When it comes to business and running an online presence, things can get tricky. There are so many things that you need to keep track of and monitor on a regular basis. It’s crucial that you have the right solutions and backups in place in case something goes wrong. If your website is your digital business card then the importance of a backup strategy is even more pronounced. Failure to have a backup plan could be catastrophic for your business. Consider this: What would happen if your site went down or got hacked? Your visitors won’t just go away; they will probably never return again because they don’t trust you as a brand or business anymore. The same goes for if your site experiences performance issues because of too much traffic, or some other error causes it to crash repeatedly. These are all reasons why having a backup plan is essential for any WordPress website owner.
Why Are Backups Important?
A website backup is a copy of your website files that you can use if your site ever gets hacked, deleted, or otherwise damaged beyond repair. This way, you can restore the website to its previous state. Ideally, you should save a backup of your website regularly, ideally at least once a week. The frequency of your backups depends on how often you create new content and how often people visit your website. If you depend on your WordPress website for your income, it’s critical that you have a reliable backup solution in place. If your website gets hacked and you don’t have a current backup, you might not be able to recover from the attack.
WordPress Backup Options
There are a few different ways to save a copy of your website. You can use a WordPress plugin, manual file copies, or an automated solution such as a cloud storage service. You can also use a combination of different approaches. All of these methods are valid as long as they give you a recent copy of your website files. You should keep your WordPress website backups in a separate location from the server where your WordPress installation is hosted. If your host offers a remote backup solution, that’s the best option. If not, you can use an external hard drive, network share, or a cloud storage service like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Dropbox.
Manual WordPress Website Backups
Manual backups aren’t as reliable as automated solutions. However, they are easy to set up and don’t require any configuration. All you need is a regular copy of your website files. You can do this by using a plugin like UpdraftPlus or WP-DB-Backup. If you plan to save your backups on the same server as your WordPress website, you have to be careful about how often you save copies of the website files. If you do it too often, you may run out of storage on your hosting account. Because of that, it’s recommended that you save manual backups about once a week and keep them for about two weeks.
WordPress Website Automatic Backups
Automatic WordPress website backups are the best approach if you can do it properly. The idea is that you install a WordPress plugin that takes a copy of your website’s files regularly. When you save the latest copy, you should also save a previous version of the files. You’ll want to save at least two copies of the website files: one that is the latest version, and one that is an older version. Ideally, the two copies will be saved at different intervals. That way, if something goes wrong, you can go back in time to when the website was working correctly. Most WordPress backup plugins will allow you to save both full website backups and database backups.
WordPress Website Cloud-based Backups
Cloud-based WordPress website backups are a great option, especially if you don’t want to deal with installing and configuring extra software on your server. You can use a service like Datto or UpdraftPlus that will automatically save a copy of your website files to the cloud. Most services will allow you to set up multiple schedules for saving copies of your website files. Depending on the provider, you might be able to back up your website’s database as well as the website files. If you have a large website, you should consider using a service that offers tiered storage. That way, you’ll always have access to the latest version of your website files
Hosting Provider Backups
Choosing a reliable web hosting provider is essential to the success of your WordPress websites. There are some essential features you need to look for when choosing a provider, and one of those is: Do they offer regular backups? A reputable hosting provider like WebPower will not only backup your website daily, monthly or weekly, but we backup your entire account. Meaning if anything does happen to your site, emails, domains or anything else in your account, there is a huge chance we can recover it – just reach out to our support team.
Conclusion
The WordPress platform is one of the most popular content management systems in the world. As such, it is also one of the most targeted. It is safe to say that your WordPress site is a prime target for hackers. If they gain access to your server, they can steal your data and make it unavailable to you and your readers. If you want to avoid this kind of situation, you will need to backup your WordPress site regularly. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to do this. You can use a manual method, an automatic plugin, or a cloud-based solution. You can also choose a solid hosting provider who will create backups for you on a regular basis. One thing is for certain, when it comes to your WordPress website, backing it up is an absolute must.
