Backing up your WordPress site is something you'll definitely want to learn, to keep you from having heartache. In this article, we're going to make the topic of WordPress backups as painless as possible by covering everything you need to know.
Learning how to save a WordPress website is one of those things that is usually considered not urgent. … Until something happens to your website, and that's where it all gets incredibly urgent (but maybe too late).
There is nothing fun or exciting about backing up WordPress. But it's something you'll definitely want to learn to prevent a headache.
In this guide, we will therefore present:
- How often to backup WordPress
- The different types of WordPress content you should back up
- Where to store WordPress backups
- The best WordPress backup plugins
WordPress 101 Backups: Why They're Important & How To Do Them
In a perfect world, backing up your WordPress website would be a waste of time and effort because nothing ever goes wrong.
However, your WordPress website doesn't exist in a perfect world - it does exist in the real world. And in the real world, several things can go wrong on your WordPress website:
- You can make a mistake, like permanently deleting important content by accident (like an Elementor design you spent hours working on!)
- A malicious actor can access your website and inject malware or cause problems.
- Your web host may have a failure which leads to data loss
- A plugin or a WordPress theme can block your website.
- A newly applied update can suddenly cause a problem.
In all of these situations, you are dealing with the potential loss of all or part of your WordPress website.
Without a recent backup, any of these situations can be catastrophic.
However, if you always have a recent backup on hand, the worst-case scenario is a minor inconvenience - not a disaster.
Long story short, if you have a WordPress website, you need to make regular backups of your WordPress website.
Do you need to back up WordPress yourself? Doesn't your web host do it?
In general, you shouldn't rely on your web host to back up your WordPress website.
Although most web hosts do some type of backup, there is no guarantee on the frequency and completeness of these backups. For your planning, you will need to treat them as if they don't exist.
With most web hosts, the only way to ensure that you have a complete and recent backup of your website is to do it yourself.
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However, there are a few exceptions here.
Namely, if you are using top quality managed WordPress hosting providers like Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel, etc.
These types of managed WordPress hosting implement strong automatic backup strategies with offsite storage - these amenities are one reason why managed WordPress hosting costs more.
How many times should you backup your WordPress website?
How often you need to back up WordPress depends on how often you change your website.
For example, if you have a static portfolio website that never changes, you don't really need to save every day. You could just do monthly backups.
On the other hand, if you have a blog where you post a new article every day and your readers leave a lot of comments, then you will probably need to save it every day.
And if you have a WooCommerce online store at high traffic where orders always arrive, you will likely need to have a real-time backup solution that records changes right away so you never miss your valuable order data.
To help you find a timeline that makes sense for your website, ask yourself this question:
If I lost the data for the last X days (or hours), would it negatively affect my website?
If X equals one day for your website, you should run daily backups.
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Remember to consider other content beyond how often you create new content yourself. Backups also capture user-generated content, like native WordPress comments.
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For example, if you have a blog where you only post once a week, but your visitors leave tons of valuable comments every day, then you would still need to schedule daily backups so that you don't miss those comments. if you ever need to restore your website.
Finally, if you have a website with constant activity, like a WooCommerce store, forum, BuddyPress website, etc., then you will need to use a real-time incremental backup solution.
WordPress vs Database Backup Files
There are two parts to backing up your WordPress website:
- WordPress files
- WordPress database
Your website files are files like:
- Theme / plugins files
Image / media uploads to wp-content / uploads folders
Your website database contains content such as:
- Content of blog posts
- Contents of the pages
- Element designs
- Comments
- Form submissions (if you store form submissions so that you can view them in your dashboard)
- Settings
When you back up your website, you need to back up your files and your database.
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However, depending on how your website works, you may not have to save both parts with the same frequency.
For this reason, the backup plugins which we will discuss below allow you to choose to backup specific parts of your website (for example, just your database).
Let's go back to the example of a blog where you:
- Post content once a week (including uploading images for the new blog post)
- Receive lots of valuable feedback from readers every day
In such a situation, you can choose to:
- Back up your website files once a week. This would ensure that you always have the file downloads of your last blog post.
- Back up your website database every day. This would always ensure that you have the latest comments from visitors, even on days when you aren't posting a new blog post.
The advantage of this approach is that you use less resources by avoiding the need to back up the same set of files every day when nothing changes. Even on a large website, your database is usually quite small and easy to back up. However, files on a large website can take up a huge amount of space.
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Some tools also offer an approach called incremental backups. With incremental backups, you only back up your entire website during the initial backup. Then subsequent backups only save new changes to your website.
For example, if you were to publish a new blog post, the Incremental Backup Tool would simply update the backup to include the latter, rather than taking a completely new backup.
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With this incremental approach, you also have the ability to make real-time backups of your website by automatically saving every change as it occurs. Again, this is important for WooCommerce online stores, forums, etc… where you will have constant changes to your website's database.
Where should you store WordPress backups?
You should not store your website backups on your WordPress website server, which some plugins give you the option to do.
If you store your backup on the same server as your real-time WordPress website, this is still a single point of failure. It might help you in certain situations, like when your website accidentally goes down, but if something is wrong with your server, you will lose both your website and your backup.
There are two places where you can safely store WordPress backups:
- Your local computer - you download your backup files to your hard drive.
