Disappearing pages

  • jimlaabsmusicstore

    (@jimlaabsmusicstore)


    6 years, 7 months ago

    Hello everyone,

    We are working to change the theme on our site trixondrumsusa.com to a new theme. Our current theme was built by an old employee who we no longer have contact with I am afraid. I will not mention what theme we plan to switch to at this time.

    When we activated the new theme all of our published pages turned into 404 errors. For example, trixondrumsusa.com/about-us is 404 not found. I checked permalinks, but that did not help. I returned to the old theme and am still getting the error. Tried a default wordpress theme (twenty-eighteen I believe) and got the same issue.

    I am able to preview drafted pages, but as soon as they are published I get 404.

    Thankfully our database is being restored to before this change so if you visit our site and it’s working that means the restoration is complete. What I am looking for is some advice on how we can prevent this from happening again when we are ready to change themes.

    I am hoping the database folks will have more insight soon, but in the mean time I wanted to see if the community had ideas to prevent losing pages. I can still get to POST via the menu in our footer, but not on the main menu (links in the main menu go through the product page versus categories made in wordpress)
    Any advice or ideas are appreciated.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Joy

    (@joyously)

    6 years, 7 months ago

    I am seeing your pages, so you must have gotten the backup restored.
    I looked at the source for the About Us page, and it has a few issues. But I can’t see the code, so I don’t know why it would be gone without the theme.
    Issues I see:
    * two copies of jQuery are being loaded (this can cause conflicts)
    * the images have URLs for a script in the theme folder for getting a certain size (that script is old and has had security issues in it)

    (You probably didn’t use twenty-eighteen to test with. No such theme in the WP repo, but I wrote twenty8teen.)
    The theme shouldn’t have much to do with whether the page exists or not, so perhaps there is a hack on your site? If your employee put code in the theme to delete content when the theme was switched, then you might need to switch it brute force instead (delete the theme and change one entry in the database), but I’m just speculating how content could disappear on theme switch.

    Thread Starter jimlaabsmusicstore

    (@jimlaabsmusicstore)

    6 years, 7 months ago

    Hi Joy,
    Thanks for taking a look. You are correct, we were able to restore the site.
    The theme itself is fairly dated (I think 2004).
    I checked and I used twenty-seventeen as a default to test.
    We are going to be setting up a developer site to work on from now on to hopefully prevent this sort of thing in the future. If I have to remake pages, so be it.
    Unfortunately not being a developer myself I’ll be unable to modify the multiple calls of jQuery (not seeking assistance, just stating this in case someone reads this later and asks if I did anything with it). Hopefully the theme we intend to switch to will help with removing those issues.
    It is very interesting that pages were effected once published…I guess we’ll see what happens on the dev site once that gets going.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Disappearing pages’ is closed to new replies.