WordPress Dropping All Pages? Don’t Panic!
For the third day in a row, I have been contacted about someone waking up and finding that their entire WordPress powered website had dropped all the pages and content! Today, it also happened to one of my own sites!
Here is what you find:
- You Visit your Website
- The Homepage or ANY Page is Blank, or delivering a 404, not found error.
Rule #1 – Don’t Panic….
I don’t know WHY this happening at this point, but every site I have spotted it on is using “page” for the homepage, versus the most recent posts like a normal blog would.
Step #1 – Login into your sites cpanel, Get the Database Name for the site
Login to your cPanel and go into the file manager. Navigate your way to the folder that contains your website.
- If its the only site on the hosting system, that would be the public_html folder (For HostGator)
- If its an addon domain, the folder may be named differently, most often, the name of the domain. For example, if I had an addon domain: “thiswebsite.com”, the most common addon folder name would be at: “public_html/thiswebsite/”
- Inside the site folder, view the wp-config.php file, and get the exact name of the database to check and repair.
Get the DB Name -
Step #2 – Check and Repair the Database
Once you have the database name, you need to repair it! In cPanel, navigate to the database section and click on the MySql Databases link icon;
From the “Repair DB drop menu, choose the database name you identified in your wp-config.php file, and click the repair button!
Boom – fixed!
Again, not sure why this has happened several times over the past week… but it is! On my site that was affected this morning, I have made NO CHANGES to the site in more than 1 week, and it worked flawlessly yesterday!
Mark
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Adding the First Pages to your WordPress Website
- Using Popshops to add Full Product Pages to your WordPress Website
- Pages Versus Posts for WordPress Review Sites
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Mark,
Are you using the Redirection plugin? If so, this will do exactly what you are experiencing.
Rochelle
@Rochelle – I thought the same thing Rochelle… but it wasn’t on all the sites I checked.
2 – Had it installed and working
1 – Had it installed but not activated
1 – Didn’t have it at all
It was the first thing I checked after some other recent redirection issues I have seen. :-)
M
Same type of thing happened in redirection plugin during wp3 update.
You need to turn off monitor in options then delete / in mysqladmin under redirection_items file.
O-sh//t just noticed after typing that its been addressed.
ooops
O and it a “not saving post” first issue I hear. If you save first then it doesnt happen
I had it happen on one site and it didn’t use the redirect plugin. It is a brand new site which is only 3 weeks old. Just happened to visit it to make an update and was like – WTF – where’s my pages.
Started to panic, catch my breath, then remembered to repair the database, whew.
Similar issue a few months ago and repairing the DB fixed it, how I remember to try and fix wp sites showing now pages. If that doesn’t work, it always pays to refer back to your Sitemap Plan that you used to build your site if you ever have to rebuild. :)
This happened to me this week scared the shit out of me, every post and page gone… then I figured out how to repair the data base, few!!
would of been easier if you posted these data base repair instructions last week..lol
Good on ya Mark another helpful post.
cheers!!
I’ve had this happen for redirection plugin reasons, databases in need of repair, and one additional odd reason – I’d created a post in MS Word and copy/pasted it into a post.
It took a while to figure out why, but the resolution was simply copying into notepad and then again into the WP post to get rid of whatever crazy control codes Word had added on…
This is really helpful, Mark, thanks – I didn’t know before how to repair a database and now I’ve started hosting this little tidbit will really come in handy.
Checked all of mine and my website clients’ websites and it hasn’t happened to anyone – yet! If it does I’ll know what to do.
Thanks again.
I have had this on a few of my sites, but it is mainly solved. It does still appear on a few sites though, even when i am in the wp-admin section, I get 404′s when I am trying to install a plugin or something “normal” for example.
I am planning to upgrade them to the latest WP anyway – so that might fix it. I wonder if the cpanel/fantastico WP 1 click installer might have done something odd when it was all set up in the first place.
My ISP told me about repairing the DBs – which did help initially – but I solved the problems on my sites by installing them under separate usernames.
You have saved my day . .so much time for me that I would have been panicked and trying to figure what i did wrong. . .and my sanity! thank you!
Had this happen on an account hosted on Glowhost who pretty much washed their hands of it when it came to helping – offered to restore back up for a price!!!!! Nothing had changed on my blog and the database was ok so did not need a repair so this was not the problem.
If your database is OK there may have been a change to the server security settings and this potentially can cause a plug in to error. If this is the case you may not even be able to log in to your blog.
Before doing any changes to your database it would make sense to backup the data base which you should do anyway either by way of a plugin, backup utility or manually.
You can temporarily deactivate your plug-ins by logging into your server via ftp – then browse to your plug ins folder. Change the name of each plug in by adding an underscore at the front of the plugin name i.e. seoplugin become _seoplugin then see if the blog is functional again. If so enable your plugins one by one (get rid of the underscore) to isolate any plug in problem. This can also happen when you update your blog install.
I’ve not experienced this glitch Mark, but I do use the WP-DBManager (http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-dbmanager.2.50.zip) plugin to run daily database backups and also routinely optimise the database every 2-3 weeks. Prevention rather than cure maybe?
It not uncommon for a host to charge for backups. The backups are there for the hosts usage unless they specifically offer backup restoration as a service as part of the package. Your backups should be kept locally if you are serious about your website. If you don’t have them, you are lucky that your host has them and can offer them to you as many hosts don’t run backups these days or backup on a limited basis.
This problem happens usually when you have 3rd party plugins installed that are not part of the wordpress default codebase. When you install plugins you open yourself up to all sorts of code problems because generally most of the people that write the plugins are not very good programmers, and the code leads to hacks.
If you are running a default wordpress install and it happens, you are probably running an outdated version that has some known security holes. You should always run the latest version.
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