You should definitely learn how to back up your WordPress website in order to spare yourself future heartache. We’ll cover all you need to know about WordPress backups in this article to make the subject as easy as we can.
Acquiring knowledge about WordPress site backups may seem like a non-urgent task.until your website experiences an issue, at which point it might already be too late.
WordPress backups are neither interesting or enjoyable. But in order to spare yourself future heartache, it’s something you should definitely learn.
We’re going to do our best to simplify the concept of WordPress backups in this piece by providing all the information you require in one convenient location:
- How frequently should I backup WordPress?
- The various kinds of WordPress content that require backups
- Where should backups for WordPress be kept?
- The top plugins for WordPress backups
- How to use a free plugin to create a WordPress backup
Now let’s get started.
WordPress Backups 101: The Significance and Methods of Performing Them
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need to backup your WordPress website because nothing would go wrong.
However, your WordPress site doesn’t exist in a perfect world – it exists in the real world. And in the real world, there’s a lot that can go wrong with your WordPress site:
- It’s possible for you to err—for example, accidentally wiping out crucial stuff, like an hours-long Elementor design.
- It’s possible for a hostile actor to access your website, insert malware, or do other harm.
- There could be a problem with your host that causes data loss.
- Your site can crash due to a plugin or theme.
- An update that was just applied could pose a problem at any time.
You run the risk of losing all or part of your WordPress website in each of those scenarios.
If you don’t have a recent backup, any one of those scenarios could be disastrous.
However, if you always have a recent backup on hand, the worst-case scenario is a minor inconvenience – not a catastrophe.
In summary, you must create backups of your WordPress website, if you have one.
The topics of how, when, and what to back up are covered in the remainder of this section
Is It Necessary to Make Your Own WordPress Backups? Is Your Host Not Doing It?
Generally speaking, you shouldn’t depend on your hosting provider to backup your WordPress website.
While most web hosts do take some type of backup, there are no guarantees when it comes to the frequency and completeness of those backups. For your planning, you should treat them as if they basically don’t exist.
Making your own backups is the only method to ensure that you have a complete, up-to-date copy of your website at most hosting.
But here too, there are a few outliers.
In particular, if you use premium managed WordPress hosting companies like Flywheel, WP Engine, Kinsta, and so on.
The implementation of robust automated backup protocols and off-site storage by these managed WordPress servers accounts for part of the higher cost of managed WordPress hosting.
How Frequently Should Your WordPress Website Be Backed Up?
How Often Is It Necessary to Backup Your WordPress Website?
For instance, daily backups are not really necessary if your portfolio website is static and never updates. Monthly backups might perhaps be acceptable to you.
Conversely, you should definitely back up your blog every day if you publish a new entry every day and receive a lot of comments from readers.
Additionally, you probably want a real-time backup solution that saves changes immediately if your WooCommerce business is busy and orders are coming in often so that you never lose your important order data.
Consider the following to help you determine a timetable that makes sense for your website:
Would my website suffer if I lost all of the data from the last several days or hours?
You should do daily backups of your site if X is equal to one day.
Never forget to take into account other content in addition to how frequently you produce fresh stuff. User-generated content, such as native WordPress comments, is likewise captured by backups.
For instance, if you run a blog and only write once a week but your readers leave insightful comments every day, you should probably implement a daily backup plan so that, in the unlikely event that your site needs to be restored, you won’t miss any of the insightful remarks.
Finally, you should employ a real-time incremental backup solution if your website experiences continuous traffic, such a WooCommerce store, forum, BuddyPress site, etc. More information on this is provided below.
Database vs. WordPress Backup Files
To backup your WordPress website, there are two steps to take:
- WordPress files
- WordPress database
The files on your site include files like:
- Theme/plugin files
- Image/media uploads are in the wp-content/uploads folders
The database on your website has your actual material, like:
- Blog post content
- Page content
- Elementor designs
- Comments
- Form submissions (If you keep form submissions on your dashboard to examine them later,)
- Settings
It is necessary to backup your database and files along with your website.
But, you might not always need or want to back up both sections equally, depending on how your site functions.
Because of this, you can opt to back up individual sections of your website (such as only your database) using the backup plugins that we’ll talk about below.
