How to recover content if an account is gone?
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How can you recover content if the account it was under seems to be gone?
The Wayback Machine only saved the home page and one article. (Do some WordPress block types prevent the Wayback Machine from crawling a site?!? Like, the blog posts weren’t saved, nor were individual pages unless they were the destination page for a menu item, like the one article that was saved. WTF? That would make me NOT use WordPress if Wayback Machine can’t crawl the site.)
Concise history:
- The woman who wrote/owns the content is not tech savvy. But she managed to get helpers over the years, including me at one point.
- There were I guess 4 of us at one point with admin access to the content on WordPress. At least 2 people no longer have logins. My access was not through my regular WordPress account, so I can’t recover the content using my account.
- At some point in the last year, the site came down. The content owner said it was up and running 3 or 4 months ago. She’s a bit of a digital nomad right now, so she might’ve just been viewing cached pages.
So, in summary, I don’t know which account had access to the content, I don’t know if the content expired and was permanently deleted, but I’m desperate to recover it. It contained a LOT of important, hard-won food sovereignty knowledge.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Wow, I got a file list in the Wayback Machine. It saved the home page, one article somehow, and all the support files (icons, images, etc), and… robots.txt!!! That’s the file with the code that prevents the Wayback Machine from crawling the site! >>>>: (
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If the site was hosted on WordPress.com, your best option is to contact WordPress.com support and provide as much information as possible about the site, including the URL, the owner’s email addresses, and any previous admin accounts. If the content still exists in a suspended or expired account, they may be able to help the owner recover access.
As for the Wayback Machine, WordPress block types generally do not prevent crawling. More often, missing pages are due to limited archiving, robots.txt restrictions, lack of inbound links, or the pages simply not being captured before the site went offline.
You may also want to check search engine caches, old email notifications containing post content, social media shares linking to articles, and any local backups that former administrators might have created. If the content was valuable and widely shared, there may be copies scattered across multiple sources even if the original site is no longer accessible.
The key question is whether the site was deleted entirely or whether access to the account was simply lost. If it’s the latter, recovery chances are much better.
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Hi there, can you confirm the address of the WordPress.com website you need help with? Thanks.
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http://www.handsonpermaculture.org/ is up and running but isn’t hosted on the wordpress.com platform. To get things sorted out, you must head over to https://wordpress.org/ documentation and forums.
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Hi @pookiemitchell,
I understand how concerning this issues is. The site seem to be hosted on Amazon. I suggest you get in touch with them and try to log into the account. There you’ll be able to access the wordpress site.
I hope this helps!
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The new site is hosted on Amazon. I _just_ set it up.
The old content was hosted on WordPress. handsonpermaculture.org.
inspiring5999c8f430, when you say contact WordPress.com support, do you mean the person-to-person help you have to pay for, or the AI helper? Because the latter was unhelpful. I have a different website hosted on WordPress. Does that entitle me to person-to-person help, do you know?
Thanks for all the replies.
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Hello again, I asked about your WordPress.com website. These support forums are meant to assist site owners hosted on WordPress.com, the hosting provider. As a volunteer I can’t see that handsonpermaculture.org was ever hosted here. However, I do see that your domain was hosted earlier on bluehost and then godaddy.
So if you need help with a site using the open source WordPress software on 3rd party hosting, you’ll want to do as @staartmees suggested and head to the support forums for the open source WordPress software for help.
Not sure of the difference between WordPress and WordPress.com? This support guide explains https://wordpress.com/support/com-vs-org/
TBH, if you did not save backups of your old site, it may not be possible to recreate the content. Sorry for no better news.
Best wishes.
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If the account has been deleted or is no longer accessible, recovery options depend on the platform. First, check whether the content is still available through cached copies, backups, exports, shared links, or archived versions. If you previously synced the content to another device or cloud service, you may be able to recover it from there.
If the account was recently deleted, contact the platform’s support team as soon as possible—some services offer a recovery window before data is permanently removed. Be prepared to provide account details to verify ownership.
Without backups or account access, recovery may unfortunately not be possible, especially if the content has been permanently deleted from the provider’s servers.
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