How to Restore a WordPress Website After a Crash
Ah, the joys of owning a website. We all love hitting that publish button and feeling the rush as soon as our work appears online. It is even more exhilarating when you wake up one day to find your site down – broken, or partially broken, at the very least. What then? You might ask. Well, let us explore some of the potential solutions to this thorny problem and how to restore your WordPress website to its former glory.
The Importance of Backups
It goes without saying that the importance of having backups cannot be overstated. You never know what could happen when you are pushing your luck with a new tool or plugin. Maybe you are trying to add a feature or option to your site and decide to take a shortcut, only to discover that you have inadvertently broken something. In this case, you have either resolved the issue yourself, or you have contacted the support team for the plugin or theme you were using and they have helped you out. Nonetheless, it might still be irretrievably broken. This is where your backups come in handy. If you are fortunate enough to have them, you can always restore your site to its former glory by pulling the latest backup and applying the appropriate changes to fix what was broken.
Restoring from a Scratch
So, you have decided that your website is done. You have served your purpose. You have posted all the content you came up with and now it’s time to let the world see it. You click the big red “publish” button and your site goes live. Perfect! Right? It is not quite that easy. While you were busy fiddling with the copy and the design of your site, something else entirely could have happened. The server powering your site might have crashed, or you could have faced a cyber attack, or one of your visitors could have stumbled upon some sort of malware that is infecting your site. All of these things could have caused the issue you are now facing. Of course, you will have backups. You will also realize that there are certain things you will need to change before you hit that “publish” button. For example, if you are using a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, you will need to import your content into a fresh installation of the platform. This is one of the things you will need to do before you hit that “publish” button.
Using an Existing Installation
If you already have an existing installation of WordPress on your site, you can restore from that point as well. This way, you will not have to worry about choosing a fresh copy of WordPress to restore your site to. All you need to do is log into your existing installation and pull down the WordPress Backup. Once you have downloaded the backup, you can use the Import function inside WordPress to restore your site. In some instances, you might have to edit a couple of the files inside your WordPress installation to get it working properly again. Once you have done that, you can hit the “Publish” button and your website will be restored to its previous state. This is also one of the safer and more reliable options for restoring your site, as you are basing the process on an already existing installation of WordPress. In case anything goes wrong, you have already got a working copy of WordPress to fall back on. This is crucial, especially if you are not the tech-savvy type and might struggle to know what is happening when things go wrong.
Using a Professional’s Help
If none of the above solutions seem to be working for you, or if you are simply not comfortable fixing things yourself, then it is time to call in the professionals. There are many experienced companies that offer website backup and recovery services. They will have a team of experts standing by to help you out with whatever issue you are facing. So, instead of trying to fix it yourself, or calling on your fellow bloggers for help, you can contact a website restoration service and be back online in no time.
The moral of the story is this: creating a website and all the content you put on it is an exciting endeavour. However, we all know that nothing is ever really done until we click that “publish” button. The joys of owning a website. One day, you are browsing through your social media accounts when you come across a post about your old website. You realize that this is the post that kept getting republished over and over again. You click it and, pouf!, your website is back online. You have finally removed the scape-raps from your site and returned your site to its former glory. While you were off making babies and enjoying life, your website was busy serving the internet as a ghost blog. Restoring your website after a crash is undoubtedly one of the most satisfying experiences you can have as a webmaster. So, keep those backups coming and enjoy your new-found freedom from broken links, and redundant content.