Restarting httpd on AWS EC2 behaves erratically. Is it supposed to delete the contents of /var/www/html?

Much as the title says, I'm hosting a PHP application in an EC2 instance (elastic beanstalk) on Amazon Web Services, actually running Wordpress connecting to an RDS instance. I've been needing to restart apache for a number of reasons, mainly because I'm using the mod_pagespeed apache module.

Almost without fail when I do that though, it deletes the contents of /var/www/html/ using this command:

sudo service httpd restart

I'm at a bit of a loss since I'm new to AWS, but this clearly isn't desired functionality. Is there another way I ought to go about restarting apache? Can anyone explain why that's happening?

Any advice welcomed, I feel I've got to grips well with most of the admin but this is just a head scratcher for me!