Why Is Backing Up Your Site Necessary?
A wise person says your WordPress site is only as secure as your last backup. Well, I am not sure someone said that, but even so, the sentiment is true. If you have a WordPress site and you want to ensure you’ll keep having that WordPress site in the future, keeping it backed up is key. Which is why you are reading this post. So, let’s start.Why does backing up WordPress matter?
“Why backing up a WordPress site is necessary” in the first place? And that’s a question in need of an answer. After all, once you pay a company to host your site on the web, they should be responsible for keeping your site secure, keeping hackers out, and ensuring nothing goes wrong. Right? Well, the realities are a bit more complicated.Why Backing Up Is Essential?
While any reputable host will do everything in their power to protect your site, they can guarantee nothing will ever go wrong, or if something does go wrong, they can fix it.Setting up a proper backup routine gives you agency and a sense of security that if and when something goes wrong, you can restore your site to the date and time you want. There are some other less obvious reasons as well.
Some Reasons for Backing Up WordPress:
- Your host might have a technical problem destroying your site and your backups
- Your site and your backups might get hacked
- Your hosting provider may be bought or go out of business
- You may want to migrate your site in the future
First Reason
Just like your computer might break down due to a technical or software malfunction, so can your host. After all, web servers are just large computers. If your web server breaks down there is a good chance your backups disappear along with your site. If have seen this happen. If this catastrophe should come to pass, the only way to get your content back online the only way to get your content backup online is to rely on a third-party backup on a third-party service you set up yourself.Second Reason
No matter how secure your site is, there’s always a chance it will get hacked or fall victim to the same form of malicious incursion, either through fault, or through the host’s fault, or something else. When this happens, you can’t trust any of your files or the content in your database, and the safest thing to do is to revert to an earlier version of your site that was backed up before the incursion occurred. Sometimes this means restoring your site to what it was a couple of days ago. Sometimes you have to go back weeks, or even months. It all depends on how the malicious incursion comes in and what it did. The challenging thing is sometimes the hack or incursion also encompasses your server backups. In this situation, having a secondary backup stored on a third-party service ensures you have unhacked backups to return to.The Third Reason
May seem less likely but it’s still something to consider. Your hosting provider may choose to either discontinue your service. It might get bought by a different company or even a close-up shop. In these cases, it’s your responsibility to move your site and all its contents to another location before the site goes offline. In some cases, you will only get a couple of weeks or maybe only a couple of days to do this. And in some extreme cases, you may only learn that your host is no longer available after going offline. Having proper backups and a secondary backup on a third-party service, allows you to restore your site to a new location with ease.The Fourth and Final Reason:
It is not really about backups, but more about data portability. Some of the plugins featured in this course allow you to migrate your site to a new host. After all, if you think about it, that’s just restoring your site from a backup to a new location.So, now that you know the why, let’s take a closer look at the “Ways to Back Up Your WordPress Site” in the next tutorial.
What to Backup WordPress Site and When to Do It
Manage Your WordPress Backup
WordPress is the application, the active theme, and plugins, the databases holding all the data and the uploads. When backing up a WordPress site, each of these different components needs to be backed up, but they don’t need to be backed up at the same frequency.When to Back Up
Four main components are working together to form the WordPress site. The components will be shown shortly first and then we will discuss them below in detail.- WordPress
- Once a month or less
- Themes and plugins
- Once a month and any time changes are made
- Database
- Monthly, weekly daily, or hourly depending on usage
- Uploads
- Monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly depending on usage
What to Back Up
1. WordPress Application
First, The WordPress application does not technically have to be backed up at all. You can always download and install a fresh copy from wordpress.org. However, the core install of WordPress includes custom configuration files like .htaccess and wp-config.php which control how WordPress operates on this to get everything working smoothly. That said, WordPress core and its configuration files rarely change so these can be backed up at a cadence of once a month or even once a quarter without running the risk of anything getting lost. In this process, you also have to keep in mind that WordPress updates quite frequently so any old backups will hold older versions of WordPress.2. Themes and plugins
Second, the active themes are what control the appearance of your WordPress site, and active plugins control extended functionality. These are core elements that need to be backed up to ensure the site runs smoothly and consistently even after being restored from a backup.Themes and plugins should be backed up once a month, and any time you make a configuration change or add new themes or plugins.
3. Database
Thirdly, the databases, on the other hand, are where all the data sits, including posts, pages, comments, and all other entries as well as references to any media elements uploaded to the site. Depending on how much usage the site gets, this database needs to be backed up on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis to ensure no data is lost.4. Uploads
Fourth and finally, any uploads made to the site, be it images, video, audio, or documents, end up in the wp-content/uploads folder, unless some other non-standard location has been introduced via a plugin or a custom development. All these uploads, need to be backed up to ensure they remain available even after the site is restored from a backup.Over time, the uploads folder can get large, but the files uploaded usually don’t change once they’re uploaded. For this reason, it may be worth the effort to find a backup solution that only backs up the changed files in the upload folder on an ongoing basis. So, you don’t end up with multiple full backups of the same files. As for the database, depending on how much content is published on the site, the uploads folder might need to be backed up on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis, to ensure no data is lost.
