The Importance of Backing Up WordPress
Have you ever been typing up an important memo to your boss or contract for a client and BAM, your screen blanks out and you get the dreaded "blue screen of death"? I have and it wasn't pretty especially since some of the programs that I use do not have any auto-save features so I couldn't recover my document.
More scary than that is if your computer crashed and did not allow you to reboot and you had not backed up your computer. Needless to say, it’s so important to back up your files. The truth is that WordPress sites are no different. Your content might be changing all the time. Whenever you share a new blog post or a user posts a comment, the files on your site are updated. If you don’t back up, you might lose them if your site crashes or gets hacked.
The truth is, no web host is perfect. Even if you do research and select a host with 99.9% uptime, there is still a chance that they could run into a problem. If your site crashes and it hasn’t been backed up, you could lose valuable information.
As far as website hacking goes, it happens. I've had clients that their websites were hacked and if I had not been backing up their site, we would have had to rebuild their entire site from scratch...not fun!
But with regular backups, you have the peace of mind of knowing that you can recapture your data and get your website back on track in the event that there’s a problem. Just as you click save when you’re drafting a document or creating a spreadsheet, you need to make sure that the data on your website is backed up.
Backing up is so important that many site owners actually have more than one method of backing up their files. For example, they might do a regular manual backup where they send their files to the cloud, and combine it with a regular backup that’s performed by a plug-in.
What Tools to Use for Backups
Manual backups are up to you, but let’s look at a couple of tools that you can use to get your site backed up and backed up for FREE.
Now that you have a couple of choices, I have created a video using UpDraftPlus to show you how easy it is to get your site backed up and schedule automatic site backups.
Now that you know how easy it is to secure your site with regular backups, don't get caught unprepared for disaster! Stuff ALWAYS happens. I've also included the written instructions below:
If you need more instructions to get more done, head over to our resources section for free software comparison charts or get additional guidance in the Learning Studio.
