You've spent time and money on your WordPress website. You do not want to lose your website with any issues such as human error, website crashing, hacking, or hosting failure.
If you have a website backup, it's straightforward to restore your website to the time when the backup was performed. Your website needs a regular backup process to restore quickly and easily to the point you need.
What is a WordPress website backup?
A website backup is taking a copy (or twin) of your website's most important content and storing it away from the website.
Ideally, this would also be away from your hosting company in case anything happens with your hosting company. For example, a website company in the UK was hacked a few years ago. They were given a choice to either pay a ransom or close the business. They chose to close, asking all their customers to download their backups from the hosting. I don't trust the files knowing the hosting company had been hacked.
How do I perform a WordPress website backup?
You can use a WordPress plugin to do this for you regularly. There are several popular plugins, and one of those is Updraftplus.
Updraftplus has a free and premium version. The free version will take a daily backup at the same time the plugin was first installed. If you want the backup to happen outside of business hours, you must install it at that time. The free version does not back up the WordPress files since you can install them independently. Both versions will send the backup to the cloud, although the premium version has more options than the free version. Both versions allow one-click restore as well.
What do I look for in a website plugin backup?
A regular schedule, which you can change as your business evolves. For example, you will want more frequent backups if you add an online shop or membership.
The ability to send the backup to cloud storage so that it's away from your website should anything happen to your website.
Ensure you understand what parts of the website are backed up so that everything runs smoothly when performing a restore.
Restoring your website should be easy and not require any other software.
Choose a reliable plugin with a company that'll be around for a while to ensure that it is maintained regularly with WordPress changes.
Is only one backup method okay?
In our website plans, we perform daily backups of every website and store them away from the hosting. As well as that there are regular backups that are sent to the client's cloud storage. Some of the hosting companies also perform regular backups. Why use more than one method? If one way fails, the other one should work. You'd be unlucky to have two backups that both failed to restore.
Do I have a backup plugin installed?
Check your plugin list in the back end of your WordPress website. You can search for plugin names such as Updraftplus, Backup Buddy, WP Vivid Backup, or search on the word backup. If you need more support, you can order a WordPress website plugin audit from us.
Summary
Please check that you have a backup of your website, ideally stored in the cloud away from your hosting. If you need to know if you have one, book a free 30-minute chocolate and chat session (one per client) so that we can check. Please select the zoom session option.
