Backing Up Your WordPress Site
It’s important that you create regular backups to mitigate the risk of losing your WordPress site. There are a number of different things that could go wrong so you will need to take a few steps on your own to prevent losing your web site completely.
In the following article we’ll discuss what problems could arise and the various backup techniques available to you to help recover from any situation that might develop.
Web Sites Can Fail
There are a great number of WordPress sites hacked on a daily basis, usually due to running out of date versions of WordPress itself. Older versions of WordPress are subject to vulnerabilities and hackers will look to gain access to your site if they are aware of a known published weakness.
In some situations you may not know that the web site has been hacked and so the FASTDOT backup service creates a backup of a hacked web site. Our backups may be up to date and working, however your site would still be destroyed.
Your web site may also get corrupted simply due to an error that took place when updating or maintaining the site. You, or your web developer, may have initiated a major upgrade of WordPress, or an existing theme or plugin, and as a result the site stopped working. In this situation it will be easier to restore from a working backup that took place prior to the changes that occurred.
Creating Your Own WordPress Backup
There are are two popular methods that you can use to back up your web site. Each have their own particular advantages and ideally you would use them both to create a series of backups in different locations that you could turn to in case of an emergency. This is important because backups can fail, and relying on one source of backup may not help you help you if turns out to be corrupted.
Using cPanel
You can create backups of your WordPress site including the database right from within your hosting control panel. Backups can be stored within your web hosting account or downloaded directly to your PC.
We would highly recommend that you download them to your PC which will ensure that you have your own local copy. If you would like to learn more about creating a backup of your WordPress site using your control please review our tutorial at:
Backing up via cPanel WordPress Hosting
Using a WordPress Backup Plugin
You can create backups of your site from within WordPress itself. There are a number of commercial plugins that will allow you to create a series of scheduled backups either to your hosting account or to another online storage facility like Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP or email.
The main advantage to these plugins is that the backup service is automated, allowing you create a custom schedule that creates a series of backups even when you are away from your computer.
There are a number of free and commercial backup plugins that we can recommend including:
- VaultPress
- Backup Buddy
- UpdraftPlus
- BackWPup
- BackUpWordPress
- Duplicator
Check Your WordPress Backup Works
Even when creating a regular set of backups you need to check them regularly as they can be easily corrupted or contain missing files or folders. Also consider creating backups in as many locations as possible. You can store backups on your local PC, within your hosting account and with external storage providers. You should be utilising all of these options to ensure that you have working backups available to you anywhere.
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