Can a web developer put something on a WordPress site that causes all pages he created to be deleted if his account is deleted?
My site was started a little over a year ago by a guy who does graphic work for me and who assured me he could set up a site. After three months, he was unable to resolve a number of login- and email-related issues and bailed on the project. Nice guy, but said it was beyond the time he could commit. I offered multiple times to pay him for the work he’d already done, but he refused, although he did let me pay him for a plugin.
The site sat dormant until late January, when I started on it. It took a lot, because I’m not a developer, but after dozens and dozens of hours I got it up and running. The email issues had something to do with the hosting provider. The login issues were resolved as soon as I moved it away from GoDaddy. I tweaked the site and it was working fine.
About an hour ago I logged in to approve a new subscriber. While there, I noted the original developer’s two logins and deleted those as he hasn’t been involved since 3/2023.
Immediately after deleting them, all pages he created were also deleted — including the home page! I’m still logged in and checked “Pages” on the dashboard, and six pages are gone. When I try to log in from an incognito window, it goes to the site, the menu I created shows the pages I created, but everything else shows “Not Found.”
Even more odd, the pages are also missing from the staging site that I created long after he was gone. The staging site was created by copying the primary site.
I don’t think he would have done it maliciously; if he did it at all I suspect it is something he did on all websites and included it on mine. But before I ask him, I want to know if this is even a thing. Might he have included a code or a plugin that would delete everything if his account was deleted?
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EDIT TO ADD: I don’t know that it matters, but in February — long after he was last involved — I (a) moved hosting from GoDaddy to KnownHost, (b) changed the theme from BeTheme to Divi, and (c) created the staging account. I doubt those have any effect, but it’s odd that the staging site was affected by this too.
I have a backup (hoping it’s current), but don’t want to access it until I know a file in it isn’t also going to self-destruct.
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EDIT TO ADD #2: I think those who said I deleted it by accident are probably correct, but am not sure. Yes, when I deleted him I was asked if I wanted to delete his content and, thinking it was asking about posts, I said to delete. Yes, I’m an idiot. Have pity. So that would ordinarily explain it and restoring from backup (which I have) would be the solution.
However, that wouldn’t explain why the pages were deleted from the staging site. The staging site is a copy of the main site. To sycronize them, I have to manually copy one over the other. In this case, I *did not* do that. I was working in the main site. Deleted the user. Tried to go to the home page and it was gone. Opened a different browser window and tried to log into the stating site, and the home page is gone there too. In both cases, the site is there. The pages I created are there. The menu I created (I switched themes and created a new menu) is there. His stuff is gone.
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When you delete a user in WordPress, it will ask if you want to delete all content created by that user, or assign it to someone else. It (stupidly) defaults to delete, which appears to be what you selected. Your designer would not have put in self-destruct code.
When you delete a user, there will be an option to attribute the user’s content to another user. I’m guessing you didn’t do that and so his pages were deleted. That said, they should still be in the trash and you should be able to recover them without having to do a full site recovery.
There’s a lot of possibilities. Most probably you messed up somewhere.
>Can a web developer put something on a WordPress site that causes all pages he created to be deleted if his account is deleted?
Answer to this is YES. A semi proficient coder can implement a code which can remove certain or entire part(s) of Websites.
It sounds like the dude wasn’t proficient enough to do something so dastardly.
Likely what happened is, when you deleted his user, you didn’t attribute his content to another user which will cause the content he created to delete.
You need to restore a backup and go through the deletion again, attributing his content to your profile.
RTM
It literally asks you what you want to do with the content a user created when you delete them.
Just restore the last backup and assign the content to yourself when you delete the account.
You didn’t attribute the content to a user when you deleted the dev user. Best to restore from a backup immediately prior to deletion, and the. Attribute the content when you delete the user, attribute to your own admin user.
Check the trash and if it’s not there then contact your hosting provider as they also store a back up of your site. they will give you dates as a restore point.