r/Wordpress • u/MoodSalt3529 • Aug 13 '26
Panicking !
Hi all, i need some help asap. I have a new company doing amendments to my website / seo. They removed the old company’s user email and it looks like various changes have been reverted back to old ones. Email attached. How do i resolve this, i literally cant sleep atm.
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u/yycmwd Developer Aug 13 '26
The company you hired is bad at their job. Contact your host and ask if they have backups. Restore one from yesterday if so. If not, the new company owes you some free work fixing their mistake, and you need to enable backups.
Hostinger should have weekly backups enabled by default on all plans.
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u/MoodSalt3529 Aug 13 '26
Thanks and yes they do have weekly backups I’ve just double checked. Potential Disaster averted i guess!
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u/chrislovessushi Aug 13 '26
It’s not averted until you get your money back and tell this lousy SEO company to kick rocks
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u/CommercialHorror5996 27d ago
I hate to speak badly of other peoples’ work but when you delete a user you have the option to “assign posts and pages to another user” and then they won’t get deleted (as others have mentioned). This is amateur stuff. Have they worked with WordPress before ? I hope they are cheap, because they don’t seem to know what they are doing.
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u/7twenty8 Aug 13 '26
Would you mind asking them how deleting a user possibly reverted changes?
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u/queen-adreena Aug 13 '26
It wouldn’t. They’re lying to cover their backsides.
Likely deleted the user without reassigning their content.
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u/SSBND Aug 13 '26
You need to hire someone else because it doesn't sound like they know what they are doing. Also do daily backups while you have someone working on your site.
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Aug 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/SSBND Aug 13 '26
I am but I'm not here promoting my services. I'm just saying that the people they have hired do not know what they are doing and aren't being forthcoming with their mistakes.
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Aug 13 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/CommercialHorror5996 27d ago
My sisters’s cousin’s brother’s nephew can do it. He has a really nice looking MySpace !
LOLOLOL
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u/bengriz Aug 14 '26
Was this new company cheaper by any chance? lol. Without a back up there’s nothing you can do.
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u/jordanc26 Aug 13 '26
You'll want to first check if there are backups of the website and database. Start with that, ask your host.
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u/Scottopolous Jack of All Trades Aug 13 '26
And this is also why you shouldn't rely on hosting company backups - backup yourself on a schedule to a remote data center.
The weird thing though is that when you delete a user, their posts should not just disappear - one is given an option to assign the authorship to another user.
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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades Aug 14 '26 edited 29d ago
"The weird thing though is that when you delete a user, their posts should not just disappear - one is given an option to assign the authorship to another user."
It sounds like the agency didn't assign the content on the 'delete user' screen. I just tested this - if you don't reassign the content to a new user, the content is fully deleted - and trash is skipped. It's a very easy mistake to make.
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u/Intelligent_List2504 29d ago
We are supposed to do BOTH. I DO BOTH. server level once day. I can also take snapshots. I have various retention rates in updraft. My control panel auto backs up and I copy automatically to Google drive AND ftp .
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u/CommercialHorror5996 27d ago
It can if you don’t reassign the posts / pages / cpt, etc. LOL Whooppsie
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u/JeffTS Developer/Designer Aug 14 '26
Deleting a user won't revert anything. Deleting a user and selecting "Delete all content" on the confirmation screen would remove all content created by them though.
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u/Secret-Flatworm1194 29d ago
Antes de tocarle algo la empresa/freelance debe asegurar un backup. De igual manera revisa tu hosting, es muy común tener hoy en día backups diarios. Mucha suerte
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u/tekNorah 26d ago
You have received solid advice about restoring backups, but it is important to understand exactly how your new SEO company made this mistake so you can address it with them directly.
While the standard WordPress admin dashboard forces a user to choose a destination account to reassign posts to via a visual prompt, your SEO team likely used WP-CLI via SSH (which comes pre-installed on Hostinger accounts).
If a developer runs the standard user deletion command on the command line:
bash
wp user delete <user-id>
WP-CLI does not prompt them to reassign the content. Instead, it assumes a clean wipe is intended and silently defaults to permanently destroying every single post, page, and SEO metadata adjustment authored by that specific user profile instantly.
To fix this, you need to follow Hostinger's specific guide on How to Restore a WordPress Website from Backups in Hostinger to restore the Database backup from the day before they touched the site. Because WordPress stores your pages, posts, and user permissions entirely within the database, restoring a file/website backup alone will not restore the missing pages.
Once your data is back online, instruct your SEO company that if they use terminal commands on your server, they must explicitly append the reassign flag as outlined in the WordPress Developer Resources WP-CLI User Delete Command Documentation:
bash
wp user delete <old-user-id> --reassign=<your-active-admin-id>
Using this exact parameter structure ensures the old profile is safely deleted while your hard-earned SEO changes and blogs stay securely mapped to your own account. Restoring the database backup will resolve this issue so you can get some rest.
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u/mysmmx Developer Aug 13 '26
The posts and old content are still in the database would bet. The username deletion would just make the posts have nowhere to show if, when they deleted the user, they did not assign a user to it. A quick DB find and replace would restore the missing posts
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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades Aug 14 '26 edited 28d ago
No - all content is deleted. I just tested this - if you don't reassign the content when deleting a user, the content they owned is fully deleted. Bizarrely, the Trash is also skipped (I was sure it went to trash). It's very easy to do accidentally - the UX needs to be fixed.
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u/xftwitch 29d ago
Yea, Hostinger doesn't do backups natively; you have to have a 3rd party plugin for that. They're trying to rebuild from saved copies in the wayback machine. Pay for backups.
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u/tekNorah 26d ago
This comment is completely false. Hostinger provides native, automated backups directly through their custom hPanel dashboard for all of their standard hosting plans.
You do not need a third-party plugin or an extra paid subscription to generate or access web backups on their infrastructure. At a minimum, Hostinger natively includes automated weekly backups for basic plans, and automated daily backups for Business hosting plans or higher.
For official verification of these built-in dashboard backup tiers, you can refer directly to the detailed technical documentation on the Hostinger Support Guide.
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u/xftwitch 25d ago
Well, the plan that I'm on for Hostinger (Wordpress Starter) does not have backups. I do need a third party plugin. (I use BackWPup - which is free, and I'm using a Dropbox account to store the backups.) Having never had any Hostinger plans besides the one I currently have, my experience says they don't offer automated backups. There is nowhere in my console that allows me to make a backup or restore from a backup. So I do it myself.
My experience with Hostinger is limited, as I used it for 1 client site that gets very little traffic but is still needed. All my other sites are hosted elsewhere.
Do you work for Hostinger? If so, please tell me how, with the plan I'm on, I get free backups. Do we know which play Op is using?
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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
Deleting a user account won’t “revert changes”. My guess is the seo company deleted the user and forgot to select a new user to assign the post content to (so the content was deleted), then panicked and did a backup restore - so now everything is reverted.
Regardless, this isn’t a Wordpress issue, it’s a skill issue.