How to take a WordPress backup
Kim Scotland
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Knowing how to take a WordPress backup is an important skill for a WordPress website owner. It falls into the boring but must-do category of business admin. I can hear you sigh but trust me, you'll thank me some day. When you've accidentally installed demo content (yes I have actually done this) or a dodgy plugin corrupts your site you'll be singing my praises. You're welcome.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through one of these links I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products that I use or want to use in future.
Why do I need to take backups?
No -one likes to think about bad things happening to their website but you need to be prepared just in case.
Taking regular backups protects you from losing pictures, blog posts and pages if your site is hacked or something bad happens to your hosts servers.
When installing a new theme on my other site I accidentally, after 2 or 3 hours work, managed to reset the theme options and had to start again from scratch. I was cocky and didn't back up beforehand, because I thought I knew what I was doing. Ever since then I always take a backup before making major changes. The moral of the story is don't be like me, backup your files.
How often should I take a WordPress Backup?
There's no right or wrong answer here. It depends on how often you make changes to your blog, whether it's writing or editing a new post or uploading new images.
Personally, I'm on my blog every day tweaking posts and adding new pages so I take a daily backup. But if you only make changes once a week or once a month then weekly or monthly backups are fine.
The one exception to this rule is before you make major updates to your blog. For example you should always take a backup before updating your theme, plugins or version of WordPress. This is just to cover yourself incase anything goes wrong during the updates. Don't be scared of making updates – it's really important that everything is kept up to date for security reasons, just be sure to take a backup to cover yourself, just incase.
Don't have the time or patience to take your own backups?
Let me take care of it for you!
With my Worry-Free Website Plan I'll look after your website every week. I'll login take a backup, install & test all available updates, run a security scan and check for any broken links, leaving you with peace of mind that your website is in the hands of an expert.
How do I take a WordPress backup?
So now I've banged on about how important backups are, we get to the juicy bit. I'm going to give you a brief overview of different ways to back up your WordPress blog.
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Your host
I'm hosted with Lyrical Host and they take a daily backup of my sites. At any point I can choose a backup they've taken over the last 30 days and use it to restore my website to that version.
I can also take additional backups via my Lyrical Host dashboard if needed.
Siteground, another popular WordPress hosting solution takes daily backups of websites hosted by them and stores them for up to 30 days.
Most good website hosting providers will have this facility, if yours doesn't, you'll need to use another method such as using a plugin.
A plugin
This is my preferred method to take a WordPress backup. I like to have my backups close to hand, so I'm not running around like a headless chicken if either of my blogs go down.
I use the free version of UpdraftPlus which, allows you to automate daily, weekly or monthly backups. You can't specify a particular time for it to take your backups with this version, but so far I've not felt the need to choose a time.
UpdraftPlus is one of 9 plugins I recommend all business owners install on their websites.
It also lets you choose where to back up your files to. I use my Google drive, but you can use Dropbox and a few other online storage solutions too.
Summary
Taking regular wordpress backups is really important, to make sure you don't lose any work if something bad happens to your website.
You can choose to backup in a few ways. Via your host or a plugin. I think that the easiest way to make sure your blog is backed up regularly, is via a plugin, but it really doesn't matter how you do it as long as you do it.
How often do you take backups of your website? Do you even take them at all?
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