A rare But Frustrating Issue To Solve
If you are reading this, and you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you can be very thankful and skip the tutorial. Because the issue I’m about to describe is very frustrating, and if you do not face it, breath a sigh of relief. It started last year, I would randomly lose about 30% of my Divi Theme Builder templates. This tutorial is the quick solution to a long journey of trying to solve it, so in this tutorial I will show you how to restore missing Divi Theme Builder templates.
▶️ Please watch the video above to get all the exciting details! 👆
FYI: Do It With Divi Assistant!
Why work so hard? You can do this easily with a setting in our Divi Assistant plugin!
I Use Divi Them Builder Templates For Everything!
I love Divi, and I love the Divi Theme Builder! I use it like crazy, because it saves me so much time by creating dynamic templates. I take full advantage of conditional assignments, dynamic content, conditions, custom fields, and global elements.
If you are unfamiliar with the Divi Theme Builder and how it can benefit you, it’s not too late to learn. You can check out my Divi Beginner Course or my Divi Theme Builder mini course. I also have various tutorials on these topics related to the Theme builder, dynamic content, display conditions, and more, so be sure to check out my other tutorials.
I use the templates for a lot of things on this site, including the blog posts, product pages, documentation pages, etc. The two most important places are my blog and my plugin product pages – and of course these seem to be the ones that go missing. Occasionally, such as last week, I wake up to emails like: “I am looking at your plugin page, but can’t find any way to purchase it.” What a horrible feeling that is to know people want to purchase something, but half of the page is gone. Or if you come to my blog posts here and only see the text of the post, not the template area around the content.
What If The Templates Go Missing?
For some unknown reason, there are rare times when random Theme Builder templates go missing. Sometimes the entire template is gone, and sometimes just the Body Template. I’ve spent a lot of time looking into it, and a lot of time with the Divi Support team leads. No one can understand it, and I’m not the only with the issue. However, I think I tend to be “the squeaky wheel that gets the grease” if you know what I mean. So after contacting them every month or so when I wake up to find emails in my inbox asking why they can’t purchase my plugins, they finally told me that yes this is a known issue, and it happens very randomly to others. They think it is related to an error that occurs when saving, and I think I have noticed this pattern. Sometimes I noticed the Theme builder takes extra long to save, and the next I usually discover that the templates are gone. The support leads even created a plugin to help solve it, and that’s what we are going to talk about today.
How To Restore Missing Theme Builder Templates?
If you are still reading, you are probably also experiencing the same issue from time to time. The best advice I can give is to always have Theme Builder backups. I’m not talking about full site backups, but rather export the Divi Theme Builder templates every 30 days or so. Trust me, you will thank me later! Thankfully for me, I always have a backup. But what if I made changes to my template recently? That unfortunately would be lost. But there is hope! As I said, the support leads at Elegant Themes have created a way to retrieve the missing templates pretty easily. The key is this – the templates are still there in your database – so they created a tool to retrieve it.
- Head over to Github and check their solution.
- Read their instructions and download and install their plugin. I cover everything in my video above, but I am not going to repeat their written instructions here.
Restore From Backups
Now, obviously you can restore from a backup that you have saved. But the solution above is different because it uses the actual item saved in your database. But I have often restored the missing templates using backups.
In this tutorial about How To Backup Your Divi Website, I showed how to make a backup of your Divi Theme Builder templates.
How To Show Theme Builder Templates As CPTs In Menu Using Divi Assistant
Here are the simple steps to show the Divi Theme Builder templates as custom post types using our popular Divi Assistant plugin:
- Install and activate the Divi Assistant plugin
- Click on the Utility Helper tab and the Post Types subtab
- Enable the setting
I hope that is easy enough for you! 😉
Learn More About Divi Assistant!
Our flagship "helper" plugin has (141) main features to make your life easier when working with Divi!
Thank goodness for PeeAye, again!
I’m so glad this was helpful, Jemma!
Nelson, you are a legend! So helpful! And nice that this save feature is also added to your Divi Assistant plugin!
I did find that sometimes that when using this solution, the names for the body template post types don’t seem correct, or seem repeated. Perhaps old versions are saved in the database?
I find it helpful to go into the Divi Theme Builder, rename the Custom body types to a new name and save changes. When I then enable the solution to show them as post types, they are corrected.
Thanks again,
John
Nelson, you are a legend! This issue has plagued me and I thought I was losing my mind! I would complete a massive amount of work on a website and then suddenly I woudl notice the body format would have disappeared or that the header would be deleted. I thought it was my clients doing it all along and I made them special videos to warn them not to delete the headers lol. This is great and saved my life today becasue every time I save the theme builder it deletes something at random but now at least I can restore them in a jiffy 🙂 Cheers for the heads up on this.
Hi Marianna,
I am really glad to hear this has brought some peace to the chaos! Thanks so much for sharing! We now have this as part of our Divi Assistant plugin.