How to Back Up Your WordPress Site

Backing up your website is the most important thing you can do to protect against hackers. It won’t keep hackers out, but it will give you a way to restore your site to a pre-hacked state (assuming it was backed up before the site got hacked).

The first question I ask people when they say their site has been hacked is, “Do you have a backup?” If they do, the site can be up and running in a relatively short period of time.

Without a backup, you can spend hours and a lot of money restoring it, if indeed it can be restored.

Are you convinced that you need to backup your site? If so, your next question is undoubtedly, “How do I backup my site?” Am I right?

I want to give you some key points about backing up your site and share some things that I discovered the hard way.

First, install and activate a backup plugin

1. I have used BackupBuddy for years. I am very confident that it is a quality plugin and I have restored sites using it many times. It is a PREMIUM plugin, which means it costs money, but it also means you get support.
2. BackWPup is another plugin that is also very popular. It is FREE. I have not used it, mainly because I had already been using BackupBuddy for awhile and saw no reason to change.

Second, where to store the backup

1. The backup will automatically be saved in WordPress, but if you leave it there, you will quickly fill your hosting space. If your email is on the same host, you may come to a point where you cannot send or receive email. Not only that, but if you lose the data on your site, you will most likely also lose the backup as well.
2. There are several places you can store your backups: your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3. I use Amazon S3 because it literally costs pennies to do so.

Third, how often to backup your site

The more often you update your site, the more often you will want to back it up for the obvious reason that the fewer backups you have, the more data you risk losing.

A backup is only as good as its ability to be restored, and the ease with which you’re able to do that.

Tutorials for Backing Up

Here are a couple of links to step-by-step tutorials for BackupBuddy and BackWPup. I am a visual person, so I love step-by-step tutorials with images.

BackupBuddy

BackWPup

If you find it all too confusing or time consuming, I can help you. Check out my Peace of Mind package and let us do the backup for you.