Backups are critical for your WordPress websites. This post will discuss different ways to backup WordPress but first, we need to understand the importance of a backup
We all know creating a WordPress website from scratch is a daunting task.
Now imagine investing so much time & energy into creating a stunning WordPress website, only to wake up one day to find out it’s gone!
Because the truth is that even if you have taken the best security measures, the possibility of a security breach always remains.
WordPress backups are considered as insurance to your website if disaster strikes. By making sure that you are not at a complete loss if there ever comes a day that your website just completely vanishes.
You don’t need to live under constant fear of losing your website. Learn more about how to make your website more secure.
How to Backup WordPress Website.
Broadly speaking, there are three ways through which you can get your website backed up.
1- Backup WordPress via Plugins:
The power of WordPress comes from its plugins. There are plenty of backup plugins you can install to your website and they will take care of your backups for you.
Plugins create your websites backups for you depending on how you configure them and
Here is a list of the best WordPress Plugins for you
Plugins offer three different types of backups:
Database backup: Your entire website is backed-up.
Complete backup: Only the backup for your database is made
Scheduled backup: Allow you to schedule a backup for the future.
Once you install and configure a WordPress backup plugin, it regularly creates backups of your website.
But what people do is that they install a plugin once and never go back to check if it’s working properly or not.
2- Backup WordPress Manually
For non-tech people, this might sound a bit difficult. However, you can easily create a backup of your website manually by downloading your entire WordPress directory using your c-Panel.
Learn step by step how to manually backup WordPress.
3- Backup WordPress Through WordPress Maintenance Services
Managing a website is a challenging task. If you have the budget for it, WordPress maintenance services such as WP Minds are your best options.
They have a team of trained professionals, who dedicate their time to taking care of the health of your website.
They run regular automatic as well as manual backups of your website and even help you restore your website if need be. We know what you might be thinking.
Don’t Website Hosting companies keep regular backups for your website?
Well that’s right, technically they do.
But the backups that they create are not good enough to help you fully restore your website in case disaster.
- Their backups are not reliable as they do not include everything in their backups
- Their backups are not regularly scheduled
- They never notify you if the backup fails
- In case you have multiple sites, they don’t give you the option of restoring a single website.
We highly suggest that you do not depend on you hosting companies with the safety of your website.
How Often Should You Backup your WordPress Website?
There is no hard or fast rule to how often you should backup WordPress websites. It mostly depends on the type of website that you are running.
If you are running a blog or a website in which you publish 2-3 posts a week and get regular comments, you need regular daily backups.
Same will be the case if you have an e-commerce website.
Whereas if you are running a website that has relatively static content, content that is not updated that frequently then you can even get away with weekly or even manual backups.
Why it is important to back up your WordPress website.
We are well aware that WordPress websites have a ton of content stored on them from code & styling to media & posts.
And under happier circumstances, you wish to move your website to lets a new domain, a different hosting server or even migrate your website.
And under gloomy circumstances, after your WordPress website accidentally gets deleted, or is hacked.
There is basically two ways to go on about it
Either you create new content from scratch.
Second, is the wiser option. you create regular backups of your websites.
Best WordPress Backup Location
You should always keep your backups in more than one place for safety purposes. Normally when people create a backup for their WordPress website, they store it in their personal servers.
But nowadays it is normal practice to also keep backups on cloud storage such as Dropbox, Google drive or even Microsoft one drive.
Conclusion
The importance of having a regularly backed-up website cannot be further stressed upon.
This is your safest bet to ensure that you never completely lose your website or its content.
As already discusses, there are plenty of ways in which you can create a WordPress backup for your website. But we highly suggest that you keep an eye on it, since even the best plugin may stop working without notice.