We all know the familiar situation: you or your employee accidentally clicks delete or (trash in WordPress) and your blog post disappears. Is there anything you can do to restore your posts?
There are several ways you can rescue your posts and I will list them in order of easiness of execution:
When you log in to your WordPress admin, go to Posts (menu item on the left hand side) and notice the Trash filter option at the top of the listing (in the main window).
If you click on the Trash link, you will see the list of deleted blog posts.
If you can’t find your blog post in the Trash area, you can try to access the Google cached version of your blog post. Chances are that Google has indexed your website and you can still view the cached version of your article even if it’s been deleted. To access the cached version you can search directly on Google for the blog post you are looking for and then click the “Cached” link to view cached version of your website.
Or you can use this little tool to get the Google cached version straightaway. Just enter the url of your deleted blog post (if you can recover it) and then press “Show cached version!” button.
It might be that one of your RSS readers has already downloaded the blog posts before it was deleted. It might be worth checking this out as it this is one of the easiest ways to recover a blog post.
You can access archived version of your entire website using one of the Archived website services such as WayBackMachine. The trouble is that unless your website is very popular the WayBackMachine may not have enough archived versions of your website.
The last resort that is available to you is to access a backup version of your database with WordPress data. In order to do that you need a) hosting provider that allows you to do that b) either contact your hosting provider or your web designer to assist you. It’s not a straightforward process so I would not recommend you to test it on your own unless you possess enough technical expertise.
The other danger of this approach lies in the fact that all the changes you have done since the moment of restoration will be completely lost.
UPDATE from comments: You may not need to restore your entire WordPress database if you can perform a search on the recovered database file and find your deleted blog post this way. Or you can back up your current database, restore the old one, copy the deleted blog post and install your latest database back. Then you can easily upload the deleted blog post while making sure that none of your latest updates to your website will be lost.
Hopefully we have helped some of you to restore your accidentally deleted blog posts.
