How to Restore Your WordPress Website from a backup and Database

Estimated read time 5 min read

How to Restore Your WordPress Website from a backup and Database can seem like a daunting task at the beginning but is as easy as pie.If you are running a business and it’s on website hosted on WordPress then success is also about knowing how to keep a back-up of your website so that it is available when you are at that moment when you need to restore it. We use WordPress for most of our websites so we are going to go through the different steps to restoring your WordPress website.

How to make a back up of your WordPress website

Before you can restore  the website you must have made the back up. Here is how you make the back up and always have a good hosting company and support

Visit your control panel and look for back up or back up wizard

Click on Back up and from there you can download the Partial Back up as well as the Database Back up

Now that you have done your back up of your website an database let us go through how to restore your website

How to Restore your WordPress Website easily

Your back up will come as a Zipped file so don’t panic which is the easiest for your system to upload the files. Using the same wizard for back up you can upload your database through the control panel so that its now on whichever hosting site you have chosen such as hostcradle.

Once you have uploaded the database and the website it’s time to do the next few steps.

Visit your control panel for your hosting site and open file manager

From here you should see something like this

This is where your website is hosted in the File Manager and if you are using  WordPress you should see the following folders

  • wp-content
  • w-includes
  • wp-admin

If you are not seeing these  in your File Manager then make sure you have installed WordPress.

If you go back to your back up of the website (not the database which has a .sql  extension) you can unzip it so that you see the files inside. For example on mine you would see the following

This is where it gets interesting and exciting. If you open the public_html in your unzipped file you will see the following

From the unzipped folder you should be seeing these files mainly

  • wp-content
  • wp-includes
  • wp-admin

Also in the folder are other files that are not in folders.

Restoration is simple. Zip the folders that (wp-content,wp-includes,wp-admin) on your machine.

Go to File manager and on top click on upload. You should see the following screen

Once you have uploaded your Zipped file. Change the name on the folder you want to replace in the Public_html of your file manager. For example in File manager change wp-content to wp-content1.

Go to the zipped file that you uploaded. Right click and click on extract. You should get a screen prompt and select where you want you extract to go so that you create a new folder of the file that you had renamed. In this case for example you could be replacing w-admin.

MAKE sure you are extracting to the right path of the folder in public_html.

Do that for all the folders in your unzipped back up for public_html.

Replace all your files with the new files. When you are satisfied that you have extract all files and restored all the other files from your website unzipped back up, you are ready to go to the next stage.

Restoring your back up Database for WordPress

Though you have restored your website you still need to restore your database so that it all points to the right place.  On your control panel there would be a WordPress installer such as the one provided at hostcradle

It’s advisable to get a website host that give you easy installers as seen above.

After you click on the WordPress installer you will see your WordPress installation from which you can check the database that you are pointing to

From this if you click on overview you should see the current installation below

Look for edit and you should be able to see the database that you are pointing to. The database in this case should be the new installation that you did so we will keep this one.

Lets go back to control panel. and look for phpMyadmin

From there click on PhpMyAdmin

and select the database that you are pointing to.

Click on it and the following should appear

Import from the sql file of the database back up that you had done, there you go, you have completed a successful database import.

Final Step to Making Database Restoration work

Now that you have restored everything you will need to go change the database name and user name in one of the WordPress config file.

Go to file manager and locate the wp-config in your public_html. Right click on it and select edit.

Make you sure you have done a back up of that file in case you make a mistake. Look for where it says database and user name and replace with the database name and password

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘ddddddd‘);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘ppppppp‘);

 

If you have done all this and you save, your website should be coming up easily.

Hope this was some help to you as you continue on your path to success.

Share this article with as many people as you can to help them to make restorations.

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