Back-up of a website is inevitable for a live website. You can’t imagine how tough it is to restore, recover, and rebuild a broken website. It can cost hours, days, or even months of downtime; leading to revenue loss, increased expenses, and emotional distress for you and anyone who relies on your site. Being able to restore your files and database if anything goes wrong can prevent this kind of painful situation. Cyber attacks, unknowing data deletions, and switching themes need backups to restore. Here we have come up with solutions for how easily a backup of a website is possible and different ways of backing up a site before you lose anything important.
What is WordPress Website Backup?
WordPress backup is a duplicate of a website. It can be restored and recovered in case of need. Backing up your WordPress site ensures you have a copy of all your website’s data, files, and content in case of any unexpected incidents. Also, WordPress site backups give you peace of mind knowing that you can quickly restore your website to its previous state. You won’t have to stress about rebuilding your site from scratch, and you can get it back up and running quickly!
WordPress backups help safeguard the hard work you have put into crafting your website. An emergency of a security breach, malware issue, or human error could occur and all important data gets outage.
Why is Website backup Important?
Do you know, a server failure, malware, or even simple human error can wipe out months of work, and cause significant loss?
Why is backups necessary? Backups are essential to migrate from one host to another if your site becomes corrupted or damaged. On the other, it is essential when changing website design and updating new themes or plugins. If backups are undone you might face unsolvable issues and that can’t be the same as before. Check its importance in points.
- When updating to the newest version of a plugin, a theme, or WordPress core, you may occasionally get scary fatal errors. These errors might result in the dreaded white screen of death, but sometimes you might experience less obvious problems.
- Hacking is an ongoing threat that businesses face. If your website gets hacked, you want to restore it to a version before it is compromised.
- If your host accidentally deleted an important directory or made other problematic changes to your server, your site may go down or experience functionality issues. So backups are needed.
- Website design changes or switch themes on a staging site instead of your live site, you’ll want to keep a backup either way.
- If you need to move hosts or you’ve decided to change your domain name, you’ll want to make a backup of your site.
Backup is the only solution that protects against all those scenarios. Ultimately, the backup of a website is significant to ensure everything goes smoothly and functions as before.
3 Easy Methods to Backup Websites
A WordPress backup saves a copy of your site’s important files, folders, and databases. This includes your content, plugins, themes, images, videos, settings, and other information. You can easily use the backup to restore your website. Now, you knew the importance of backing up your WordPress websites, it’s time to explore the three easy methods to perform quick backups. You can choose either of them, whichever fits your requirements best.
1. Backing up using a plugin
The easiest way to back up a website is by using a backup plugin. There are a variety of plugins that allow you to back up your WordPress site either on-demand or at scheduled times. The official WordPress Plugin Repository has many backup plugins, including popular options like BlogVault, BackWPup, BackupBuddy, Updraft Plus, and Jetpack Backup.
To backup with plugins you should install and activate a plugin from wordPress.org and go accordingly.
Let’s take an example of UpDraft Plugin. Once the plugin is installed and activated, click on the “UpdraftPlus Backup” tab, and click “Backup / Restore.”The UpdraftPlus plugin comes with a dedicated dashboard with multiple options.
Click on “Backup Now” to generate the backup. Checkmark the required options and click “Backup Now.”The backup will finish in a few minutes & will be available for restoration in the future.
2. Backing up manually
WordPress sites are built using a database, WordPress core files, themes, plugins, and other files you choose to upload. To backup manually you not only need to back up all these WordPress-related files, but you’ll also need to back up the database also.
Manually Backup a WordPress Site Using cPanel:
Cpanel is a graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies server management. From cPanel, you can set up websites, manage your file structure, change your domain settings, create site backups, and more. Manually backing up your WordPress site files with cPanel might be the easiest way because all you need to do is connect to your host dashboard and download the files.
Make a site backup using SSH:
SSH (Secure Shell or Secure Socket Shell) is a network protocol that provides secure access from one computer to another over an unsecured network.
If you’re using managed WordPress hosting and you want to access your site’s file directory to make a backup, you will need to use secure file transfer protocol (SFTP), secure shell protocol (SSH), or a plugin that grants folder-based access to your site’s files. it should include a link to phpMyAdmin for database access. Some web hosts offer a browser-based SSH shell.
Create a WordPress database backup with phpMyAdmin:
phpMyAdmin is an online software used for the administration of MySQL and MariaDB databases. Next, head to the ‘Advanced’ tab from the menu on your left and scroll down to the Databases section. From here, click the ‘phpMyAdmin’ option. You can select a database from the menu on your left. After that, simply select the tables you’d like to back up and click the Export button at the top.
Once your database is selected, you’ll see a list of all the tables included. You can then choose from a Quick or Custom export. The Quick export will export your entire database. For the ‘Format’, you’d want to select SQL. After you click on the ‘Go’ button you can now save the SQL file on your computer in a secure location as a backup. To restore a database, you’ll just need to import the SQL file into the phpMyAdmin panel.
Manually Backup a WordPress Site Using FTP:
You can back up your WordPress files using an FTP client. There are many FTP clients you can use for Mac and Windows. First, you must connect to your site using the FTP software. Once you’re connected, head to the root directory of your website from the panel on your right. This is where you’ll find folders like wp-content, wp-admin, and other important files like wp-config and .htaccess.
Next, you can right-click any folder or file you want to back up. After that, click the ‘Download’ option. You can save the files and folders from a live website to your local host or computer as backups.
3. Automatic backups through a hosting provider
Regarding hosting providers, it’s essential to have a reliable backup policy in place to protect your website and data. Luckily, many providers offer this as an extra add-on benefit or even for free. If your hosting provider offers you, you shouldn’t worry about searching other ways. However sometimes relying upon a hosting provider doesn’t work when your host goes down, your backups are inaccessible. If someone hacks your site, they may also gain access to your server. If your backups are stored there, they could also be compromised.
How Often should you back up?
The frequency of backing up a WordPress website depends on how often you update or add new content. If you make daily changes, you probably want to backup daily. If you make changes only monthly, daily backups are not necessary. Another consideration is how important the site is. Always perform a backup before making major updates to your WordPress core, themes, or plugins. Before making significant changes to your website’s design, functionality, or settings, it’s a good idea to create a backup. This includes changes like installing new plugins, modifying themes, or adjusting site settings. Before running a significant marketing campaign, promotion, or event, consider creating a backup as well.
Store your backups in a location separate from your web server. This could be a cloud storage service, a different server, or a local backup. This ensures that if something happens to your server, your backups are still accessible. It’s also crucial to periodically test your backups to ensure they can be successfully restored in an emergency. Additionally, keep backups for an appropriate duration, depending on your storage capacity and compliance requirements.
What is the best way to back up your website?
There are several methods to back up a website, and the best method depends on your specific needs and preferences. Backing up manually takes time to back up. Backing up via Cpanel, FTP, SSH, PHPMyAdmin, and FileZilla are some of the ways to manually back up a WordPress site. On the other hand, Many hosting providers offer automated backup services. However, it’s essential to understand the backup frequency, retention period, and how to restore from these backups.
Likewise, Using a plugin for backup is the easiest method that anyone can do. The plugins often allow you to schedule automatic backups, store them on external servers or cloud storage, and restore them easily. However, you should still periodically check in to make sure your chosen tool is creating backups on the schedule that you configured. For most people, using a WordPress backup plugin offers the best solution for how to back up a WordPress site. We highly recommend using plugins for a backup.
Backup is extremely necessary before you switch to a theme. If you want to know what things you should do before switching theme, Read the article: Things you should do before changing WordPress theme.