Backup your WordPress Website
WordPress does not come with a website backup option. Without a backup of your current WordPress site, you will lose your entire website in one day due to various reasons.
Backup of your WordPress can help in different ways when you run your business in the long run.
To deal with the following cases, you should have a proper backup that can be used to restore your website quickly.
The following list shows the most common reasons why you should maintain a proper backup system for your website.
- Server Crash (Your host’s backup may not enough)
- Hacked WordPress Site
- Error when you update website
- User errors of your WordPress website.
- New versions of plugins are not compatible with your running version of the WordPress
- When you test your development work with live site there can be issues unexpectedly
- You accidently delete some of the files of your WordPress
You have to backup the file system in the WordPress and Mysql database
Files you should get backup
Live WordPress website has mainly three types of files to be backed up.
- WP core files – these are the files of WordPress software and when you update the version of the WP, these files are going to be changed
- Files created by a developer when they develop plug-ins and themes
- Files uploaded by the user (Documents and Images)
The best practice is to backup all three types of files regularly and keep them is a safe place.
Backup Plan
Proper backup plan is needed to run your website properly.
- Use good naming convention to name your backup files so that you can easily identify your backup when you want to restore them.
- If you have any special changes to files when you take a backup of a site, document all these note along with the backup for your reference at later stage.
- Make sure you can restore your backup very quickly and easily.
- Test your backup in different server to make sure it works properly.
Ways to get Backup
There are common ways you can use to get a backup your WordPress and maintain those backups so that you can easily restore.
Using FTP client tool
You can use FTP client tool to connect to your webserver with FTP credentials (Host, Username and password) and then you can download the files to local machine and maintain your backup. This is the very simple way of backing up your files.
You can use the cPanel to create FTP username and the password for this operation.
Using the File Manager of cPanel
cPanel comes with the File Manager tool to access the files in your web server. You can use this tool to get the backup of your WordPress directory. First you can zip the entire WordPress directory and then download the zip file.
This process is very difficult and time consuming if you have large website.
Using WordPress backup plugins
WordPress backup plug-ins can make your life easier than getting the backup manually. There are several backup plugins available depending on your requirement and the budget
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the popular backup plug-in with over 3 million installations. You can experience the incremental backup and sheduled backup with this plug-in and ideal for site migration and cloning.
You can use this plug-in for multi-user WordPress sites.
BlogVault
This backup file is ideal one if you do not want to overload your server while taking the backup. It can take incremental backup without any issues. They offer you free off-site storage to store your backup files.
If you are WordPress developer you can run the staging on cloud server.
Jetpack
Jetpack is very popular backup plugin used by more than 6 million websites and it provides other services in addition to the backing up WordPress site. You can experience the real time cloud back with starting storage of 50GB and it keep track of 30 day activity log and archive.
Other awesome features are one click restoring, malware scanning and spam protection.
BackupBuddy
This backup plug-in can backup your WordPress file system as well as the database. You can setup the schedule to run backup process automatically allowing you to store backup files at off-site safe location.