What Is WordPress Disaster Recovery?

The short version

Disaster recovery is the plan for the day your website is really gone, not just slow or showing an error. The site was hacked and gutted. An update broke everything and nobody has a copy. The hosting company closed the account. A developer left with the only login. Recovery means getting a working site back, with its content, and then making sure the same thing can't take it out again.

There are two halves to it. The half that happens after the disaster is the rescue: finding whatever still exists and rebuilding from it. The half that happens before is the preparation: backups that actually restore, logins that more than one person holds, and a record of what the site runs on. The second half is cheap. The first half is not.

What counts as a disaster

Most WordPress problems are not disasters. A critical error, a white screen or a database connection error looks alarming, but the site's files and content are usually still sitting on the server untouched. Those are repairs, and they're routine.

A disaster is when the content itself is damaged or missing, or you can't get to it at all:

• A hack that deleted or overwrote pages, or infected so many files that cleaning is harder than rebuilding.
• A failed update or migration that left the site half-moved, with the only copy broken.
• A hosting account that was suspended, expired or closed, sometimes with the files removed.
• A ransomware-style attack that scrambled the files or the database.
• The only person with the logins is gone, and the site has been drifting unmaintained since.

How a recovery actually works

Step one is finding what still exists. There is often more than people think: a backup the host kept, a copy a previous developer made, an older backup in a plugin's folder, cached copies of pages in search engines, and the database, which usually survives even when the files are a mess. Step two is choosing the best starting point: the most recent copy that is clean and complete. Step three is rebuilding on it, bringing the site up to date, and checking every important page, form and checkout. Step four is closing whatever caused the disaster, so the recovered site isn't hit the same way next month.

If a hack is involved, the cleanup comes first, because restoring an infected backup just restores the infection. Here's how much fixing a hacked site costs.

How to make sure you never need it

The whole subject gets much less dramatic with a little preparation:

• Backups in two places, taken automatically, kept for a sensible period, and tested by actually restoring one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a plan. Here's why backups matter.
• Logins held by more than one person, for WordPress, the hosting account and the domain name.
• Updates tested before they go live, on a copy of the site, so a bad update can't take the only version down.
• Someone watching, so an outage is noticed within minutes instead of when a customer mentions it.

Every Warrior WP care plan includes daily backups kept for 30 days, nightly off-site copies kept long-term, updates tested on a staging copy first, and uptime monitoring that's always on. That's disaster recovery done in advance, for a monthly fee, which costs much less than the rescue.

If you're in the middle of one now

Don't delete anything, don't reinstall WordPress, and don't restore a backup until you know when the problem started. Each of those can destroy the copy that would have saved the site. Write down what happened and when, gather every login you have, and get someone who does this for a living to look before anything else changes.