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

Talon H. shared this question ago

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I was following a help article to get the IO Reviews working, which instructed me to make a Page Template.

Apparently, when I made a Page Template called "Reviews" it may have overwritten my website page at /reviews.

As soon as I realized it, I unactivated the Page Template, which didn't seem to change anything.

So I went to the Elementor History to try and restore my version from before the Page Template, but there is no longer any History, and the button is grayed out.

Anyone know how I might be able to get that page back?

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Comments (3)

Susan M. ● 22 days ago

We were able to get it back on the menu and it seems like the page is working. Let us know if there was a change that you were trying to make that wasn't working for you

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Talon H. ● 22 days ago

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.

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Susan M. ● 22 days ago

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?

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Talon H. ● 22 days ago

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.

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Daniel C. ● 21 days ago

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

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Talon H. ● 21 days ago

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.

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Talon H. ● 13 days ago

The page has been overwritten again. What's causing this to happen?

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Daniel C. ● 13 days ago

Hey Talon,

My apologies that this has become a recurring problem for you, and can understand how frustrating that is.

I just looked into the code that generates the reviews page from our system. It looks like it does a check every time Wordpress is fully loaded to see if the page exists and if it does, is our reviews widget present on it. If the reviews widget is not present on it, it deletes the page and makes a new one with the widget on it.

This may present a bit of a challenge because unless you just recently deleted the widget from the page, your changes potentially got overwritten almost immediately after you made them. Another challenge will be if we're able to restore the page, the script may run before we can get to it. Although, having access to the files themselves on our server may enable us to retrieve it without needing to load up wordpress so it might not be that big of a challenge.

Are you able to recall if removing the widget was something you recently did or was it all in one go when you rebuilt your customization for the page?

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Talon H. ● 5 days ago

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.

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Daniel C. ● 5 days ago

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.

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Talon H. ● 2 days ago

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.

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Daniel C. ● 13 hours ago

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.

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