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This is the boring part of owning a blog or website, the monotonous administration that no one can be bothered with, so it often gets forgotten about or procrastinated on until eventually…disaster strikes.
There are a number of things that could cause a website to go offline. A lot of the time it’s something as simple as a client forgetting to pay their hosting bill. But there’s a range of different things that could happen to your website. Servers crashing, compatibility issues with routine updates, getting hacked, malware or even simple accidents. All of these things happen more than you’d think!
Having a backup of your website is your insurance policy for these scenarios. If something goes wrong, simply restore your website and you’re back in business.
How do I backup my WordPress website?
There are plugins that you can use to backup your website, as well as hosting providers that take care of it for you.
For the sake of this blog post, I’m assuming you don’t have automatic backups with your host and we’ll cover how to manually backup your website for free with one simple WordPress plugin, as well as a paid plugin that can automate and simplify the process for you.
All-in-One WP Migration
Price: Free (Premium add-ons available)
All-in-One WP Migration is a free plugin by ServMask enabling you to manually create backups at the click of a button, and as the same suggests, you can then use these backups to easily migrate your site to another WordPress installation if needed.
- Download and install the plugin to your WordPress website
- In the WordPress menu on the left-hand side of your dashboard, go to the All-in-One WP Migration tab, then click “Backups”
- Click “Create Backup”
And that’s it. From there, your backups will be stored locally on your site, but you can also download them to your PC which I definitely recommend doing. Upload a copy to your Google Drive or another cloud storage platform for safekeeping.
In the event that you need to restore that backup, you can just go back to “backups” in the All-in-One WP Migration tab of your WordPress menu and click “restore” on whichever version you want to revert back to. Or you can also go to “Import” and upload the file if you downloaded the backup to your PC.
I love the simplicity of the free version of All-In-One WP Migration, but ServMask also offers a range of premium add-ons to add extra functionality to the plugin.
BackupBuddy
Price: From $80.00 USD
BackupBuddy is a plugin by iThemes that adds a bit more firepower to your backup strategy. Similarly to All-In-One WP Migration, BackupBuddy creates a full backup of the entire WordPress database and files, but then it also lets you schedule your backups automatically at a range of intervals; hourly, twice daily, daily, every other day, bi-weekly, weekly, monthly and more.
On top of that, you can download the .zip file or automatically store your backups to your preferred cloud storage service for an added layer of protection.
This is a fantastic plugin for a more complete and automated solution as your website and business start to grow.
BackupBuddy are also running a 20% off promotion through June 30 with Coupon Code ITMS20.
Key Takeaways
Just like you back up your iPhone or computer, backing up your website serves the same purpose. If something bad happens, you can simply restore a previous version that you have backed up rather than starting over from scratch. It just takes a little bit of time to avoid putting your business and brand at unnecessary risk.
