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.
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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.Â
What If The Templates Go Missing?Â
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.Â
Thank you so much! Works perfect! This saved a lot of time!
You’re welcome Andreas!
We are glad to know that our guide helped you in some way. Stay tuned for more of such guides.
You just saved my bacon
I’m glad to hear it! #savethebacon
I can’t thank you enough for posting this! I almost lost my mind but you helped me find it! 🙂 The plugin worked great!
You’re welcome, I’m so glad I could post this timely resource!
great article, it helped me a lot. big thanks
You’re welcome, glad it helped!
Great tutorial and I do back up Theme Builder templates!
OK, it’s not a problem with missing Theme Builder templates, but keep getting the Divi “Backup exists” warning in the Theme Builder stating it’s newer than the version I’m working on.
BUT, I know it was saved (even twice) before exiting. Also, whenever I work on Divi Theme Builder templates I always disable CSS static file generation first. Caches are cleared, etc.
Divi system check are all green and the site is running on PHP 7.4 (tried lowering from 8.1 to see if that helped… nope).
Weird.
Any ideas, as it’s constant now.
They have fixed that issue now in 4.19.5.
Thanks! Worked fine for me and saved quite some time.
You’re welcome, I’m so glad this could help!
I had a client today, ruin one of my global library sections and of course library items have no history once you’ve left the page and a day has passed. Would this plugin help or what would? I’m having to re-create it. THANKS!
Hi Becky!
Yes, the plugin will help in restoring the previous version or deleted theme builder layouts. You can try and check if the layout version is available. You can ask the server host for a previous backup as well.
Thank you so much for this post! My templates got lost, and when I contacted Divi Support, they told me I need to get full restoration of my content by the hosting company…. But while I was waiting for that to be done (they said it would take 24-48 hrs!), I found your tutorial and it saved me 🙂