Site broke down, how to find the old pages to rebuild?

The content of your pages/posts was stored in the database. The page files don’t exist as static files, so you won’t find them by browsing the directories on the host server.

WordPress is a CMS, based on a database and using PHP to run the functions of the site, including the display of the pages. It isn’t possible for it to revert to a straight HTML site, and it sounds more as if your theme stylesheet involved some errors or you used a stylesheet from the wrong theme.

If you’re getting a “page not found” error for a page that you know exists (in the database, i.e. it’s in the list of Pages in the dashboard), it might have meant that the link TO it was wrong and needed adjusting.

WP wouldn’t just use some links and not others. If the link is wrong, the link’s path is wrong. The object it is linking to either exists or not, WordPress wouldn’t just stop doing links correctly.

What exactly did you do when you reinstalled WP? If you reinstalled WordPress before the ISP backup, do you know if you created a 2nd database, essentially a brand new install, or did you just re-upload a fresh copy of WordPress leaving the original database intact?

Hi Moodles,

Thanks for your detailed and very to-the-point post.

If you’re getting a “page not found” error for a page that you know exists (in the database, i.e. it’s in the list of Pages in the dashboard), it might have meant that the link TO it was wrong and needed adjusting.

I think there may have been two unrelated issues side by side. This one may have been due to the fact that I was unsure how to rename my home page (in General Settings) to the name I wanted. When I renamed it to e.g. ../myhomesite/ it would then publish as ../myhomesite/myhomesite/. As a bloody beginner I am still grappling with the relationship between the pages section and the General Settings section.

What exactly did you do when you reinstalled WP? If you reinstalled WordPress before the ISP backup, do you know if you created a 2nd database, essentially a brand new install, or did you just re-upload a fresh copy of WordPress leaving the original database intact?

I just reinstalled it from the standard Linux interface called CPanel, provided by the ISP. So I have no idea if this install removed all prior files or just implanted itself over the old file structure.

I am just hoping to either find the info that was on the old pages in some file on the current installation or in a backup I made. So basically the question is, how can I recognize my – old – database and how can I access the info there in a way so as to easily copy-paste it into the new site that I started to set up nilly willy.

Thanks for any help.

By the way, the problem with the homepage missing appeared again. I have no idea how this has happened. If I click on the link in the top of General Settings (available on the whole of the dashboard, actually) I will get a page not found. This time I haven’t tinkered with the link names. Other pages are still available.

Try logging in at your host, in cPanel, find the database section,
and using the backup your data/restore your data articles from this link, see how to find how many databases you have:

https://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/

If in phpmyadmin, you can see you have two databases, one is the first install and should contain your old data. However, if you’ve been busy with the new install, restoring the first database to the current install will overwrite anything you’ve done since it was set up. (Note that the host may also have a database in there, probably smaller than the databases created for WordPress. Don’t touch that one!)

Not sure about your home page issue. Why are you renaming it?

Did you want a static home page and the blog/posts section on another page? If so, all you need to do is create a page name home.php, and wordpress will recognize it.

You don’t need to designate a home page UNLESS you want to do something different than the default. WordPress will create its own home page with the posts, using the theme files.

PS. Also on the PODZ wordhelp site there is an article “change ‘site_url’ and ‘home’ values” and if you are clicking on the upper left link in the dashboard that should take you to the home page of your site, and get an error, it sounds as if the URL to your site is messed up in the database. You don’t need to specify a home page unless you are doing something other than the default setup; just enter your basic domain (where wordpress is installed). It is usually
https://www.mydomain.com

If you installed WP in a subfolder of your site/domain, the site URL will be somethinge like:

https://www.mydomain.com/mysubfolder

Restarting from scratch. Thx Moodles so far!

Please close this thread. Although I haven’t been able to fully understand why I got in trouble, I was able to restart successfully.

Thanks Moodles for the friendly help!