How to Backup Your WordPress Website Effectively

The golden rule of updating your website is to always take a backup. Despite it being a crucial step, it’s often neglected. In the event that an update goes wrong, a website could be lost for good if you forget to take a backup, so it’s important to make it part of your process whenever you’re making any changes to your website.

Let’s take a look at how you can get started taking backups of your website.

  • Benefits of backups – Having a backup of your website can minimize downtime and also prevent issues with human error. By minimizing downtime, if you notice something has gone wrong with your site, you have a quick option to restore the last version saved. Additionally, if you happen to make a mistake editing your website or heaven forbid a hacker is successful in attacking your website, you can fully and easily restore your website with a backup version.
  • Backup options – WordPress offers plug-ins for backups like UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, BlogVault, or other options. Updraftplus is one of the most popular ones and quite affordable.
  • Storing backups – Once you decide on a backup plug-in you’ll want to store it in a remote location like Dropbox, Amazon’s Web Services, or on a Google Drive. These options will require different levels of technical expertise, so research what is best for your technical level or you can contact us to assist you.
  • Backup frequency – Depending on your type of business, you’ll want to decide how often you should perform a backup.  An easy ‘set and forget’ style option is just to set daily backups. This is more than suitable for most business websites, in fact, it would probably be considered overkill as most websites aren’t updated daily. But storage is cheap, and daily backups provide peace of mind. For websites that have more frequent updates or use E-Commerce, they could consider backups more than once per day.
  • Testing backups – Now that you’ve backed up your website, make sure you test the backup. It’s just like testing a fire alarm in an office building or even in your home. You need to know that it works and that, in a worst-case scenario, you’ve got everything you need to get things back on track quickly. Here are items to test: 
    • Test how long it takes to back up a given quantity of data and run a restore of this same information while recording the results.
    • Run an application backup and run restore of this same application while recording the results.
    • Run an offsite restore test if your data is in a cloud or remote location, you should know how long it takes to recover from that location.
    • Make sure to test regularly ideally 4 times a year. More frequently is even better.
  • Peace of mind – Having a backup plan is like having a disaster response plan. Knowing what to do in a website emergency is important and can give you as a business owner peace of mind. You spend lots of time and money on your website so don’t let it all disappear in an instant – get your backup in place.

At BG Digital Group, we offer assistance in setting up your backup plans. We can install your plug-in and set up your remote location for storage. Additionally, if your website goes down, all you have to do is give us a call and we’ll restore it. It’s pretty simple to have a hosting partner that you can trust will be there when you need them.

If you would like assistance in setting up a backup schedule, contact us today. We’re experts in small business marketing and also ensure your website experiences as little downtime as possible.