Manually Restore a WordPress Website Without a Backup

Whether you are developing or running a WordPress website, it is extremely important to back up the site regularly. he lets you easily get your last working site up and running if something unexpected happens. While this process may seem easy, it can be very complex.

In this post, we’ll show you how to manually restore your WordPress site using cPanel and FTP, assuming you’ve already made a backup.

Reasons to Restore a WordPress Website

Restoring a backup of your WordPress site is not something you do often. However, when you do this, It is important to follow the right steps. Some of the most common situations that require a website backup are:

Whatever happens to your site, you should prioritize solving the problem and making website content accessible again. Restoring a site backup is the fastest way to recover from any unforeseen situation and gives you the time needed to fix the problem.

WordPress Site Backup Methods

There is Several ways to restore WordPress site backup. One of them Using plugins like UpdraftPlus and similar software. They allow you to take a full backup of your site and restore it if needed. But while such add-ons provide many useful tools, they can be quite limited. For example, a feature that allows you to save a backup of your site does so only within the server area where the plugin resides. Also, you may not be able to use the automatic backup restore option unless you can access the WordPress dashboard.

Another way to restore a WordPress site backup is with the option included with your hosting plan.. Many hosting providers provide this feature, while others offer this option as an add-on.

For example, this option Backup Wizard within a cPanel platform. It offers the ability to restore a backup of the website.

As we mentioned, one of the main disadvantages of this method is that the hosting provider stores your backup of your website and your live site on the same server. If the server is compromised, your backup may also be lost.

So it is recommended that you do save every website backup to your computer or a cloud platform.

The manual method of restoring a backup can be a bit more complicated than the previous two. However, it is the most reliable and often the only available way to get your site back on track, so let’s see how.

How to Manually Restore a WordPress Website Backup

Manually restoring a WordPress site backup requires some technical knowledge of the WordPress backend and the way WordPress works. If you’re a beginner and aren’t quite sure what to do, it might be better to leave it to someone more experienced. Whatever your decision, we will do our best to describe the entire process in as much detail as possible.

To start manually restoring a backup of your site, you need to have a saved backup of the WordPress files and database of your website.

Once you do, you are ready to restore the WordPress website backup. This process consists of two steps:

Restoring WordPress Database using cPanel and phpMyAdmin

To get started, log into your hosting account to access cPanel or any other available platform. choose phpMyAdmin in the option databases Section.

If your hosting provider uses a different platform, consult its documentation to access the site. phpMyAdmin choice. When you access it, go to: databases tab.

On the left panel, you will see a list of all databases stored on the server. Find the database used on your WordPress website. If you don’t know which one it is, you can find out by opening the wp-config file. Finding the value of the variable ‘DB_NAME’.

Before starting the restore process, you will have the option to empty the existing database and import or delete the saved backup and create a new database for this purpose. If you choose the latter, don’t forget to add the new data of the database by editing the wp-config.php file.

Fly: In case your website is hacked and the tables in the database are targeted, we recommend that you delete all the tables in the database and only then restore the database backup. Of course, this will only be possible if you have already backed up the database.

To delete tables from the database, simply highlight them by clicking Check all. near the bottom of the screen. Then select the Drop option from the drop-down menu next to it.

The step of deleting these tables from the database is recommended in case your site is hacked, otherwise you can skip it as the following step will invalidate the existing equivalent tables in the database.

Whether you have deleted the tables in the database or not, when you are ready to restore the backed up version, click on it. import Click the tab near the top of the screen with the relevant database selected in the left pane.

Then, in the File to Import section, choose file Click the button and select the database backup from the location on your computer where you saved the backup file.

After selecting the database backup file From your computer, in the Format section, choose SQL in the dropdown menu:

Finally, click the Go button and import the file. database backup. It will take some time for phpMyAdmin to take your database backup. After importing the part of the website that contains your posts and pages, the site is restored.

Restoring Website Files

The next step is to restore the WordPress files. We will use an FTP client for this purpose. This requires you to have an FTP account and FTP software like FileZilla. You can control or create an FTP account via cPanel on your hosting account.

after you find yours FTP account and get a start FTP client log in to connect your computer and server. When you log in, the left panel will show your local site along with the files on your computer, while the right panel will list the remote site files on the server.

In the left panel, find the location where you saved the backup files from your WordPress site. Double check if the files are uncompressed. If not, remove them. Now on the right panel, if you haven’t already, public_html folder.

The next step is to delete the old files from your server. Double check that the file backup contains all the edits you want to save. This check is important as you cannot restore these changes after deleting the server files. To delete old files, right-click on the old folders and files you selected earlier and To delete.

Proceed by uploading backup files from your computer. Using FileZilla, just drag selected files from local site in left panel and drop them to remote site in right panel. The duration of this process depends on the size of your files.

Another way to restore your backup files is to use cPanel and File Manager tool. Go to your hosting account and File Manager choice.

In File Manager, find the public_html folder with the WordPress installation of your website. If there is more than one domain on the server, be sure to select the folder where your domain is located. After opening the folder where your site files are located, select them, right click on them and choose Delete.

Once you have emptied the public folder, click on it. To upload Press the button on the options tab at the top. Now just go to: backup zip file you saved it to your computer.

Depending on the file size, the upload may take longer. Once complete, you will see a zip file installed in your public folder.

Right click on the file and select Eject to open the file.

Although this method has the same result, we recommend restoring the backup via an FTP client as it will be faster and more efficient.

Final Checks

If you followed these instructions, your backup files and database should be restored to your server. Now it’s time to check if everything is working properly, so go to your website and do a quick check.

Start with add-ons – check if they are installed. If there are any changes, enable them.

Fly. Note the permalink structure. Restoring your site from backup may change permalinks – in this case, posts and pages won’t open in the browser. To check permalinks, go to: Settings > Permalinks in Dashboard your website.

If you are restoring your site after a hacker attack, it is recommended that you change the login credentials for both administrators and other types of users.

Additionally, you can create a new backup and install a security plugin to increase the security of your site.

final thoughts

Regular file backups are incredibly important security measures for any site owner. It allows you to quickly restore your site after a malicious attack or crash caused by an incompatible theme, bad plugins, and software updates. While there are several ways to restore your site, the manual method is the only one that offers absolute control and security, so keep this tutorial close in case you need it.