I had a silly thing happen the other day. Actually, it was a little terrifying. I had written and published a blog post about my son’s birthday and I later realized that it had gotten deleted. It was totally my fault that it happened and I was looking everywhere on the interwebs for how to possibly get that post back – because I had written it right in WordPress so I didn’t have another copy of it. My heart was a little broken.

After using tips from a few different sources I was able to get my post back… in its entirety! Now I’m here to share how I was able to quickly recover a deleted post. I hope if you’re having troubles this will work for you too.

How to Quickly Recover a Deleted Blog Post

Disclaimer: I am not technically savvy. I’ve done my best to describe what worked for me in hopes it will help someone else! This method will work for those who have access to Cpanel in their hosting account.

Step 1. Log into your blog host provider. I’m currently with Bluehost.

Step 2. Navigate to your Cpanel, find and click on phpMyAdmin.

bluehost cpanel phpmyadmin

Step 3. Check the left navigation and open your blog’s database.

After you click on the database, you’ll find a list of databases for your blog. Click on the one with your blog posts inside. Mine is called “wp_posts”. Yours will likely be something similar.

click on database on left side - recover deleted blog post

After clicking on the posts database, you’ll see a list of all of your posts like this:

click to sort by post title

The list you see will likely have your oldest post at the top. You may also notice your blog pages in the list.

Step 4. Click the categories at the top to sort by whatever method might be best in your case. I used post_title and post_date to find the post I was looking for.

Step 5. Click edit on the post you want to recover. (edit shows up on the far left side of the page for each post listed)

You’ll see the post in plain text form:

recover deleted blog post copy paste

Step 6. Copy and paste the text into a new post! (and/or copy to a text document and SAVE!)

Step 7. If all else fails try to contact your host. They should be able to help you locate the post you need if it’s able to be recovered.

Tips to Prevent Deleted Blog Posts

Use a text editor other than WordPress to craft your blog posts. I prefer typing directly into WordPress but that doesn’t seem to be best practice considering the inspiration for this post. :)

Backup your blog regularly. Many hosts automatically do this for you but it’s a good idea to be sure your blog is being backed up regularly. This makes it easier to recover anything that gets deleted. I’d also recommend backing up your blog before and after making any changes to your blog just to be sure you can recover everything if things get wonky. There are also plug-ins that will backup your blog for you. Here are a few important plug-ins I use.

If you ever transfer hosting to another provider always be 100% certain the transfer is complete before changing anything on your blog! This is the biggest mistake I made.

Clear as mud? ;)

I do hope it helps!

xo Mindi