Keeping a healthy backup for your website is a golden rule. You cannot run a website, especially a content management system, CMS. without maintaining a healthy backup. The emphasis on backup is not necessarily because something bad is sure to happen. It is a safeguard, a preventive measure to ensure that if something happens and you are unable to get an effective repair, there should be a backup to fall back on. Even though it is a week old, at least, you are not made to start all over.
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You will find a lot of WordPress plugins in the WordPress plugin directory but not all of them are so effective to do a complete backup for your website. If fact, you will discover that only very few can effectively deliver a complete backup for a website. A complete backup will involve taking backup of plugin, themes, backup wp-content folder. Moreover, it's always recommended to automatically backup WordPress to make sure; you have most recent version of backup available for your website or blog.
Why backing up your WordPress blog is important
If you rely on your web hosting company and fail to maintain a backup, then you will be making a mistake. We recommend that you always maintain a healthy backup and here are the reasons why:
- Hackers can bring down your website
Hacking is not a new word for anyone who is knowledgeable about the internet. It is common to hear of hackers. Most hackers will target sensitive information like credit cards while most hackers simply want to prove their skill and ability to hack. The majority of hacker attacks on small, simple and small business websites are just to cause trouble. The only guarantee to be sure you can recover or fix your hacked WordPress website and to protect your website from further security hacks is if you have a healthy backup available. For as long as your website on online, there are chances that it can be attacked and compromised. The safe way to go is to maintain a backup.
- Computer Related Problems
Having a copy of your website stored on your local machine is a good idea. But computers can crash and the data may not be recoverable. In that case and to be double sure of having a secured backup, backing up remotely is a safer option.
- Issues with your updates
WordPress websites undergo regular updates. It has become a source of worry for most WordPress users to have issues with their websites after an update. This is why WordPress always tells you to perform a backup before updating. WordPress websites have multiple components, including plugins, themes, software, and back-end programming. An error during updating can take off the entire website from the internet, Only a backup can serve as an easy recovery measure for website owners who are not so good at understanding WordPress recovery techniques.
- Malware and Viruses
Malware and viruses are a major concern and can lead to a serious penalty from your hosting company. They can find their way into your website even through third parties. You can download them unknowingly with a theme or plugin, Having backup files means that you'll be prepared just in case your site starts acting weird.
- Employee Errors
This is commonplace and happen even with the most skillful website managers. A slight distraction can cause a code error and you may never be able to detect where the mistake was made. We all make mistakes. You can even erroneously click a button that deletes a file and cause a major damage. You can even empty a content into the wrong folder and cause a serious conflict. All these could just happen by accident and one way to recover fast is to have a healthy backup in place.
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Important Files to backup in WordPress:
Though you can configure a full website back for your WordPress website. Technically, you require to backup just two elements of your WordPress website - the Database and the Files.
Database: This contains all your posts/pages, comments, categories, tags, theme settings, plugin settings, WordPress settings, user accounts and every URLs/links you have on your site.
Files: The WordPress files will need to be in the root of your domain, typically the public_html folder. It consist of three folders called wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes plus a few other configuration files and a .htaccess file. The wp-content is a very important folder for your site which contains all your images/uploads, plugin files, theme files, and additional files created by plugins.
Generally speaking, the Database and the wp-content folder are the two most important part to be backed up on a regular basis. With your wp-content and database file, you can restore or migrate your site.
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Trusted WordPress Backup Plugins
1) VaultPress
VaultPress is the backup solution by Automattic (theParent company behind WordPress). This solution is perfect to take backup of 1-2 blog, and will not be very good for a website with multiple blogs because of the cost of running it for multiple blogs.
2) UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration
This backup solution works for multiple WordPress backup and is a very popular WordPress backup solution. This comes in two version: Lite (Free in WordPress plugin repo) and the Premium Version
Updraftplus is the most popular backup solution for WordPress. It offers all the features which you would need to backup your WordPress blog. It offers more than just backup, as using the cloning migration feature, you can easily migrate one WordPress site from one host to another.
What make this plugin stand out is the variety of options for backup. With UPdraftPremium, you will also be getting free 1GB of space for UPdraftPlus Vault, which is their cloud storage.
3) ManageWP Backup
Good for multiple WordPress site, ManageWP is also popular and it is easy to optimize, update & track all your blog from one dashboard.
ManageWP offers real-time protection as it offers incremental backup. That means, instead of taking complete backup every time which slows down our server, it takes backup of only those files which are changed & is uploaded to their cloud storage infrastructure.
One key and very exiting about ManageWP is that it can be used by even the least knowledgeable user as does not require any skill to configure configuration. You only need to enable or disable it. You have the option to take a backup using Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, One drive or ManageWP cloud infrastructure.
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There are other free and premium WordPress backup solutions including:
1. BackUP WordPress (Free)
2. Dropbox backup & restore (Supports only Dropbox is free)
3. BackupBuddy (Pro)
However, the three(3) we have examined above are the best solutions for WordPress backup and will server every need.
