All my pages are suddenly 404! =(

  • Resolved daretoeatapeach

    (@daretoeatapeach)


    7 years, 10 months ago

    Hello,

    I have a wordpress site that I have been writing and publishing pages for, though it hasn’t officially launched yet (keeping it behind a Coming Soon page). I’ve been working on the home page using the Divi theme builder, but today I decided to edit some of the other pages I had written, and they are all gone!

    I know WP loads from database on the fly, so there’s not like a text document somewhere, but is there some place I can go to view the contents of my database, to try to get back the text of these pages? I put so many hours into creating them.

    I tried restoring from my back up, but apparently those have failed too.

    I have disabled all my plugins. I’ve also tried reverting to an older version of Divi, but that didn’t help. I’ve tried switching to new 2017 theme, they are still 404.

    My permalinks are set to the post name (not sure if relevant to Pages, just trying to give any info that might help).

    The homepage itself is still there, oddly enough. But since I’ve been working on the homepage for months, I don’t know what I did that could have deleted the existing pages. The pages are still listed in the WordPress dashboard, as if they exist, giving me hope that the content is still there, hidden somewhere, perhaps at a different permalink.

    That the pages exist on the dashboard makes me think they were deleted via some other method like FTP, but the only thing I’ve deleted from FTP is Divi theme, and I backed that up and restored it, so that doesn’t seem to be the cause…but I don’t know. Trying not to panic.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Try resetting your custom permalinks back to the default setting and renaming your WordPress .htaccess file.

    If that works, then try reading Using_Permalinks before setting a custom permalink structure again.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by t-p.
    • This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by t-p.
    Thread Starter daretoeatapeach

    (@daretoeatapeach)

    Thanks! I noticed the permalinks page had a message telling me to update my .htaccess…since this new site doesn’t have an .htaccess…Bingo! That was the problem. OK, marking as resolved, the rest is just to help anyone else who stumbles upon this in their own troubleshooting.

    I created a text file, pasted the stuff from the WP permalinks page, saved it to my site via FTP, and renamed the file .htaccess. It promptly disappeared because my FTP program doesn’t show hidden files, but I knew it was working because the pages showed up.

    Also, for anyone reading this who has a similar problem: I did a search of the site for a common word (I used “Why,” as in “WHY GOD WHY ARE ALL MY PAGES 404?”) and the search results showed a bunch of posts. That reassured me that the content still existed, even if it wasn’t showing up. So if you’re having my issue, run a search before you panic.

    I most certainly must read up on that, because I am having a similar issue on a relaunch of a site I’ve had for ten years.

    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    Glad you got it sorted ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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