How to Recover and Restore Deleted Pages in WordPress

Accidentally deleting a page in WordPress can be frustrating, but the good news is that it’s possible to recover deleted pages from the trash. Whether it’s a simple page or a WooCommerce product page, recovery is often just a few clicks away.

Many WordPress users have faced this issue, and we’ve helped countless beginners retrieve their deleted content without any hassle. WordPress’s trash feature acts as a safety net, allowing you to restore mistakenly deleted pages.

In this guide, we will show you the simple steps to recover deleted pages in WordPress and WooCommerce. With these instructions, you’ll have your pages back up in no time.

How WordPress Handles Deleted Pages?

WordPress moves deleted items into a ‘Trash’ folder like your computer. This removes those items from your WordPress website and admin screens but does not permanently delete them immediately.

After 30 days, WordPress permanently deletes the item from the trash and your WordPress database.

If the page you deleted is still in the trash, you can restore it. We’ll show you how in a minute.

However, if it has also been deleted from the trash, you will need to try other ways to restore the deleted page in WordPress.

Sometimes, you may accidentally delete an important page and not notice it for a while. For instance, if you have multiple pages with the same name and end up deleting one, you need.

Another common scenario that we have seen is users accidentally deleting pages needed by WooCommerce or their WordPress membership plugin.

That being said, let’s look at how to easily restore deleted pages in WordPress and WooCommerce.

Here is a quick table of contents so you can jump to the section that best fits your needs:

Method 1. Recover Deleted Pages from Trash in WordPress

This method is the easiest; you should try it before doing anything else.

When you delete an item in WordPress, it is sent to the trash folder. You can recover it for the next 30 days, after which it will be automatically deleted forever.

Simply go to the Pages » All Pages page inside your WordPress admin area. From here, you need to switch to the ‘Trash’ tab to view all the pages that have been deleted during the last 30 days.

If the page(s) you want to recover are listed there, simply hover your mouse over the page title, and you’ll see the option to ‘Restore’ it.

You can also restore multiple pages at once by selecting them and then choosing ‘Restore’ from the Bulk Actions drop-down menu at the top.

You can now go to Pages » All Pages and locate the restored page there.

That was quick and easy, but what if the page you deleted is not listed under Trash?

Don’t worry. There are other ways to restore deleted pages in WordPress.

Method 2. Restore Deleted Pages in WordPress Using a Backup Plugin

We recommend backups as the best WordPress security and productivity tools. All WordPress websites must set up a proper WordPress backup plugin.

These WordPress backup plugins not only help you recover a hacked WordPress site, but they can also help you recover deleted content, including pages.

Note: WordPress backup plugins allow you to restore your entire website to an earlier point. This means any other changes you made to your website after that time can be lost.

If you know when you deleted a page, then you can access the last backup before that time to restore your website.

If you don’t have a WordPress backup plugin installed, then there is still a fairly good chance that your WordPress hosting company does, and you can still restore it via cPanel.

Our guide on restoring WordPress from a backup provides step-by-step instructions. It shows how to restore WordPress from a backup using Duplicator, phpMyAdmin, cPanel, and more.

Method 3. Recover Deleted WooCommerce Pages

By default, WooCommerce creates checkout, cart, shop, and account management pages. These are the essential pages for your WooCommerce store to function correctly.

If you accidentally delete a WooCommerce page, then you can first try restoring it by looking into the Trash (see Method 1 above).

If you cannot find the page in the trash, you can simply create a new one. For instance, you can go to the Pages » Add New and create a blank page titled ‘Cart.’

Similarly, you can create other WooCommerce pages for Shop, Checkout, and Account.

After creating new pages, you can tell WooCommerce to use these new ones instead. Simply go to the WooCommerce » Settings page and switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab.

You can select pages you created earlier under the Page Setup section.

For the shop page, you’ll need to switch to the ‘Products’ tab and then select the page you want to use as your Shop page.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save changes’ button to store your settings.

Method 4. Restore Selected Pages from a WordPress Backup (Advanced)

This method is complicated, unreliable, and not recommended for beginners. However, it would be useful if you don’t want to restore a complete website and lose any changes you made after your last available backup.

You can simply restore your WordPress backup to a local server installation and then copy and paste the page contents that you wish to restore.

First, you’ll need to download your WordPress backup files to your computer. Simply go to your WordPress database backup plugin page and you will be able to see recent backups.

For instance, here is how you’ll see your recent backups listed in the Duplicator plugin.

Simply click on the ‘Download’ button to download the backup to your computer.

Next, you will need to restore your WordPress site to a local server. You can install WordPress on your computer using WAMP (or MAMP for Mac).

After that, you can install your WordPress backup plugin on the local server installation and restore using the backup files.

Optionally, if you only have the database backup, you can also restore that using phpMyAdmin as well.

Once you have restored the WordPress database, you will need to update the WordPress Site and Home URLs in the database. To do that, simply open phpMyAdmin on your local server by typing the following URL:

http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

After that, select your WordPress database from the left column and click on the wp_options table. Switch to the browse tab and locate the rows containing ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’ under the option_name column.

You’ll notice that the option_value column contains the URL of your live website. You need to edit both of these rows and replace your option_value to match your local server WordPress site.

After that, click on the ‘Go’ button to save your changes.

You can now log in to your localhost installation and see all your old pages listed under» All Pages.

Go ahead and edit the page you want to restore. You only need to copy and paste the content as a new page on your live WordPress website.

Don’t forget to update or publish changes on your live website.

We hope this article helped you learn how to recover deleted pages in WordPress. To keep your WordPress site safe and secure, you may also want to see our complete WordPress troubleshooting guide and read our article explaining which WordPress files you should back up.

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