How to Restore WordPress Sites from Backup in SiteGround?

SiteGround offers pretty decent hosting services on Google Cloud platform. One of the important features of running your WordPress site is to keep a regular backup and restore when it is necessary. SiteGround offers free and automated backup that you can restore any time. The automated backup runs on everyday morning time which you can see from your hosting account. In this article, we will explain how to restore your content from the backup on a live site.

Finding Backups of Your Site

Login to your SiteGround hosting account and go to “My Websites” section. Click on the “Site Tools” button against the site that you want to restore the backup. remember, SiteGround migrated all existing customer accounts from cPanel based interface to Site Tools. With the new setup, you have to choose the website and perform activities unlike you could do it in a central cPanel app before.

When you are in Site Tools section, click on the “Security” tab and go to “Backups” section. Here you can see all available backups of the selected site along with an option to create a manual backup.

Manual and Automated Backups

There are two backup types available with SiteGround – manual and automatic. Automatic backup is available for all hosting plans while availability of manual backup depends on individual plan. If you want to have manual backup for the shared hosting plans, you may need to raise an on-demand request for GrowBig and GoGeek plans. Unfortunately, there is no manual backup and restore option for StartUp plan in SiteGround.

• You can enter the name of your backup and click on the create button to create a new backup. there are 5 manual backup slots available for both shared and cloud hosting account. We do not recommend to create manual backups, instead if your account supports use staging feature.
• You can view all automated backups listed on the page. The number of automated backups depend upon your hosting plan. SiteGround keeps 30 days automated backups for applicable shared hosting accounts and 7 days for Cloud VPS account.

However, on new Site Tools we could see backups available for more than 7 days. If you have a confusion, first confirm with customer support from SiteGround about the applicability on your account.

Restoring Backup Data to Live Site

Click on the three dots button against the available backup that you want to restore.

You can restore the followings from your backup:

• Restore all files and databases
• Restore files
• Restore databases
• Restore emails

Restoring All Files and Databases

If you want to completely restore the entire site then click on this option. Confirm the prompt to replace the live site content with the backup content.

You will see the backup restore process run for some time depending upon the size of your backup.

Finally, you will see a success message like below.

Now, check back your site has the content from backup and everything works as expected. You can view history of all successful restores under “Restore History” tab.

Restoring Files

In many cases, you may not need to restore the entire site. For example, you might have wrongly deleted a plugin or theme wrongly from the WordPress admin dashboard. In this case, click on the “Restore Files” option from your previous day backup.

Navigate through the files and find the specific folder you want to restore. Click on the “Confirm” button and again confirm the prompt to only restore the selected folder. Remember, site files include all WordPress, theme and plugin folders except your database. If you have deleted some pages wrongly then you should restore the database and not the files.

Restoring Databases

Some users directly play with the live database to delete, import and export the tables. This could lead to fatal situation of deleting some content accidently. Though you may have backup of the database, the easy way is to restore from your previous automated backups. Select “Restore Databases” option and confirm the prompt to restore your content from the database.

Restoring Emails

Similar to other options, if you want to restore emails with SiteGround click on “Restore Emails” option. Select the email name and click “Restore” button to bring all emails back from the backup.