Help Centre / Backups And Staging
Restore A Backup
Something has gone wrong and you want the site back. A restore takes about as long as the site is large, the whole thing is a few clicks, and you can choose to bring back everything or only part of it.
Read the first two steps before you start. Five minutes of thinking saves you from restoring the wrong half.
Step 1: Work Out What Actually Broke
A restore replaces what is there. If you take the whole site back to yesterday, you also take back anything good that happened since: new orders, new comments, a page you wrote this morning. So decide what is damaged before you decide what to restore.
| What went wrong | Restore |
|---|---|
| A plugin or theme update broke the layout | Files only |
| You deleted or mangled pages, posts or settings | Database only |
| A failed update broke both, or the site was hacked | Files and database |
| The site is blank or shows a fatal error | Files and database |
| A shop is broken but orders are still coming in | Files only |
Files only is the safe choice far more often than people think. Most breakages are code, and code is in the files. Restoring files only leaves your content, your orders and your comments exactly as they are now.
Step 2: Take A Backup Of Right Now
The platform does this for you. Every restore is preceded automatically by a backup of the state you are about to overwrite, listed as Safety Copy (before a restore), so a restore is itself reversible.
Take your own on-demand backup as well if you want a copy in your hands. It sounds odd to back up a broken site, but it is worth the thirty seconds when the thing you needed turns out to have been in the version you replaced.
If the site is badly broken and visitors are landing on it, consider turning on password protection while you work. See password protect a site.
Step 3: Pick The Right Backup
Open the website in the members area and go to its backups list. Each entry is dated, and you have the last 30 days.
Choose the last backup taken before the thing that broke, not the newest one, because the newest may already contain the problem. If you updated a plugin at 10am and the daily backup runs overnight, last night’s copy is the one you want.
If you are not sure when it broke, work backwards a day at a time rather than jumping a week.
Step 4: Choose What To Restore
Start the restore on that backup and choose the scope:
- Files and database replaces both together.
- Files only replaces the whole web root: WordPress, the theme, the plugins, the uploads folder,
wp-config.phpand any file you added. The database is left alone. - Database only replaces your content, settings and users, and leaves the files alone.
The same dialog asks where to put it: your live site, or your staging copy if you have one. Restoring onto staging is the safe way to look at an old version first. A restore onto the live site asks you to type the website’s name to confirm.
A restore overwrites what is live. A database restore removes any content, orders, comments or user accounts created since that backup was taken. There is no merge and there is no partial undo, which is why step 2 matters.
Step 5: Let It Run
The restore reports its progress. How long it takes depends on the size of the site, so a large uploads folder takes longer than a small brochure site.
Leave it alone while it works. Do not start a second restore, push staging to live, or edit the site in the WordPress dashboard until it has finished.
Step 6: Check The Site
Open the site in a private window, not the tab you have been staring at for the last hour.
- The home page loads.
- The page that was broken is right again.
- You can sign in to the WordPress dashboard.
- Images load, which tells you the uploads folder came back.
- On a shop, your recent orders are where you expected them to be, given what you chose to restore.
If pages look stale rather than wrong, that is the cache rather than the restore. See clear the cache.
Step 7: Do Not Repeat The Mistake
A restore puts you back where you were, including back before the update you were trying to make. The update is still waiting for you, and it will still break the site if you run it the same way.
Do it on staging next time. Copy the live site, run the update there, see what happens, and push it live when it works. That is what staging is for. See create a staging site and push it live.
If the breakage was a hack, a restore alone is not enough: whatever got in can get in again through the same outdated plugin. Restore, then update everything and change the administrator passwords. See malware scans.
Troubleshooting
The site is still broken after a files-only restore. The problem is in the database, often a plugin setting written during the failed update. Restore the database from the same backup.
Content is missing after a files-and-database restore. It was written after the backup was taken. Restore the database from the backup you took in step 2 to get it back, then restore files only from the older backup.
You cannot sign in to WordPress after a database restore. Your password has gone back to what it was on that date. Use One Click Admin in the page header, which works whatever the restored password is, then set a new password inside WordPress. The site’s address is put right for you during the restore, so you do not need to search-replace anything.
Images are broken but pages are fine. The uploads folder is older than the content referring to it. A files-only restore from a newer backup will usually line them up again.
The restore will not start, or stops partway. Open a ticket from the members area with the website name and the date of the backup. Do not keep retrying, because a half-finished restore on top of another is harder to unpick than the original fault.
You need a backup older than 30 days. We only hold 30 days. If you kept a copy of your own, that is the copy to use. This is why how backups work asks you to keep one.
Did this answer it? If not, open a ticket from the members area and someone who runs the platform will pick it up.
Open A Ticket