“Oops! I’ve just accidentally deleted my WordPress site! What should I do to restore it?”
If you find yourself in this situation, don’t freak out because restoring a deleted WordPress site is not brain surgery. The good thing is that you can easily fix this problem yourself with the help of our insightful tutorial.
Today’s article aims to provide you with 4 easy methods to recover deleted WordPress pages. We will make sure that all your valuable content is not lost.
1. Recover deleted WordPress pages from the recycle bin
This is the easiest way to recover deleted WordPress pages, so you can try it first before trying other, more advanced methods.
In your WordPress admin dashboard, go to Pages > All Pages. Locate the Trash tab, where all pages that have been deleted in the last 30 days are stored.
Hover over the deleted page you want to restore. Click on “Restore”. If you want to restore several pages at once, simply select all of them and click on “Restore” in the “Bulk actions” drop-down list.
You can now return to “All pages” and see the restored pages there. This is the quick and easy way to restore any WordPress pages you’ve recently deleted.
But what if you can’t find your deleted pages in the trash? Let’s look at some other methods for restoring deleted pages.
2. Restore deleted pages with a backup plugin
We’ve emphasized the key role of backing up your WordPress site time and time again. In this tutorial, we’ll be use UpdraftPlus – one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins, probably because it’s feature-rich, easy to use, and free.
First, you’ll need to download your backup files from your remote storage, your hosting provider or if you have already saved the backup files on your computer, you are ready to go.
Go to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups > Restore > Upload backup files.
Upload the backup files you downloaded earlier. UpdraftPlus will then scan these files and display them on the backups page.
Click on the “Restore” button to continue scanning.
Click “Restore” again when a new pop-up window appears. Make sure you select all available backup files, i.e. plugins, databases, themes and others.
UpdraftPlus will now start scanning, extracting and restoring data from these files. You will be redirected to a page informing you that the process has been successfully completed.
If you complete the backup successfully, you should see your deleted pages again.
3. Recover deleted WordPress pages from the Google cache
Search engines restore a cached version of your site content to the internet archives. This is handy because you can restore deleted WordPress pages by searching Google’s cache. The prerequisite is that the pages have been published and indexed by Google.
To restore your deleted WordPress pages using the Google cache, follow the instructions below:
- Go to Google.com
- Enter the exact URL of the page or post you want to restore. You can also try this command: site:www.yourdomain.com/name-of-your-deleted-page. Don’t forget to replace “yourdomain.com/name-of-deleted-page” with your actual domain and page.
- Search for your site in the search results. Once you see it, click on the down arrow next to your URL which displays 2 options – Cached and Similar.
- Click on “Cached” Check what Google returns. If it contains the content of your deleted page, copy the content, go back to your WordPress pages and create a new page.
4. Bring back your deleted pages with Wayback Machine
Wayback Machine is a huge digital library of the internet that stores billions of free books, movies, music, audio, software, etc. To find your deleted WordPress pages here, your pages or posts must have been published long enough for them to be indexed and categorized in the archive.
To recover your deleted content, you must first visit the WayBack Machine website, then enter your site and click “Search History” Once you see the results page, simply select a publication date to search for your posts. Alternatively, you can submit your site pages directly to the archive.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve shown you 4 easy ways to recover deleted WordPress pages. Normally, you can easily find and restore them in the recycle bin. If you can’t find the pages you want to recover in the trash, you can use backup plugins like UpdratfPlus or try searching for them in Google Cache and Wayback Machine.
