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Backup your WordPress site

Backing up your blog is extremely important and should be done regularly. As the owner of a self-hosted WordPress site, you are responsible for your own data. If there is a catastrophic failure in your server, or you make a serious mistake, you could lose everything if you don’t keep regular backups. It is also one of the best ways to be able to easily recover in the unfortunately event of a malware. No matter your preferred method a backup must include two things. 

  • A copy of the database that includes all tables
  • A copy of your WordPress files

We often hear from folks who thought they were backing up correctly but learned the hard way that they were not. Does one of these describe you?

  • Only backing up the database or only backup up the site files but not both.
  • Assuming the host is handling backups or that more backups are available then actually are.
  • Incorrectly or incompletely setting up a backup plugin. It’s present and active but not connected to a backup destination.

Thankfully, backing up a WordPress site is not very hard. Our #1 recommendation for backing up your site is to use a plugin that backs up automatically to an external storage account. In that realm there are a number of options but these are our favorites.

Updraft Plus

If you are looking for a free option, Updraft Plus is your best bet. That said, spending money the features for their paid plan is absolutely something that makes sense if your website is important to your business. It’s easy to use and can connect to a dizzying array of remote storage options – Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive, FTP, email and much more. If you don’t want to use one of those options you can upgrade to Updraft Vault and send backups to their own cloud storage. You can use it to restore specific files or directories or even migrate your site.

Blogvault

Blogvault is another excellent backup option, offering incremental, cloud-based backups, easy one click recovery options, migrations and free staging sites. They even have a special backup plan for WooCommerce sites.

VaultPress by JetPack

If you like (or are already) using WordPress’ JetPack plugin this option might be for you. VaultPress is the backup solution included in the paid JetPack licenses. It offers more then just backups, too. The premium license for small businesses has SEO and security related tools that are excellent as well.