Why back up your WordPress Website
For most businesses, it’s the website that generates most sales. Losing the website, even for a short period of time, can mean a massive drop in sales at best and losing all the hard work you put in, potential sales as well as your online ranking and trust at worst.
A business, therefore, must have plans in place to counter risks of data loss with multiple backup strategies including both onsite and offsite backup systems.
A website can be lost due to a number of reasons which may include hardware or software failure, natural calamities, data corruption, malicious attack (hacking, virus, malware), or accidental loss of data which may be permanent causing irretrievable damage to the business.
How does a website backup work?
A website backup is simply a copy of your website that can be restored in the event the main version of your website is lost. Backing up your WordPress website, therefore, is the only way to make sure you are safe from accidently losing all the work you’ve put into it.
You can backup your website in a number of ways as follows:
1. Backing up your website with your hosting partner
Most premium web hosts include both manual and automated backup tools in their hosting plans. Check if your web host has these tools and start using them to ensure you’re always covered in case of data loss.
The most reliable backups are what we call fail-safe backups stored off-site in another geographic location. These backup systems are designed to allow website data recovery from a primary system failure. If the primary system fails in some way, well-designed fail-safes can restore the website preventing it from being lost unexpectedly.
To put it simply, an off-site backup ensures your website will be safe in case the server hosting your website is compromised. If your backups are also stored on the same local server or infrastructure, your backup will also be lost at the same time your main website is lost.
At Rocket Domains, all your websites have automated daily backups which are geographically distributed to maximise data safety and availability. What’s more, we make the backups available to you on a rolling 30 day basis allowing you do restore your website from any historic snapshot you want.
2. Backing up your WordPress using a Plugin or with Manual Download
As a serious business, you must not put all your eggs in one basket. In other words you have a responsibility to have an extra layer of protection by having your own backups to ensure fail-safe business continuity.
You can do that by using a backup plugin to have a backup at least once a month. Alternatively, you can log in to your web host and download a backup to your computer every month.
Backing up WorsPress with a plugin
There are a number of plugins available on WordPress plugin repository that you can use to back up your website yourself. When backing up your website with a plugin you should make sure that it backs up at the very minimum:
- Your database
- Your uploads folder
The above two elements of the back up will get your website up and running when you already have WordPress, Themes, and Plugins files and folders in place.
To make it easier to restore your website from a backup, you should consider including the following in the back up as well:
- WordPress Core Files
- Your Themes
- Your Plugins
Most backup plugins will also allow you to set up and store automated backups in the Cloud such as:
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- Amazon S3 (or compatible)
- Rackspace Cloud
- … and more
You should also be able to have a copy of the database back up sent to you via email.
Conclusion
It really does not matter which back up tool you use. What matters is that you backup your website in at least two different ways off-site using a tool that does the job.
Launch your WordPress website on Google Cloud with Rocket Domains today.
