Being one of the most diversified and flexible platforms, Shopify is one of the reliable destinations for eCommerce store owners. Famous among businesses of all shapes and sizes, the platform allows businesses to start from scratch.
How to Recover Shopify Store?
The platform has solutions to everything, from setting up your store’s theme to listing products and fixing individual rates; it has it all. However, no matter the platform’s flexibility, it also has its limitations.
LIKE WHAT? Creating a backup of your store can be big trouble for you.
Here, we’ve got good and bad news for every store owner…
The bad news: Shopify store owners cant recover a single account back to its original state or allow the recovery of specific data sets. So, there’s your answer to does Shopify has a recovery plan?
Shopify aids its users by maintaining recovery backups if things go wrong with the entire infrastructure of any specific account. However, the platforms limit the ability to restore selective data sets for any individual account.
For example, the individual store owner won’t restore their deleted Shopify store or its products. While the platform must back up the entire platform, it’s your personal responsibility to back up the organization as a wholes data.
But wait, here’s the good part! If you lose your store’s data in any situation, you can redo your entire eCommerce store without having to begin the process from scratch. This is where Shopify recovery comes in handy for your business.
How to Recover Shopify Store?
This Shopify Recovery blog explains the multiple processes that are involved in the process of recovering a lost store. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
What is Shopify Recovery?
As the name suggests, Shopify recovery refers to the process of recovering your Shopify store that was previously lost. The recovery option here allows you to restore the entire store precisely as it was before the accident.
A Shopify store backup is like an insurance policy where you might lose your store and its products. The primary purpose of using backups is to restore your eCommerce store just like it was earlier.
However, the process doesn’t assure you of complete recovery of your store. No matter the size or date of your backup, you’ll still be at a partial loss!
How? Backups are meant to make your store functional and back in operation. However, your backup’s success depends on your host’s rate of recovery, hosting provider, or disaster recovery process.
There are chances that you might have just deleted a popular product by mistake. This might result in a situation where the entire server is hacked, and the contents of your store get deleted. Or it might also result in a complete wipeout of your store data.
Common Reasons for Shopify Store Corruption
1. Someone has accidentally wiped out a blog post, page, or product from your store
Let’s understand it this way: you tried to modify some elements of your store, but you could not make the necessary changes for some reason. Now, reaching out for some help is going to be the first thing that you do. However, the chances are that there might be some accident, causing you to lose a part of your online store.
2. Someone with access to your store via unfair means maliciously deletes necessary data sets from your account
We never know where phishing attacks can come from, which is one of the most common reasons people lose their Shopify stores. When you run a successful venture, the chances are that scammers or someone who has accessed your account via unfair means will try to harm your business. Here, the other person with store access might delete a few pages or even your entire store in such situations.
3. Some 3rd party application that you installed has made unwanted changes to the store
Trying to make things easy is normal human behavior, and when youre running a successful Shopify store, youre going to utilize all the help you need. We all know how Shopify eases its user’s work with its thousands of applications available across the store and over the different online platforms. This is where you might make a mistake in the process.
Understand it this way; you’ve installed some third-party apps to ease your store’s checkout process. Now, the chances are that you might have provided it with unwanted access while you were installing the application. Here, the application gets the right to change the setup and configuration of your store as it sees fit, making unwanted changes to your store.
4. You import a CSV file into your Shopify store that contains an error
Creating a backup is all about doing it right and with patience. You can’t simply create one haphazardly; if you do, there is a scope for error. This error might later prove fatal when you need to restore your store. Here, the imported data with the error might harm the restoration process, leading you to a corrupted store.
Essential things you need to recover from your Shopify store
As you can see, there are numerous ways in which you can corrupt your store. Some by your fault and others via phishing attacks that are common over such platforms.
This is why you need to be precise about the necessary elements you must recover to restore your Shopify store. Listed below are a few of them:
1. Products and Product Images
Now, isn’t it obvious? Product and product images are the centers of your Shopify store. If you dont have them, your store will be a blank canvas with nothing to display. Therefore, you must begin your restoration process with products and product images.
Without the relevant images, even the data can be confusing to process with the restores.
2. Customers data
Following the product images is the consumer data. Customer data is the true asset of a store and should be the topmost priority, no matter whether you are backing up or restoring your Shopify store. After all, who would like to lose their customers just because they lost their store due to some issues?
3. Metadata
Metafields are the extra data sets that your store applications can attach to customers, products, orders, and other similar objects found around the Shopify universe.
Such Metadata is the key to storing all the valuable and relevant information that is generally not saved over the Shopify admin. Therefore, you must restore your Metadata to ensure the seamless functioning of your store post the restoration process.
4. Orders, Collections
Let’s say your shop has just received orders yet to be processed. However, some unfavorable situation leads to data loss in your store, making your orders incomplete.
Would you like to be in such a situation where you’d lose both customers and goodwill? Therefore, it becomes necessary to recover the orders and all the collections from your Shopify store.
