If your site’s Creator or Entrepreneur plan expires or you renew it too late, features like plugins and third-party themes are removed from your site. If you wish to recover your website from before, you can resubscribe and restore a backup. Follow the steps in this guide to return your website to how it was before your plan expired.
In this guide
The first step to restoring your site is to upgrade to a Creator or Entrepreneur plan again by purchasing it on the Plans page. Do this as quickly as possible because the site’s plugins are removed 7 days after the plan expires. We retain backups of your site for 30 days after the plan’s expiration date. After that, the site’s plugin content is deleted.
To renew your plan:
- Log into your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Upgrades → Plans (or Hosting → Plans if using WP-Admin).
- Purchase either the Creator or Entrepreneur plan for the site.
If you’re unsure which WordPress plan you previously had, visit Purchases → Billing History to check.
If you renew your plan too late and you have lost content, move to the next step to restore your website from a backup.
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If you no longer require plugin access, you can contact us for help downgrading to a lower plan.
As a feature of your plugin-enabled plan, we automatically create daily backups of your site. When your plan expires, we retain those backups for 30 days. When you reactivate your plan, you can use one of these backups to restore your site to how it looked before the plan expired.
You will want to make sure you choose a backup created the day before your plan expired. If you’re unsure what day your plan expired, you can visit Jetpack → Activity log, where you’ll find a record of all your site’s activity.
Once you’ve identified the date your site last looked the way you want it to, take the following steps to restore a backup:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Backup (or, Jetpack → VaultPress if using WP-Admin).
- Click the “Activate Jetpack VaultPress Backup now” button and Continue.
- This activation may take some time to complete. In the event of an error, wait a few minutes for the process to complete in the background.
- When backups are ready, use the “Select Date” option to load the backup from the day before your plan expired.
- Click the “Restore to this point” button.
Depending on the size of your site, the restore can take a few minutes or much longer. An email will be sent to the account owner when the restore is complete. You can then look through your site pages and content to ensure you’re satisfied with how everything looks. Learn more about site backups here.
If you see an error message like “Jetpack connection has failed” when you try to access your backups, follow these steps:
- Try the “Reconnect Jetpack” button.
- If that does not resolve the issue, allow 15-30 minutes while Jetpack syncs in the background, then check your Backup page again.
If you continue to see the error, please contact us and we’ll work to help you get this resolved.
When a plugin-enabled plan expires, we set the site to private. This way, you have time to restore your site instead of your visitors seeing a site with broken plugins or themes.
To switch the site back from private to public:
- Visit Settings → General (or Hosting → General if using WP-Admin).
- Set your Privacy Settings to “Public” (or the status you had it set to before the plan expired).
- Click the “Save settings” button.
You may also need to visit Upgrades → Domains (or Hosting → Domains if using WP-Admin) and ensure the right domain is your primary site address. You may need to re-add the domain to the website.
