Page Template just overwrote my website...can I get it back?

It's always been on the menu, but now it shows what looks like the generic IO reviews page. I had built out a page with selected reviews and content that was replaced overnight.

Ok, so you had a edited reviews page showing? And it was working until last night? I can see if we can retrieve it. When was this updated page created?

Correct. That would be fantastic. The page itself was created when I first had IO create my website. I don't think I edited it since then until yesterday, when I built the whole thing out.

I last published and checked it to be working around 4pm MST. This morning I didn't revisit the page until after creating the Page Template that I'm assuming overwrote the one I built.

Hey Talon,

I've restored your site to yesterday's (10/29/24) back-up. These generally get created roughly at 4am EST (so a bit earlier your time) so hopefully doing so will return your customizations to you. Let me know if there's anything else you need help with!

Best,

Dan

Unfortunately it looks either like my theory of the page being overwritten by the page template was wrong, or it's truly non-reversible, because that page still shows the IO reviews instead of the page I built out.

I've replaced the overwritten page with new content and will see if it gets overwritten again tonight.

Thank you for looking into that.

I did replace the widget at the same time I did the customization, all in one go.

The page itself had a broken version of the widget that just gave an error message of some sort. Unsure how to fix the broken widget I replaced it with the full-blown page.

No worries. I would suggest that if you want to customize the reviews page, build out from a new page what you want it to look like and contain. Then once it's ready I can work towards a solution to get it on the actual reviews page. I suspect that it should be pretty straight forward like setting the display of the widget to "hidden" so it doesn't load and then including your content on the same page so the check that's deleting it will see that the page is there with the widget (even though it's hidden) and move on.

Yes, I would much prefer to have the page I customized. That is a good suggestion to see if it will circumvent the repeated overwriting.

Are you able to recover the page? You had mentioned above some of the challenges that might present themselves after recovering the page, but the recovery itself would be a great first step. If it's best to schedule a time or a phone call to facilitate that and adding the (hidden) widget, I'd be happy to do so in order to recover what was lost.

Thanks.

My apologies, it doesn't appear that we can recover your customized page from our backups. It seems that the automatic process I previously described overwrote your changes before the backup for the day was made. (For a bit of context, this process uses WordPress's "wp_loaded" hook, which runs every time your WordPress site fully loads. So your changes may have been overwritten almost immediately after your saved them.)

I've gone ahead and hidden the widget on your current reviews page to help prevent this from happening again. To be extra safe, I recommend creating a backup of your customized content on a separate page that's not affected by this process—perhaps named "Review Content" or "Review Template." This way, you'll have a copy of your work just in case.

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to assist you.

That is unfortunate.

I attempted to edit the reviews page but it appears as though Moree is hidden (and inaccessible) than may have bee intended. I'm not sure how to add new elements on that page so they are not also hidden (even though the reviews widget actually shows in the properties that it is not hidden?)

Ah, the issue was that I went too high up in the HTML elements so it was hiding the entire Elementor space. I have adjusted it so it's only hiding The IO reviews widget now. I also checked it out in Elementor and it looks like the IO reviews widget will still show up there even though it's hidden on the page. I think this is due to having hidden it with CSS, basically it still exists and Elementor can see it because it's not completely removed from the page, just invisible. I would recommend leaving it there in Elementor, otherwise I think our systems check for it would fail and trigger the behavior where it deletes the page again. I am looking into workarounds for this as a long term solution, but you should be good to continue customizing it now!

Fantastic, thanks. I updated the page with a few customizations to see if they'll get wiped and so far so good. Thanks for your help!