Wix squarespace recovery guide

Wix Page Recovery: Built-in Tools

Wix gives you three built-in recovery paths, and the order you try them in decides how quickly you get your page back. The first is the trash area. When you remove a page in the Wix editor, Wix moves it into a recovery area rather than destroying it immediately, and it normally stays there for about a month before it is cleared for good. The exact date your page will be cleared is shown in the dashboard, so check that rather than relying on a fixed number.

To restore it: sign in to the Wix dashboard, open your site in the editor, go to the Pages panel, and switch to the trash or recovery view. The deleted page is listed with its original name and last modified date. Select it, choose Restore, and confirm. The page returns at the URL it originally had. It is not enough to restore it, though — a restored page is not automatically back in your site navigation, so open the Pages panel, drag it back into the menu where it belongs, and publish again.

The second tool is the editor’s History panel, which records the state of your site over time and lets you restore a previous version of the site or of an individual element. This is the better tool when a page was not deleted but overwritten. Restoring element by element is safer than rolling the whole site back, because a full restore can also undo changes you made after that point. Open the History panel from the editor toolbar, find the entry from before the accident, and preview it before you commit.

The third is the site backup Wix maintains for you. Wix keeps a rolling backup history, and how far back it goes depends on your plan. A manual backup can also be downloaded from the dashboard as a zip archive, which is worth doing regularly and keeping somewhere off-platform. If you need a full site restored to a date the dashboard will not do, open a support ticket from inside your Wix account with the date, time, and domain, and they can restore from their own retained snapshots if that date is still within the window.

Squarespace Page Recovery: Built-in Tools

Squarespace recovery is weaker than Wix, and it is better to know that at the start than to spend an afternoon looking for a trash folder that does not exist. Squarespace does not keep a page trash. Unpublishing a page keeps it private and fully reversible, which is the option you want if you are merely taking something down temporarily. Deleting a page from the editor is not reversible from the editor’s point of view.

That leaves version history as the main built-in route. Open the page, then look for Versions in the page menu on current templates, or in the page settings panel on older ones. The panel shows previous states of the page and lets you restore one. How far back it reaches depends on your plan and the content type, so check before assuming it covers a long-ago deletion. And check what the earlier version contains before you restore it, because restoring replaces whatever is on the page now.

If version history does not cover the deletion, your options narrow quickly. A content export, if you have one, will hold the text. A support ticket may work, but there is no guarantee they can restore an individual deleted page. And a public archive may still have a capture from before the deletion. In practice, most older Squarespace recoveries end with someone reconstructing the page from an archived copy, so check the archive before you rebuild it by hand from memory.

One practical note that saves confusion: Squarespace template versions differ. If your site was on an older template when the page was deleted and you have since moved to a newer one, recovered content often needs re-formatting, because heading styles, image blocks, and section layouts do not map cleanly between versions.

Recover from Site Backups (Wix + Squarespace)

Wix: the platform keeps rolling backups of your site, and the retention window depends on your plan. Self-service restore is not available on every account, so the usual route is to open a ticket from your Wix dashboard and give them the exact date and time you need restored. Two things make this much smoother. First, ask Wix to restore to a copy or a secondary domain if they will, so you can check the result before it goes live. Second, download a manual zip backup yourself from the dashboard and keep it with your other files; a backup you hold is a backup you control.

Squarespace: there is no automatic site-wide backup of the kind Wix offers. The export tool produces an XML file of your page content, and it is gated behind higher-tier plans, so check what your plan includes before relying on it. Two limitations matter: the export carries text and structure, not your images or your layout, so it is a content backup rather than a site backup. Do not treat a two-year-old export as a safety net for an incident that happened yesterday.

If you have no recent backup on either platform, make one now. A zip from Wix or an export from Squarespace costs a few minutes and gives you something concrete to compare against as you reconstruct the missing pages. Store it off-platform with a date in the filename, and set a recurring reminder to refresh it.

Use the Wayback Machine for Wix/Squarespace

Both platforms archive reasonably well in public archives, because for a given URL the content is served from the platform and the address stays stable. Our Wayback Machine guide covers the interface in detail, and our step-by-step restoration guide covers the general method. In short: open web.archive.org, enter the site address, browse or jump to a date, find the page, and check the capture closest to before the deletion.

To find pages you do not have URLs for, enumerate what was captured with the CDX API. Narrow it to your domain and filter to successful captures:

curl 'https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com/*&output=json&fl=timestamp,original,statuscode&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=urlkey&limit=5000'

The collapse=urlkey flag returns one row per URL instead of one row per capture, which gives you a clean inventory of everything ever saved from the domain. Our Wayback Machine API tutorial covers the parameters in full, including date ranges, which is how you find the capture closest to a specific date rather than the most recent one.

