Backing up your WordPress Website – How to
It is extremely important to have a copy of your website in case something goes wrong. Here is a quick tutorial on how to back up your website before making any major changes.
January 15, 2020
Photo by Burst on Pexels
There are many reasons to backup your WordPress website before making major changes or updating core functionalities. Backing up is one of the best things you can do to give you peace of mind when the catastrophic happens. Your website is worth all the money and time you’ve spent to help build your business and brand, and loosing that can be devastating to your business
While many hosts provide limited backup services, it is your responsibility to keep regular backups of your website. And with hackers, malware, unintended server outages all lurking in the shadows to inflict damage to your companies brand, it is good to have a solid backup policy.
Lucky for you, backing up a WordPress website is super easy.
How to Manually Backup your Website
All websites created by Studio Twofold have the Updraft plugin installed and activated by default. Updraft is one of the most popular backup plugins available, with over 2+ million active installs and a 5-star rating. Updrafts most important functionality free to everyone, enabling you to backup your site with a single click!
- The first thing you need to do after logging into your WordPress Admin is to go to Settings > Updraft Backups.
2. In the main dashboard of Updraft, click on the big blue Backup Now button to manually backup your site at any time. Let the backup run for a couple of minutes or more, depending on the size of your website.
And that is it! Updraft will save a copy of your website to your webserver.
Backup to Dropbox or Google Drive
Backing up your website files offsite is a smart choice. If you lose access to your server, or malware wipes it completely clean, you will lose everything. If you have a copy backed up offsite on, say, Google Drive or Dropbox, happy days – your website can be restored.
- To set your offsite storage for your files, click on the Settings tab along the top of the Updraft plugin dashboard.
2. Click on your prefered remote storage solution. In the image below, I’ve selected Dropbox.
3. Click Save Changes to commit the selection.
4. Follow the prompts to authorise access so Updraft is able to upload the files and voila! You’re done. See the video below for a walkthrough of these authorisation steps.
How to set Automatic Website Backups
The best thing you can do for your backups is set it and forget it. Updraft gives you the options to schedule automatic updates from every couple of hours, to monthly.
- To set your automatic backup schedule, click on the Settings tab along the top of the Updraft plugin dashboard.
2. Set your files to automatically backup every day, week, or month. Every website is different, so use your best judgement on what is best for your website.
3. Write in how many times you want to retain your files. Two is a good number, as the files can be large and take up all the space on your remote storage.
4. Do the same with your Database backup schedule, selecting the frequency and how many copies of the database you want to retain.
Final thoughts
If you’re looking to backup for free – Updraft is a must. Its functionality with automatic scheduled backups has saved us so many times. Unpredictable update conflicts, malware, code errors, database crashes – there is too much that can go wrong not to have a secure offsite backup solution.
