Support

You have the right idea. That's what I would do.

Before you do anything, though, make sure you have a copy of your backup archives and a copy of the copy as well. Ideally these copies should be stored on separate media, e.g. one copy on your computer and one on a removable drive that won't be plugged into the computer when you start working. This reduces the likelihood of losing your only copy of your site's latest backup.

What you describe is that JavaScript does not execute at all on your site, at least in the backend.

Do a quick test. Edit your user profile and change the editor to None. Try to edit an article. Do you see the article contents as plain HTML code? If you do, change your editor in your user profile to CodeMirror and edit the same article. If the HTML does not appear formatted (and most likely not appear at all) you have a JavaScript issue.

The first thing I'd check is the obvious. Check that JavaScript is enabled on your browser. If you are using browser extensions such as ad blockers, NoScript etc try disabling them for your site. If you are using a firewall / antivirus check if it has options which might be screwing up JavaScript on your site. For example, AVG comes with a "link checker" feature which ends up throwing JavaScript errors and breaks sites when you visit them.

if that didn't help you need to check the browser's console for any errors which would tell you if there is a JavaScript error – perhaps because of a misbehaving plugin – in your backend pages.

Without having information from the browser console I'm reluctant to offer any further advice. I can think of a few things that could have gone wrong (HTTP/HTTPS and www/non-www disparity between the site being accessed and how things are configured in .htaccess and Global Configuration, permissions, an errant .htaccess file somewhere etc) but I don't want to speculate wildly.

For what it's worth, you seem to have been having a similar problem before restoring your site. You had said this:

I am now unable to access any part of my backend Admin panel using the top menu bar. It is totally unresponsive. I therefore cannot use my new Akeeba Backup Professional since I cannot access it.

The top menu bar is actually a bog standard Bootstrap drop-down menu rendered using JavaScript. If JavaScript is dead on the page (either doesn't execute at all or stopped executing because a plugin threw an error) you would indeed lose access to the menu. If the problem is a misbehaving third party plugin, the plugin order determines how early its misbehaving code that throws a JavaScript error is parsed by your browser which could have the effect of some bits working and others not at all. So if I were to take a wild guess I'd say that the browser console will show a JavaScript error in index.php and when you look at the referenced line you'll see it comes from a block of code (typically right above the referenced line) produced by a third party plugin in Joomla.

Check your configuration.php file. What does the line with public $live_site read? Ideally it should be

public $live_site = '';

If you've entered your site's URL there: remove it. Joomla is not WordPress, it doesn't need to know the URL to your site. It receives this information from the web server. Putting your site's URL in there will cause problems if you have HTTP to HTTPS or non-www to www (or vice versa...) redirections. One of the immediate symptoms is that the JavaScript stops working because modern browsers consider it a cross-site request to load a JavaScript file, disabled by default for security reasons.

And no, you are not going crazy. This did start happening "suddenly", as much as I hate the term in the context of problem manifestation. The last few months browsers have gotten far more restrictive regarding loading cross-site JavaScript files because of major security concerns about this practice. A site that was misconfigured would be working last year with an older version of the same browser but now it no longer works.

You're welcome!

If I may, I can tell you why the alternative code worked. See how it uses https:// instead of http://. That's the trick.