How to Restore a BlueHost WordPress Website

If you’re reading this, I assume you’re either a) a blogger yourself or b) someone who knows one. Either way, you’re in the right place! Let’s get started.

Step one: Take a deep breath.

It’s important to take your time and do this right. You don’t want to rush and mess things up. The first thing you need to do is take a deep breath and calm down. You’re going to need to focus and figure out what you’re doing step-by-step. Even if you’ve done this hundreds of times before, it’s worth repeating: take your time.

Step two: Back up your website.

You should already have a back up of your website. Depending on your plan with BlueHost, this should be a simple process. From your dashboard, click the “Backups” button in the sidebar. This will bring you to your “Backups” page, which will list all of the backups for your site. Simply click on the one you want to restore from and follow the instructions.

Step three: Make sure WordPress is updated.

Now that you have your back up, it’s important to make sure that WordPress is updated. WordPress is constantly evolving and changing to keep up with the times. With these updates come new security issues. Make sure that you’re always keeping WordPress updated by logging into your dashboard and checking for updates. If you don’t have one, you can ask your WordPress administrator to email you the latest version of WordPress.

Step four: Delete outdated plugins.

You don’t need to have a ton of plugins to run a successful blog. In fact, you should have very few plugins, if any. The issue is that when you do have a few, over time they can accumulate and slow down your site. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can go through and manually delete any plugins that you don’t need. Just be careful and make sure you have a backup in case something goes wrong.

Step five: Get to know your WordPress dashboard.

Now that you’re ready to go, it’s time to learn your way around your WordPress dashboard. The dashboard is where all of the magic happens behind the scenes. It’s where you can access all of your site’s settings, change designs, and control how things appear on your blog. If you’ve been doing this for a while, it will seem very familiar and you’ll be able to make changes quickly. Get to know the different parts of the dashboard so you can access them quickly when needed.

Step six: Make sure your website is accessible from any device.

Make sure that your website is accessible from any device. If you’re reading this on a mobile device, try out scrolling down a little bit to see the whole blog post. Even better, try out the new responsive design to make sure that the layout looks the same on any device.

Step seven: Activate the WP-security plugin.

One of the things that WordPress is famous for is its simplicity and ease of use. It’s made available to the public and has been loved by bloggers and website owners because of this. Unfortunately, this means that it’s also very well known for being a platform that’s susceptible to cyberattacks. One of the best things that you can do to secure your site is to install the WP-security plugin. Installing this plugin will give you a few extra security measures to protect your site from unauthorized access and hackers. Make sure that you’ve activated it from your dashboard under ”Plugins”.

Step eight: Test your site’s speed.

If you’re running a bit of server hardware, it’s time to see how well your site’s speed is running on it. To test speed, simply open two browsers and visit two different websites, one being a very popular website and the other being your personal blog. Visit the two sites and type in the web addresses, pressing the enter key after each. It will then be up to you to compare which site loads faster. If you’re noticing that your personal blog loads significantly faster, then upgrade your server hardware or ask your web host for help.

Step nine: Optimize your images.

One of the things that slows down a site’s loading time is overly large images. It takes time for your device to load and parse all of the images on a page. If you have a tendency to go heavy on pictures in your posts, this may be the reason why your site takes so long to load. To fix this, simply go through and resize all of your images. Keep the original images for archiving purposes and the new, smaller versions for the web.

Step ten: Check for broken links.

Finally, don’t forget to check for broken links. Just like a phone book listing, links can become outdated over time and lead to errors. To check for broken links, simply put the URL of a blog post into the web browser’s address bar and hit enter. Alternatively, you can use a plugin like Pingdom to automatically check for broken links.

Now that you’re back up and running, create a new entry in your blog and get started on the rewarding process of building your audience.