How To Recover a WordPress Website Without a Backup

Today’s post/Podcast episode topic comes from a community member Jeff, who recently lost all of the data from his site hosted at BlueHost, even after paying extra each month for them to take backups of his site.

I mentioned that as one of the primary drivers for switching my hosting recommendation back over to Webhosting Hub a few weeks back.

In today’s Podcast episode I talk in detail about how you can follow the steps Jeff provided below, to recover your website data, in the event you don’t happen to have a good backup of your website.

Thanks to Jeff for the detailed write-up, here it is….

My Niche Site Went Down and The Backups Were Bad, And It Could Happen to You Too!

You Don’t Have to Be Technical to Handle A Data Loss Situation

If you can do these basic things, you can recover the bulk of your your website, even if your web hosting provider fails and you don’t have backups of your own to turn to.

All you need to be able to do to get most of your website back is:

* Have a basic understanding of WordPress. Enough to create your own posts or install a plugin.

* Be able to search Google for your site by web address.

* Copy and paste text from Google text editor such as Notepad and save the files to your computer or out to the cloud.

* Once you have a working WordPress install, paste the saved content back into WordPress one post or page at a time.

I personally had to go through this process myself not long ago. I want to share my story and the steps I took to recover, in order to help anyone else out who happens to find themselves in a similar position.

The Back Story In a Nutshell

About three months ago, I noticed my primary niche site had some unexpected downtime. I reached out to my hosting provider and found that they had a server failure — stuff happens — four hours later it was back online.

I felt secure in the fact that my hosting provider makes backups of my site and if something should happen I could recover all of my content.

Fast forward to about two weeks ago, when my site went down again. This time it was much worse. My site content, all of my site content, was just gone. I asked my hosting provider to kindly restore my site from backup; they agreed and contacted me an hour later…

The backups were all bad. My site was just gone. I was angry and sad. I’d worked so hard on my new niche site and thought I was safe against this sort of thing. Needless to say, this was an extremely unwelcome reality check.

I Got (Most) Of My Site Back and Here Is How…

Google has some interesting tricks under the hood. One of them is the ability to look for content only on a specific site.

If you Google for site:YourDomain, you’ll get a list of every page Google has ever visited that belongs to your website.

I’ll show you. My niche site is defeatdebtcollectors.com and its main focus — as you might have guessed from the name — is now to get debt collectors off your back and fix your credit.

If I want to see everything Google has for my site, I’d just type this into the Google search box:

site:defeatdebtcollectors.com

The Site’s Down; How Do I Get My Content Back?

If you find yourself in a similar situation, all is not lost. Here is what you do to get the bulk of your content back more or less the same way I did.

Every time Google visits your site, it makes a copy of the page it visits and saves the text and other content in its own database. It has to do this, or searching the Internet would take hours or days instead of a few seconds here or there.

So, for our purposes, Google’s cached copy of your site is the closest thing to a backup you’re ever going to get.