There is an important caveat specific to modern hosted sites. Public archives are crawlers: they do not log in, and they save what the page returned to an ordinary visitor. If a large part of your site sits behind a members area or a paywall, expect the captured version to be a login prompt rather than the content. The same applies to sites that render heavily on the client side, where a capture can be a mostly empty frame. When you hit that, try two or three different capture dates before giving up.

Remember what you are actually recovering. An archive gives you the words and the structure a visitor saw. It does not give you the editable page back, and it certainly does not give you your images, analytics history, or form submissions. Rebuild the page in the editor, then confirm that its URL, title, and description still match what search engines have indexed for it.

Common Issues + Workarounds

Locked Wix and Squarespace accounts. If you have lost access to the account, no page recovery is possible for you or for support until access is restored, because support will not act on a site you cannot prove you own. Go through the platform’s account recovery flow first, using the domain email address and the billing details on file; these checks are slow by design. Everything else here is blocked behind that step.

Archives that captured a paywall instead of your content. Public archives never log in, so a members-only page usually archives as a paywall or a login screen. If the site was public when it mattered and the paywall came later, an earlier capture is your best bet. If it was always behind a login, the archive will not help and you are left with exports, backups, and support.

Deleted before anything archived it. If the page was short-lived and was removed before any crawler visited it, there may be no snapshot at all. Google retired the cache: search operator, so that is no longer a dependable fallback. What still sometimes works: asking anyone who bookmarked or shared the page, checking your own browser history for a visit, and looking at whether the page text was reused in a newsletter, a social post, or a PDF, since that content is frequently recoverable even when the page is not.

Compromised rather than deleted. If your hosted site is showing spam, injected redirects, or a new admin you did not add, this is a security incident, not a recovery job, and restoring a backup will not fix it. Follow our hacked-site recovery steps instead. On a hosted platform most of the patching is handled for you, which is a real advantage; if you later move the same content to a self-hosted WordPress site, the attack surface changes completely and our security plugin comparison is worth reading before you launch.

When to Hire a Recovery Service

Some recoveries should never have been DIY. Hire someone when several pages are missing rather than one, because that points at a bulk export or a botched template change rather than a stray delete. Hire someone when the content has real value attached to it, such as a service page that earns money or a portfolio you cannot recreate from memory. Hire one when there is a deadline, because public archive work is slow and repetitive and the bottleneck is hours, not difficulty.

Also hire one when you have already tried the built-in tools, the public archive, and an on-demand archive and the page still does not exist. At that point, more time spent searching the same sources is rarely the answer. A specialist can work from the other side of the problem: DNS and hosting records, platform escalation, third-party caches and partners who copied your content, and in some cases recovering media from other locations.

Our site recovery service handles exactly these cases, including Wix and Squarespace sites that the owner had already given up on. If you want to try first, download a backup and run one archive search yourself so you know what you have, then send us what you found — it makes the first conversation much faster.

FAQ: Wix & Squarespace Recovery

Can Squarespace recover deleted pages?

Only through a few narrow routes. Unpublishing keeps a page private and reversible, so if you merely took something down, check whether it is sitting unpublished rather than deleted. Version history on an existing page can restore older states, and how far back it goes depends on your plan and the page type, so check before relying on it for a long-ago deletion. After that, the options are a content export if you have one, a support ticket with no guarantee of a result, or an archived copy from the Wayback Machine. Most genuine recoveries of old Squarespace deletions end with a rebuild from an archive capture, so it is worth searching for one before you try to rewrite the page from memory.

Does Wix keep deleted pages?

For a limited period, yes. Removing a page in the Wix editor moves it into a recovery area rather than destroying it straight away, and it is normally retrievable for roughly a month. Check the dashboard for the exact date your page will be cleared, because the window is not fixed and can vary with the account. Restoring puts the page back at its original address, but you still have to put it back into your site navigation and republish, since a restored page does not return to the menu by itself. Beyond that window, your realistic options are a manual zip backup you downloaded earlier, a platform restore requested through Wix support if the date is still within their retained snapshots, or an archived copy from a public archive.

Can I export my entire Wix or Squarespace site?

Partly, and it is worth knowing which platform you are on. Wix lets you create and download a zip of your site from the dashboard, which is the closest thing to a full export and the one you would want in a backup routine. Squarespace’s export produces an XML file of your content, and it is available only on higher-tier plans — check your plan before assuming you have it. The important limitation is the same for both: a content export is not a site backup. It carries your text and page structure, but not your uploaded images, not your layout, and not your analytics or form data. Use it to recover wording and to help a migration, then expect to rebuild the design by hand, and download a fresh copy on a regular schedule rather than relying on an export from years ago.