Yesterday I had the first and only WordPress crisis ever since I installed it several years ago. When I tried to update an old  post, the post would just revert to it’s previous state, losing the text that I’d added. I tried all kinds of things with plugins and cache etc., none of which solved it. Then last night, my front page said ‘You’re looking for something that isn’t there’, and displayed no data. This morning, I clicked on a link to a post, and it was ‘not found’.

I then decided to follow one of the hundreds of bits of advice I’d seen yesterday while searching for an answer. It seemed the most drastic, so I didn’t take it then, but today I effectively had no site any more, so I thought I might as well. I wish I could remember whose advice it was to thank them, but I can’t, but whoever you are, thank you.

The trick is this – obviously, it’s only relevant if you have a site hosted on a server that uses CPanel, but that covers a lot of people:

1. Log in to the place where your site is hosted, and go to your CPanel

2. Select SQL databases

3. Go to the bit that says ‘Repair database’ (I missed out the ‘check database’ step, though I guess I could have done that)

4. Select the database(s) that relate to your WP installation (they’ll have WP in the name probably)

5. Click ‘repair’

I did this, it took 2 seconds, and everything’s now back to normal. I don’t really want to know why, i”m just glad it worked.