3 things I learned when my WordPress blog crashed.

This week my blog crashed. It could have been a mess, but due to foresight, para­noia, and a lot of good advice from other blog­gers, it was actu­ally a pretty simple recov­ery process.

But, without some essen­tial plu­gins and basic know­ledge, it all would have been lost. So here’s the what and why of what I’d learned the day my blog crashed.

Daily backup is your friend — the most import­ant thing you can do for your Word­Press blog is down­load and install the Word­Press Data­base Backup plu­gin. Yes, there are many plu­gins out there (take a look at the plu­gins I use) but this one should be stand­ard on any Word­Press blog. It lit­er­ally saved my blog. Basic­ally it does what it says, cre­ates a backup of your WP data­base. Then saves it on your server, or emails it to an account of your choice. The backup is actu­ally a MySQL rebuild script which you run after you’ve cleaned out your DB. Worked like a charm the first time.

Know how to run MySQL quer­ies — the above backup is use­less if you don’t know how to rein­stall it. In my case, since I’d been run­ning Word­Press since ver­sion one-point-something-or-other, I decided to do a com­pletely new install. What I did was:

• Rename my exist­ing blog dir­ect­ory. This dis­con­nec­ted it from my domain name and struc­ture, yet let me have access to my ori­ginal files for ref­er­ence when rebuilding
• Install the latest ver­sion of WordPress.
• Clear the MySQL data­base. This deletes all blog entries and related data.
• Run the MySQL backup query. In my case, I uploaded it into phpMy­Ad­min, the tool of choice for man­aging MySQL databases.
• Rein­stall plu­gins and themes. This was a great oppor­tun­ity to review all the plu­gins I had pre­vi­ously installed, determ­ine my need for them, and then down­load and rein­stall fresh copies.
• Rein­stall sup­port­ing files and data. I copied image and other sup­port files from my renamed ‘old blog’ dir­ect­ory. Cus­tom­iz­a­tions such as the ‘external link icons’, default Gravatar images, etc.

Start from a clean rein­stall — as I men­tioned above, I’d been run­ning Word­Press since the early days. It’s entirely pos­sible that there was some­thing from my many tweaks and cus­tom­iz­a­tions that borked the site. So, by start­ing from a clean install, I have a new, fresh baseline.

And, since I still have my ori­ginal blog files stored in a renamed dir­ect­ory, if I for­got any­thing in my rebuild­ing of the blog, I can eas­ily refer to my ori­ginal and fix it up.

Photo cour­tesy PPDi­gital