- Cloud storage - you host your backups in the "cloud" using services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or others.
If you have a critical WordPress website, the US Computer Emergency Preparedness Team (plus many others) recommend the 3-2-1 backup rule :
- Keep three copies of your WordPress website: one main (your website) and two backups
- Keep files on two different types of media
- Keep a copy offsite (e.g. outside your home or business)
An easy way to implement this WordPress website would be to use both your computer and the cloud storage. For example, you can:
- Download a backup to your hard drive.
- Store another backup on Amazon S3.
Put it all together
We've covered a lot of backup theory in this section, so let's summarize what we've learned.
Every WordPress website needs a backup. From the mistakes you make to the mistakes of others or attacks by malicious actors, a lot can go wrong. A reliable backup ensures that none of these issues are devastating.
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If you host your website with a premium managed WordPress host, they may already have a reliable, offsite backup procedure in place.
However, if you are not using any of these premium services then you should not rely on your web host's backups to keep your website safe, you should create your own backup strategy.
How often you back up your website depends on how often you or others change its content.
A more effective strategy may be to back up your website files and database on different schedules. For example, you can:
- Back up your website files once a week
- Back up your website database every day
This minimizes the resources used by your backups, while allowing you to back up the most important information every day (which is stored in your website's database).
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Three best plugins WordPress backup
1. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin. It is active on over two million WordPress websites while maintaining an excellent 4,8-star rating out of over 3500 comments.
In the next section, we'll show you how you can use UpdraftPlus to back up your WordPress website.
UpdraftPlus allows you to run manual or automatic backups on your WordPress website. If you go for automatic backups, you can choose a custom schedule that works best for your website.
When you back up your website, you can choose to back up:
- Your entire website (files + database)
- Just your files
- Just your database
You can also automatically upload your backups to remote storage options such as:
- Google Drive
- dropbox
- Amazon S3
- Backblaze
Google Cloud - Microsoft Azure
- UpdraftVault (the developer's own cloud storage service)
- … More
Finally, if you need to restore from a backup, UpdraftPlus offers its own tool that makes this fairly easy.
Most WordPress websites will only need the free version. However, the developer also sells a number of premium extensions that can help make:
- WordPress multisite backups
- Schedule backups at specific times of the day (instead of a rough schedule). For example, you can run your backups during times of low traffic.
- Off-site storage locations. For example, you can back up your website to Google Drive and Amazon S3 at the same time.
- Incremental backups.
- A WordPress migration tool.
- More options to back up your database.
Price : Free. You can purchase individual add-ons or get a bundle of all add-ons for $ 70.
2. Jetpack Backup
Jetpack Backup, formerly known as VaultPress, is an automatic backup service that is part of the all-in-one Jetpack Plugin from Automattic, the same folks behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce.
Jetpack Backup offers two types of backups, depending on your plan.
With Jetpack Personal, the entry-level backup plan, you get daily backups to a secure offsite location. Jetpack will store all your backups for 30 days, and you can restore them from any backup with just one click.
With Jetpack Professional, you will be able to make incremental backups in real time.
Jetpack will always back up your entire website every 24 hours to its offsite storage. However, it also uses square brackets to automatically update smaller changes on your website in real time.
These real-time incremental backups include:
- WordPress database changes - eg, new blog post post, Elementor edit, new comments.
- The tables of the WooCommerce database - p. eg new orders.
Any associated file changes - for example, uploading an image to a blog post.
For other changes, such as installing a plugin, you have to wait for the next daily backup.
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Jetpack Professional also stores unlimited backups (vs. 30 days for Personal) and lets you restore from any backup.
Overall, if you are running something like a WooCommerce online store, forum, subscription website, etc. then you will probably want to use this real-time incremental approach.
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Price : Although the Jetpack plugin is available for free at WordPress.org, Jetpack Backup is only available on premium subscriptions. The Personal plan costs $ 3,50 per month or $ 39 per year.
The Professional plan, which allows additional real-time backups, costs $ 29 per month or $ 299 per year.
3. BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is a premium WordPress backup plugin from iThemes.
It allows you to save all or part of your WordPress website with your own personalized calendar. For example, you can choose to back up some / all of the following types of content:
- Base
- Themes:
- Plugins
- Media
You can set your backups to run automatically on a schedule ranging from hours to months (or more).
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To store your backups securely, iThemes offers its own cloud storage location called BackupBuddyStash. You can also connect to other storage locations such as:
- Amazon S3
- Google Drive
- dropbox
If you need to restore from a backup, you have options to restore all or just part of your website. For example, if you don't need a full website restore, you can just roll back your database.
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Other useful tools include options for website migration and WordPress cloning, including a deployment feature that helps you build your own test WordPress website.
Price : BackupBuddy starts at $ 80 for use on a single website. This plan also offers 1 GB of BackupBuddyStashcloud storage. You can purchase additional storage starting at $ 35 per year for an additional 5 GB.
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Conclusion
Here is ! That's all for this article which explains backup on WordPress and offers some plugins for this task. If you have comments or suggestions, do not hesitate to let us know in the reserved section.
However, you can also consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on the WordPress blog creation or the one on Divi: the best WordPress theme of all time.
But meanwhile, share this article on your different social networks.
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