Renew and restore your site after a plan expires

When your site’s paid plan expires, you have a limited time to renew it before the plan and its features are removed. If the plan is removed, features like plugins and third-party themes stop working on your site. Follow the steps in this guide to renew your plan or restore your website after the plan is removed.

After your plan expires, it remains active for a limited time. During this period, your plugins, themes, and other plan features continue to work. Renew your plan as soon as possible to keep everything in place.

To renew your plan:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Upgrades → Purchases.
3. Click on the expired subscription.
4. Click Renew now in the banner at the top of the subscription to pay for the renewal of your subscription.

If you want to switch to a lower plan, contact us.

If your plan has been removed from your site, plugins and third-party themes stop working. Purchase a new plan and follow the steps below to restore your site.

To purchase a new plan for your site:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Upgrades → Plans.
3. Purchase a plan for the site. If you are unsure which plan you had before, visit Purchases → Billing History to check.

After purchasing, review your domain settings. Visit Upgrades → Domains and confirm the correct domain is set as your primary site address. You may need to re-add the domain to the site.

This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For free sites and sites on the Personal and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

If your site had a Personal or Premium plan, reinstall your plugins and reactivate your theme after renewing, then skip to Make the site public.

Business and Commerce plans include automatic daily backups, starting once you install plugins. If your plan is removed, we retain your backups for 30 days. After repurchasing, you can restore your site to how it looked before.

Take the following steps to restore a backup:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → Backup.
3. Click the “Activate Jetpack VaultPress Backup now” button and then the “Continue” button.
   • This activation may take some time to complete. In the event of an error, wait a few minutes for the process to complete in the background.
4. When backups are ready, use the “Select Date” option to load the backup from the day before your plan expired. If you’re unsure when your plan expired, check Jetpack → Activity Log for the expiration date.
5. Click the “Restore to this point” button.

The restore can take a few minutes to a few hours, depending on your site’s size. We’ll email the site owner when it’s done, and you can then review your site to make sure everything looks the way you want. Learn more about backing up and restoring your website.

If you see an error message like “Jetpack connection has failed” when you try to access your backups, follow these steps:

1. Try the “Reconnect Jetpack” button.
2. If that does not resolve the issue, allow 15–30 minutes for Jetpack to sync in the background, then check your Backup page again.

If you continue to see the error, please contact us, and we’ll work to resolve it.

When your plan is removed, we set the site to private. This gives you time to restore your site before visitors see broken plugins or themes.

To switch the site from private to public:

1. Log into your WordPress.com account and visit your Sites list by clicking the “W” logo at the top left.
2. Click the ellipsis (⋮) under Actions and select Settings from the drop-down menu.

3. Set your privacy settings to “Public” (or the status you had it set to before the plan expired).
4. Click the “Save settings” button.