Oh!No! You accidentally deleted or over wrote your WordPress page or blog post and lost all your content and now you are panicking wondering how to get it back.
Don’t fret! There is a super easy way to recover your WordPress page content or blog post to an earlier version of the page. While in the edit page or post screen, scroll down and you will see a page revisions section.
Select a revision date (by clicking on it) prior to when you lost your content or made your unwanted changes.
This will take you to a page that shows the last version of the page in HTML. Just ignore that HTML gobbly-gook and scroll further down. You should see a whole bunch of restore dates.
Select the date that you want to restore and then click the restore link and say the magic words, “Alla-Peanut-Butter Sandwiches!”. And Presto! Your content is back, baby!
What if you have accidentally deleted your post entirely? What should you do? How can you recover those hours of work?
Hi Edge Press. It would certainly suck to delete a post entirely. Here are some ideas from another blogger on how you could possibly recover the deleted posts. http://wphackr.com/recover-deleted-posts-using-firefox-cache/
Hey, I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog!…..I”ll be checking in on a regularly now….Keep up the good work!
- Marc Shaw
And how do you recover if wordpress didn’t autosave the last hour of what you wrote in a post?
Hi Cami, I am not sure what you can do if it didn’t autosave. That would stink.
Thanks now Breathing again..
this only applies for POSTS, but not PAGES… pages don’t have the same “page revision” field below, at least on mine. Any other ideas?
Hi Rachel – When editing the page, go to the screen options in the upper right. Make sure revisions is checked. Once it is you should see the revisions box in the page below. ~Tanya
Thank you!!!!!
Thanks, Tanya.
I found your little post on Google just now, and you just saved me a few hours recovering from a mistake on my main page. I’ll browse through your blog, and I expect to find more gems. Thanks again.
Robbie
amazing. My wordpress site just reverted to an older version of the contents. Meaning that I’ve lost pages and previously removed images suddenly appear on pages and deleted contents have resurfaced, replacing newer contents. i spent the whole day today adding new pages and editing content and for this to just happen, without a warning! At the end of the day’s work – and just after activating google adword. I’m upset – to put it mildly and really disappointed that wordpress has this failing. I don’t even know how to proceed. And more importantly, how to prevent reoccurrence.
I downloaded all my WordPress files with Dreamhost so I could edit the child theme and save the originals. Then on my MYSQL database, deleted a database with the name of an old business site I had, since I wanted to delete the hosting on that account and the domain name had expired. Little did I realize was that my WordPress site was in the wrong database and I lost it all. To make a long story short, even restoring the database did not replace my WordPress files becuase of the expired domain name. All I am left with are the wp-content, admin, etc files that I downloaded.
is any of this restorable/uploadable to recreate the pages I had before?
Do you have a backup of the database? You can check with the host they may be able to restore it from a backup. Once you have the site all set up again, make sure that you install a database back up plugin so that your database gets backed up regularly.
This won’t help me as I accidentally hit the empty trash button but I got a good laugh out of the “Alla-Peanut-Butter Sandwiches!”. LOL! I haven’t heard that in ages. Thanks for the smile.
I am sorry I couldn’t help you with your problem but I am sure glad I made you smile!
hey there, I actually deleted my WordPress permanently, but now I thought of retrieving it back. Any ways that I can try?
I just was just deleting a user from my site and didn’t realize (clicked too quickly) that it would remove ALL the content/etc… that user created… Unfortunately, almost the entire site was put together by that user, and I’ve recovered the pages and posts from the trash, but the images have disapeared. Is there any way to recover those?
Hey.. I accidently deleted some part of my post and this post looked as if it’ll rescue me. But i cudnt find the Page revision thing. i use self hosted wordpress.org site
Hey I got it.. I installed a plugin. But hadn’t tried an option that of Clicking the View AutoSave on clicking it i got the page revision. The only thing i am not sure is was it because of the plug in or inbuilt.
Thanks a lot anway!
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! Shouting with glee!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi There, I was out of the country and in the meantime my domain expired, I used wordpress to put up all my content and I dont have an offline copy of it. I now renewed the domain but I dont have my old contents, Is there anyway to recover them?? Is gng to my host the only way forward?? pls help. thanks
Yes, I think that your host might be the only way. Although you can check – The way back machine and see if you can find an archived version there – http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. If there is you could always copy the content from there.
Hi I accidentally made some changes to my blog’s menu’s and the contents under my menus- is there a way for me to restore my lost menus and their contents from a previous date? I inadvertently saved the wrong version of my blog’s structural menu’s and now they are gone. Please help!!!
The menus don’t get saved – I think you will have to recreate them.
SERIOUSLY GRATEFUL!
I was editing a Page and screwed it up really well! LOL
Did not know how to turn revisions on for a Page and thought I’d lost the work forever. Cheers to you and the Rachel for asking that question.
It was a Google search for “earlier version of wordpress page” that led me to you.
Feeling blessed you got me out of a mess.
Jen
Hi,
Is this also applicable for wordpress.com free blog site?
Thanks!
I am not sure – I only with with self-hosted WordPress blogs.
I need to restore a “page” that didn’t have revisions turned on. I have a back but it’s a single file with .sql extension. Can you help?
The back up is your whole database – so any changes you made anywhere on the site since the backup would be lost. You can restore the back up in phpMyAdmin (providing your host has that). If it were me, I would try restoring the back up to a test database first to be sure that the back-up is good.
Trying to find a revision of a page, but can’t se neither “Page Revisions” nor “screen options”. Any idéas?
Is your wordpress a self-hosted blog from WordPress.ORG or are you using WordPress.COM? These instructions are only for self-hosted blogs. I am not sure if the instructions hold true on WordPress.com.
THANK YOU, TANYA! This was SOO helpful… The best answers ONLINE!
Help. My blog on WordPress was wiped out. We restored it to a previous version with one post missing.
Now, I have one backup locally. Can I “find” the post and just extract it in whichever format is possible?
Thx.
To recover a PAGE simply follow this link http://en.support.wordpress.com/deleted-posts-and-pages/
Does anyone know if there is a way to restore an entire WordPress site using Wayback Machine? Godaddy deleted my server because they said I violated TOS and also deleted my backup that I use through their service.
HI,
Any insight or advice? LOVE your site by the way so will be a regular. Thank you SO MUCH!
I am a media consultant that blogs for this site albeit still a confessed novice at this. Today, while working on multiple blog sites, I go back to this screen and ALL, literally YEARS, of my blogs and previous bloggers for this site are GONE? Nothing. No opp to check autosave or revisions. It is completely blank. Having a heart attack as I write this.
Hi Sandy,
I checked out your blog and it looks ok, so I am hoping you got it resolved. My guess would be that the there was something wrong with the database and you may need to rebuild the tables. Usually your host can do this for you. I always recommend doing regular backups of your database – that way as a worse case scenario you can restore your back up. Hope everything works out for you! ~Tanya
Thanks so much for this info. It worked perfectly and really saved me. I would have had to totally re-write one of my blog posts in TURKISH (again) if not for your great advice.
It doesn’t seem as if the revisions part of the edit page is visible anymore. Does anyone know how to have it show up?
You should be able to toggle the revisions panel on and off by going to ‘screen options’ at the top right of the page. Just make sure that ‘revisions’ is checked to have it show.
THANK YOU SO MUCH. I nearly broke down in tears until I found your site!