Backup Your WordPress Website – an Introduction

1st Apr 2013 | Posted by Eko S. | No Comments

Creating a new website should really come with this disclaimer – “Beware website owner! You will be forced to acquire new skills!”

Perhaps you decided to create a website to showcase your skills as a writer, a photographer or your new line of clothes… Whatever the reason, you should know that managing a website will require you to manage many things, over and above your core competency and the website’s purpose

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First, there’s the selection of the domain name, domain registration, choosing the right technology platform, etc. Should you decide to go with WordPress, the actual WP installation is fairly simple as is selecting plugins you might need. And voila, your website is done! Or is it?

Getting a website live is probably the simplest part of managing a website. Thereafter, you will have to ensure that you are updating the website frequently, catering to the requests and needs of your readers, and tweaking it here and there to attract new readers. But more fundamental to all that, is the process of monitoring to ensure that your website is up and running, and has a stringent backup process from Day 1.

Why do you need to backup your website?

• Your server is not immortal – strange things do happen to even the best of servers, sometimes without prior notice! You have to be prepared.
• Hackers abound – these brilliant coders are unstoppable. And if they have set their eyes on the servers hosting your site, it is highly likely that it will be brought down.
• Install error – Updating WordPress or installing a new plugin can cause your site to go down. In many cases, the only way to recover from it will be to use a backup.

These are just some of the most essential reasons why you need to invest in an effective backup mechanism, almost as soon as your website goes live.

A Simple Way

Now with WordPress you can either backup manually (i.e. log into FTP client to copy files and use a plugin to backup the database), but this is less than ideal as it is not an automated process and restoring a website from a backup like this can be tedious. Check out BackUpWordPress and BackWPup.

Alternately, you can sign up for a dedicated backup service that will ensure that your site is backed up in its entirety regularly. This will enable you to go back in time (within a specific timeframe) and restore an earlier version, if required. You will probably want to choose a service that makes sense for you and gives you peace of mind depending on your requirements. Check out blogVault, Backupbuddy, VaultPress or any of the others. They won’t be free, or as inexpensive as you’d like, but backup services make sense, and provide a layer of security that all that hard work in maintaining your site, naturally deserves.

- Written by Susan is with blogVault, a Premium WordPress Backup Service. -