- Article
- Intermediate
- 2 minutes read
- Reviewed August 4, 2026
- WordPress maintenance and troubleshooting
Disaster recovery is the coordinated process for restoring WordPress after a major failure.
Possible disasters include lost hosting, damaged databases, ransomware, compromised administrator accounts, DNS takeover, regional outage or an unavailable critical vendor.
Define Recovery Objectives
Set:
- Recovery Time Objective.
- Recovery Point Objective.
- minimum viable service.
- priority workflows.
- acceptable manual operation.
- communication responsibilities.
Identify Dependencies
Recovery can require more than WordPress.
Include:
- Domain registrar.
- DNS.
- hosting.
- source code.
- database.
- media storage.
- email.
- identity.
- payments.
- CDN.
- monitoring.
- licences.
- secrets.
- third-party APIs.
Independent Recovery Access
Keep protected credentials and contacts outside the system being recovered.
Avoid placing every backup, secret and runbook inside one hosting account.
Recovery Runbook
Document:
- Incident declaration.
- authority and communications.
- containment.
- environment provisioning.
- clean code deployment.
- data restoration.
- credential rotation.
- DNS or traffic switch.
- validation.
- monitoring.
- stakeholder notification.
- post-incident review.
Test the Plan
Run restoration exercises.
Measure actual time, missing credentials, provider delays, undocumented dependencies and data-reconciliation work.
A plan that has never been tested is an assumption.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is disaster recovery the same as a backup?
No. Backups are inputs. Disaster recovery also includes people, systems, priorities, communications and tested procedures.
Should a small site have a disaster plan?
Yes. It can be brief, but domain, hosting, backup and ownership recovery should be documented.
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