5. Blogs and Blog Posts
Blogs and Blog Posts are the organic means of engaging with your traffic and establishing a name for your brand. The previously published blogs and posts on your website continue to contribute to the organic reach of your store as long as they exist. Therefore, it is equally essential to restore your blogs and blog posts while youre recovering your store.
6. Pages
Pages are the directory of all your products listed in your Shopify store. Losing any one of the pages can prove to be a futile mistake, as you’ll have to create and list them again in your website directory.
Further, losing a page means losing content that cannot be copied back, adding to the expenses of your store.
7. Themes and Theme Files
We’re sure no Shopify store owner wants to lose the look and feel of their shop that their customers were comfortable in. After all, losing a theme and its files would be like starting over with the weeks or months of hard work that went into the customization and the overall user experience.
Therefore, creating a backup and recovering your themes and files is another primary pointer in the list.
8. Shipping Rates & Zones
There are numerous methods of setting up shipping rates in your Shopify store. And we’re sure no store owner would like to go through the hurdle of re-creating their rates and the added taxes. Therefore, it is always wise to recover the shipping rates and fares as per the zones from your Shopify store.
A common mistake most store owners make is when they only create backup copies for parts of individual data sets, such as creating backups for their themes and database but not the relevant pages, product images, or configuration files.
A significant part of the problem arises when youre midway through the restore process and realize that you’ve created inadequate backups.
While you might already have your hosting company creating backups for you, it comes in handy when you create your own versions. Dont rely entirely on your hosting company as backup fails and missing files are standard in such instances.
Tips for creating smart backups
In order to avoid such instances, it is always wise to schedule your backups at least once per day.
Another alternative to the time-consuming backup process is to randomly back up your online store. However, this process is only feasible if the servers can take the load and dont slow down operations.
Also, saving some historical copies of your data would be a smart move. This way, you’ll always have original data sets of different versions of your store.
How to recover your Shopify store?
Recovering your Shopify store is easy; it’s the same as manually creating backups for your store. Here, we have highlighted the recovery process of two significant elements of your Shopify store. Let’s have a look:
1. Recovering Product Information
To restore the product information, you’ll have to import your .csv product backup file that you had previously backed up. Here are the steps to the same:
- Step 1: Go to the admin section of your online store.
- Step 2: Once you’ve accessed the admin panel, you move to the Products section, followed by a click on the All products section.
- Step 3: Following a click on the Import option, you’ll be able to recover all the product information from your store.
Once you’ve successfully followed the steps, you’ll be able to revert to the previous store version.
2. Recovering Shopify Theme
When it comes to restoring a theme is an entirely different process! Shopify allows its users to keep a backup of their theme via two processes majorly. They are:
- Downloading theme
- Cloning the theme
If you select the first option and download a backup file of the theme, you’ll have to restore the same by uploading it back to the themes section. This way, your store will be creating a new theme.
On the other hand, if you decided to go with the second option and chose to clone the theme, you could simply import the currently working theme. Later, you can simply activate it to restore the cloned theme.
However, there’s another way of getting the job done! Yes, we’re talking about the numerous backup applications that are available in the market. Applications like the Goshu backup app streamline your operations without worrying about either creating backups manually or developing an application for the same.
Here’s how you can restore your Shopify store using the upcoming Goshu backup app:
Step 1: From your Goshu backup apps homepage, scroll down to the bottom of the page and head out to the Goshu.
Step 2: Once youre there, click on the Goshu, which stores all your data. Now, once youre there, you’ll notice that there are two different sets of options for you to restore:
- One by One: The individual option
- Store: The bulk option
Step 3: Now, since we want to restore an entire store, we will go with the second option, the one where we can re-create our entire store to the original.
Step 4: Once you click and enter the option, you’ll notice that there are numerous aspects of your store, like Products, Customers, and Metadata, among others.
Step 5: From here, select the data, date, and time of the sets that you want to restore. Since we must restore the entire store here, we must go with the Rewind Store option.
Once done, you’ve successfully restored your store as new. Congratulations!
Frequently Asked Questions about Shopify store recovery.
1. How do I recover my Shopify store fully?
There are only two ways by which you can successfully recover your Shopify store. They are:
- Create local backups in your database
- Use automated backup applications like the Goshu backup app.
2. Why can’t I access my Shopify store?
Well, there might be numerous reasons why youre no longer able to access your Shopify store. To name a few, they are:
- You’ve entered a wrong password.
- You’ve accidentally changed your credentials, and you dont remember.
- Your store is corrupted
- You were part of a phishing scam, and your data has been wiped out.
3. How do revert changes on Shopify?
There are only two ways to revert changes to your Shopify store. You could use your local data sets stored in the database or hassle-free automated applications to recover the Shopify store.
4. How to recover an old Shopify website?
Yes, Shopify site recovery is possible! You can easily recover your old Shopify website via the Shopify API. However, to successfully recover your old store, you must store individual elements in your local database.
Conclusion
Now that you understand the twist and turns involved in restoring your Shopify store, we hope you’ll settle for the much more viable option. With this, we come to the end of our article that explains the different processes involved in restoring your Shopify store.
All the best with the backup process!
