One of the worst fears of a website owner is for his or her WordPress site to crash. A website is an investment of time and money. Experiencing a total data loss because of a malware attack, a plugin error, or other problems can be catastrophic for your online presence. Even a temporary crash can cause you to lose business. This is why it is crucial to back up your site on a regular basis.
By consistently backing up your website files (especially using a backup service), you can create much-needed redundancy and restore your website quickly. By having a well thought out WordPress backup process in place, you can get your site up and running again, even if the worst were to happen.
What Website Backup Options Should You Use?
You should back up your WordPress site in multiple locations. This way, even if you had an issue accessing your site files in one location, you’d still have another option.
Some of the most common backup options for website data include doing a manual backup with an external hard drive, as well as using automatic backups through your hosting account, Google Drive or cloud storage, or other solutions like Amazon S3. For ultimate peace of mind, many businesses store full backup files in multiple locations.
These backups are protected unique username and password combinations to protect important files from cybercriminals. With multiple database backups, you can restore your site even if your hard drive crashes or your cloud backup destination becomes inaccessible. Ideally, you should have at least two ways to back up your site to mitigate your risk of data loss.
Keep in mind, you may need to monitor storage space, especially for local backups that use a lot of data. Make sure your external devices have enough space to store your backups. Try not to delete old backups right away, however. Sometimes, a WordPress plugin update or other system change can cause your site to crash, and you’ll need your site’s old data to get everything up and running again.
How Often Should Website Backups Take Place?
How often should your website be backed up? One of the factors that can help you determine this frequency is the nature and content of your website. How often are you making updates to your website? Is it a blog with regular and fresh content? If so, you should ideally back up your website no less than once a week. You might even need to consider daily backups.
If your site is more or less static, has informational content that doesn’t really change, and you have no intentions on altering anything on your site in the near future, then you could get away with monthly backups. Even if the entire website seems relatively the same, you should still perform a backup to account for changes to your plugins or any data that you’ve collected during that time.
While many web hosting providers automatically back up your site on a set timeframe, you should also schedule a recurring time when you’ll download the backup to your own device. Even a basic calendar reminder will make it easier for you to keep your backup archive up to date.
Check Your Hosting Provider’s Options
Does your current hosting provider offer site backups as a part of their services? If so, you should definitely take advantage of this. Most hosting providers provide automatic backup services, but it’s a good idea to double check about the details. Understanding when scheduled backups take place and how they are stored on your web hosting provider’s server will ensure you know what to do if you ever need to use them.
You should still implement your own backups regardless. Own your important data by keeping your own backups available so you can restore your site in any situation.
Here at Site Rockstar, we not only maintain your site and help you keep it up-to-date, but we also provide a top-notch hosting environment which includes regular daily website backups. All of our Website Care Plans include off-site backups as well. As your website support team, our number one goal is to keep your site from ever crashing or going down in the first place, but we want to help you be prepared if that ever happens.
