This is my first exclusive experience of a website castrophe. I was about to update my installs of WordPress, but a catastrophic failure occured. I was lucky to use my backup of my website to restore my website altogether, and I managed to get my primary website restored, and I managed to redo an update of my install of WordPress. However, Fairies Dreams & Fantasy Writer isn’t that lucky, it was all broken, and my backups didn’t help, and I have to figure out how to get it restored. Well; experiments do fail, and it can lead to a catastrophic mess. For this instance, you were about to update your CMS, but your CMS went down after an error has occurred. I was careful enough to update CMS correctly. Unfortunately, Fairies Dreams & Fantasy Writer didn’t make it, and I have to plan out a rebuild for months to come.
What You May Encounter When Updating WordPress
You got an update of WordPress available to update your CMS. You activated a button, and you begin to wait for a while. You waited… and waited… and you work on other projects.
You came back to your main multisite, and you encountered this message:
Your site is experiencing technical difficulties, check your email inbox for instructions for troubleshooting.
It appears when you are trying to access your dashboard or your website itself. If you have users; your users may be affected by this catastrophe, but you can do any of the following:
If You Have Backups
Log into your hosting account, and open CPanel to access your control panel. If you have an app-install software, go to your backups listed for your WordPress installs. Choose a website what you want to restore, and follow the prompts to perform a restore of your website.
Test your website, if you can access your control panel of your site; you are done. If not; check for an error message, if a write-protected file is the main cause, delete it, and try agai.
Rerun an update for WordPress, you may need to activate the “Check Again” link multiple times first.
Update all of your plugins. If you were using WordFence Security; switch it off.
Check and test your website. If you managed to publish new content; your site is ready to use. Be sure to notify your users about the issue what you’ve encountered on your website.
To notify users:
- Go to a free blogging platform of choice, and open your blog like status.example.com/.
- Create A new post; and give it a name for a castrophic event on your website.
- Write details about your efforts to get it fixed.
- Publish your post, and turn on comments for your customers to discuss about this issue what you may encountered. Always respond to your customers.
If you don’t Have A Backup
If you don’t have a backup, but you experienced a loss oa data; and your customers can’t access their websites, most likely you need to reinstall WordPress. If you still have SQL databases; you may need to restore all of their content. However; I didn’t have this experience of restoring a database for my falling blogging platform. You may need to figure out how to get your customer’s data back, if you prompted your customers to export their content, and your customers restore their content after you reinstall WordPress; your customers may contunue using your platform.
Reinstall WordPress
If your data is severely rendered unusable/irrecoverable; and there’s no way to restore your website; you have an option to reinstall WordPress. Be aware you need to have a backup copy of product keys, license keys, and plugins handy when reinstalling WordPress. If you have a fast method of installing WordPress via a 1-click installer; use it. If you were installing WordPress; just like I had an experience doing it manually years ago; ffollow these steps:
- Go to your hosting account, and log into your control panel.
- Create a database with a user, and give them names to be used for your wp-config.php file during setup.
- Go to wordpress.org and download the latest version.
- Upload and Unzip your WordPress folder.
- Open your wp-config.php file, and add your database information, and other information for your website. You can always go to codex.wordpress.org to get help with installing WordPress.
- After setup, log into your website to complete installing your CMS for your website.
- Complete setup.
- Test your website.
- Edit your .htaccess file (if setting up multisite).
- Install desired plugins what you currently have on your computer
What To Do To Prevent This Disaster Like This?
Wait a bit longer before updating WordPress.
Reinstall WordPress on a regular basis.
Be careful when installing plugins.