How to Recover Your WordPress Website If It Says ‘Suspended’
You wake up one morning and find your WordPress website has been suspended.
You did everything right, you followed all the necessary steps to keep your site safe and secure, but apparently ‘someone’ didn’t like what you had to say. Now you’re struggling to find out what went wrong and how you can fix it.
We’re going to tell you exactly what happened and how you can get your site back online as quickly as possible.
The Notice You Received
The first thing you’ll want to do is to look for some kind of notice that was served on your website. There are a few things you’ll want to check for before you get started fixing things, though. The most important is the date the notice was issued. That way you can determine how long you have to take care of things before you lose access to your site.
If you received the notice more than 30 days ago, you almost certainly know what happened. Someone reported your site to the content moderator team and, as a result, your site was placed in administrative mode. The content moderator team is a group of people within WordPress who handle complaints, reviews, and feedback about your site. They also decide whether or not your site can remain online based on whatever rule violations they discover while it’s in administrative mode.
If you’re completely unaware of the reason your site was suspended, you’ll want to try and find out. Sometimes legitimate reasons can be uncovered for why a site was initially suspended, however there are a lot of reasons why a site can be placed in administrative mode, some of which are more nefarious than others. In either case, once you know the reason for the suspension, you can get started fixing it.
The First Step
The first thing you’ll want to do is take care of the good reasons for the suspension. Sometimes there will be a note on your site from the content moderator explaining why they placed your site in administrative mode or why they suspended it. If you have any questions about these reasons, you can always contact them directly through WordPress.
It’s crucial you deal with the reasons for the suspension before you start trying to get your site back online. If you do have questions about why your site was initially suspended, reach out to the content moderator team first. They will be more than happy to answer all your questions and take care of any issues you might have.
Get To The Root Of The Problem
Once you’ve taken care of the reasons for the suspension, you can start fixing things. The first thing you’ll want to do is look at the WordPress documentation on how to reactivate your site. This includes how to reactivate your site after it’s been suspended once and how to reactivate a site that was previously hacked. If you went through a third-party company to build your site, they will most likely have support for creating initial accounts as well as reactivating sites that were previously active.
If you did everything right and followed the necessary steps to keep your site secure and don’t understand why it was suspended, the first thing you’ll want to do is contact the support team at your web host to see if they can help. Your web host is the company that provides you with the space on the internet to host your website. Depending on the size of your site and how much traffic you get, you may want to consider looking for a shared hosting plan from a reputable company.
Reactivate Your Site
Once you are prepared to reactivate your site, you can click the ‘Reactivate’ button on the WordPress dashboard. There is no reason to wait until the end of the month to reactivate your site as you can do this at any time. If you do reactivate it at the end of the month, it will be set to expire on the last day of the next month. Otherwise, it will remain active as long as you want it to.
Your site will be deactivated immediately upon re-entering the dashboard with the inactive appearance. Once this is done, you can click the ‘Activate’ button to make your site live again. At this point, you can login to your admin area and start making changes to get your site back to its original state.
What To Look Out For
While it’s important to reactivate your site, you need to be careful about doing this to outdated versions of WordPress. If you are not sure whether or not you’re running the latest version of WordPress, you can always click the ‘help’ button within the dashboard and it will take you to the WordPress support page. From there you can find out what version of WordPress you’re running and update to the latest version as soon as possible. Incidentally, it is also a good idea to change your login name and password upon re-activating your site. This will prevent any previous security breaches from happening again.
Another thing you need to watch out for is any plugins you’re using on your site. Sometimes these can cause unnecessary issues if you’re not careful. For example, if you have Akismet installed on your site and you decide to reactivate it, this will delete all your past comments and you’ll have to add them all back again. Never, ever, uninstall any plugins or themes you’re not familiar or comfortable with fixing. Doing this can cause many hours of additional work, without any kind of compensation. If you are not comfortable fixing things, it’s often best to leave them alone.
Take Your Time
There is no rush to get your site back online. In fact, you can take all the time you want. WordPress gives you enough flexibility to get your site back to its original state, even if you take a couple weeks to do so. The worst thing you can do is rush through the process and end up with errors or missed information. If you follow the necessary steps and do this right, you’ll have no problem getting your site back online in no time at all.
Even if you decide to take some time off work to focus on fixing your site, you can do this in stages. For example, you can first fix things on a regular basis (at least once or twice a week) and then take a couple of days off to regroup and check everything again. This will make sure you don’t miss anything and have an error-free site when you go back online.
Remember, though, that time is still important. Even if you take the time off work to get your site back, you’ll still be behind on tasks. This can cause you to lose out on opportunities as well as make it more difficult to get things done.
If you want to get your site back online as soon as possible, you can always hire a contractor to help you. WordPress has a lot of great support tools that can assist you in getting your site back online, including a dedicated customer care team, support forums, and much more. In most cases, contractors are more than willing to help you get your site up and running again as soon as possible.
WordPress is an amazing tool and if you’re looking for a lightweight (SEO-friendly) CMS, it’s hard to go wrong. Just be sure to take the time to learn the ins and outs of the platform before you start using it. This will save you a lot of grief in the long run.