Always backup your website

July 24, 2015

Have you considered what would happen if your website crashed or was compromised, and you lost all your content? When it comes to a WordPress site, or any other type of site for that matter, there is always a chance that something could go horribly wrong. Even with all the security measures in place, you could still lose your site’s data.

Putting backups in place

In order to recover from any sort of data loss or site compromise, you will need to ensure that you have backups in place. Everything that has anything to do with the look and feel of your site is in a file somewhere on your WordPress backend and needs to be backed up. Additionally, you must make sure that you back up all of your files in your WordPress directory (including subdirectories) and your .htaccess file.

A WordPress Backup Plugin

A very simple way to implement a backup system is to make use of a WordPress backup plugin. One option I like to recommend is UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus allows you to backup your entire site, including the database, and set intervals (when you want the backups to occur) for these backups according to your needs. You then have the option to download the backup locally to your computer or to move your backups to a cloud storage solution such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Make sure that the backups are always labelled correctly so that you are easily tell which one is the latest version. UpdraftPlus also offers a paid for premium version that has added features, however the free basic version should be enough to get you started.

With backups of your site in place should something ever go wrong, you can then easily revert to a previous point in time when your site was up and running as expected, saving yourself a lot of time and stress.

Here is are some interesting articles we wrote on WordPress:

Prevent brute-force attacks on your WordPress site.

How to disable the WordPress search from your WordPress site?