then don’t upload the same database again. Create a new database.
That’s it. You have recovered your site successfully!

Case 2 – You Don’t Have a Backup Of Your Website

As mentioned earlier, if you do not have a backup of your website, then it is really difficult to retrieve your WordPress site. Even if you succeed in performing all the steps correctly, there is not even 70% assurance that you will get your site back. However, losing your entire site is way better than recovering 70% of it. So, it is no harm to give it a try. Recovering your WordPress site without a backup can be done in any of the methods mentioned below –

Method 1 – Recovering Your WordPress Site from Google/Bing’s Cache

Top-end commercial search engines such as Google and Bing usually cache website data to offer a seamless experience. So, even if your website is temporarily down, Google displays a cached version of your website to the public. In this method, we are going to use this cached version of your website to recover your WordPress site. This is how you can do it –

Google Search Engine

Copy and paste this URL on your browser – http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://example.com/. Instead of https://example.com/, paste the URL of your website.
This will take you to the latest cached version of your website.
To view the source code, click on View Source. Copy the code.
Reinstall WordPress on your website and create a new page.
Paste the code that you copied.
Now your website is retrieved. Check if it is working properly.

Bing Search Engine

When you are using Bing, you cannot get the cached version directly. You have to the below steps –

Search your website on the browser.
There will be a down arrow near your website URL. Click on it.
From the options, click on View Cached Page.
Repeat the steps 3-6 from Google Search Engine.

As mentioned earlier, this method does not assure complete recovery. However, there is no harm in trying out and achieving a partial recovery.

Method 2 – Recovering your WordPress site using the Wayback Machine

If your website is a few years old and is generating considerable traffic, then you can go for this method. In this method, we will be using the Wayback machine to get a snapshot of your website. The Wayback Machine is the world’s largest internet archive and hence there is a high chance that it has a snapshot of your website. Here is how you do it –

Go to https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://example.com/. As mentioned before, replace /https://example.com/ with your website’s URL.
A calendar will be displayed here. It denotes all the times that the website has captured your WordPress site.
Search for the latest date that has a green circle around it (it indicates that Wayback machine has crawled your site properly).
Click on the time of snapshot.
It will take a little time to obtain the cached version of your website.
Using the Wayback Machine Downloader, download the cached version of your website(https://www.waybackmachinedownloader.com/en/how-to-download-site-from-wayback-machine/). A copy of this version will be mailed to you.
This downloaded copy is your backup.

Using this backup, you can recover your website from any of the methods mentioned above.