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I’m helping a friend clean up his site from spam. Installed Wordfence and Defender plugins. Wordfence scanner worked fine and the site was fine after tons of deletions. Then I used Defender and deleted 5 theme files. Now the site isn’t loading and gives a 500 error. I’m an idiot and didn’t back it up. Any suggestions on what to do would be greatly appreciated!
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You probably need to manually install a new theme. WPBeginner has instructions (see method 3 below)
[https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-install-a-wordpress-theme/])
Usually if your theme fails WordPress will fall back to using one of the default themes it includes like Twenty Twenty. I’d install that one. If the theme activates because the other one is broken and you can access the backend of the site again, I’d go get a new copy of the old theme your friend was using. Some of its files might have been compromised and those files may have been necessary for the theme to work. Installing them from a backup will likely mean you’ll be reinfecting the site, which is why I said to get them fresh.
We need some more information here. My assumption is you cannot access the admin panel because of the 500 error. Can you confirm this?
The next step is to look at the error logs they will show you exactly whats causing the error.
Is the site hosted on a vps or hosted (godaddy for example) and has a cpanel.
If vps
Search how to find the error logs depending on the linux version its diffrent. Ubuntu its /var/logs and your looking for error logs
If cpanel
Then search how to access error logs in cpanel
I suggest you to manually deactivate the current theme and activate one of the default one. In addition to that, always make sure the themes/plugins are up to date.