One of my WordPress websites started acting up today… Specifically my site was missing its content from all the posts.
Pages were OK. WooCommerce products were OK. But no content in posts.
I didn’t even discover this… So who know how long it was like this.
A customer emailed me to say that she wanted to read an article I had posted, but when she went to the post, the content was missing.
Post Content Missing
It’s relatively easy to build a WordPress blog… And usually the tech acts bulletproof.
But sometimes things happen…
Today, basically the WordPress post “body text” was missing from all the published posts on the production site.
However, if I went to “edit post” for that particular post, all of the content was there. If I made a change to the post and hit “Save”, still nothing happened. The published post was still blank.
If I right clicked “view source” on the page, there were some “divs” missing for the content and images.
Somehow the “entry-content” containers were being stripped out by WordPress.
Troubleshooting
I found this video on YouTube.
The video shows how to FTP into your site, go into your “wp-content” folder, find the “plugins” folder and change the name of the folder.
If you change the folder name, it will deactivate all the plugins.
After you have deactivated all the plugins, refresh your browser to test your site. If the site is still not functioning properly, the problems are not related to your plugins.
There is some other issue.
Instead of FTPing in, I printed out a list of all my plugins and went through and deactivated each one. Each time I refreshed the my Chrome browser to see if that was what caused the issue.
None of the plugins seemed to be causing the issue.
Restore From Backup
Then I restored the files and database from an earlier backup of the site using GoDaddy “managed WordPress”.
Initially, this did not work. The site went blank.
That’s never a good feeling.
Luckily I was able to fix this by trying again and restoring my files and database to a different, more recent date.
This worked.
It brought my site back up and fixed the missing “entry-content” containers that were not showing up on the posts.
This reminded me of the importance of having an offsite backup of my entire site, in addition to the regular backups that happen every day through GoDaddy Managed WordPress.
I use a free version of WP Backitup. You can download a full backup of your site very quickly and then save it in case you ever have problems with your hosting backup.