My WordPress Website Crashed – Now What Do I Do…?

I had a school contact me today saying that their website had crashed.  He alluded on his voice message that they had run an update and then the whole thing went down.  He then emailed me a link to the site (which is down) with a little bit more info…  In my business, I hear this all the time and so decided to write him up some answers.  I always like helping school’s and I figured the least thing I can do is give him some direction.

Note:  I took out the person’s school and name, but you can fill in your name if this every happens to you!

Hi, NAME!

I got your voice message and email… Thanks for contacting my company. I’ll do my best to give you some info on what can be done…

1. No Quick Fix – I want to start by saying that it is extremely difficult to repair a WordPress website unless you know how it was designed. So, your original web designer would be the best person to successfully fix this sort of thing. If they are unavailable, then I can tell you that it may take hours and hours and hours of work to figure out what is broken. Sometimes the solution is obvious, but usually it’s hard to nail down because it’s thousands of files. So, I typically do not work on that sort of thing. It’s just too difficult to nail down and especially quote you a price on what that would cost. It could end up being more than just starting a new website if the solution is not self-evident.
2. Reinstall from Backups – The first approach I can offer is that if you have Backups going back in time, then the very best thing to do is reinstall the site from before it crashed.
   1. Contact Your Server – The site is clearly down completely right now, so something major happened. See if the server can fix the issue and/or push it back. I’d suggest starting by contacting your SERVER and see if they have any backups. I did a quick lookup and it seems to me that it’s hosted on SERVER NAME HERE. I have no idea what level of account you have, but if they have backups and can push the whole thing back from before any of this happened, then you have a better chance of cleaning it all up. This would be something you can do yourself…
   2. Software Backups – If your web designer was smart, then they have setup Backups to run and they are stored somewhere (like on YOUR SERVER NAME). My company actually requires this sort of Maintenance Plan with every account we work on. It’s just smart. If you find that you do have backups, then we could talk about having me look at those backups and attempt a reinstall. It’s not an easy process and it is all determined on having good backups.
   3. No Backups – If you have no backups, then there’s not much you can do but find someone who will dig through it (which could be expensive) or start over with a new website.
3. Site Analysis – If/once the site is live and working again, then I can do a full “Site Analysis” where I look at what you have, where issues are, … WordPress is all about layers of software and it’s all custom made. EVERY site is completely different. It’s all based on what design theme you have, fancy features (like forms, calendars, …), … as to what is actually in there. So, I can’t tell you what you have at all without looking at it in detail. I charge $400 to do this Site Analysis. This has me look at it and write up a report of what I found.
4. New Website – If all else fails, then we could talk about what it would take to create you a new website.

If you get that far, then we can see what you have and work on a long term plan that gets this working for you with less risk and more stability.

Smiles,

Joe