If you’ve ever heard someone say “backing up,” chances are that person meant making a backup. A backup can be called a copy of your data stored in some other place for later use. You might think that backing up your WordPress site is easy, but there are many things that can go wrong along the way.
You can lose your website’s SEO performance, or all internal linking can stop working if you perform backup in the wrong way. And you know very well how much loss you will face if you lose your SEO and internal linking. Also, If you are not from a technical background then you should consider working with a WordPress maintenance service provider.
Why Website Back Up is Important
Backups are crucial for ensuring that your website stays safe from hackers and other threats. If you don’t regularly back up your site then you risk losing valuable information such as customer details, credit card numbers, and personal photos.
Website backups are essential to ensure that your site remains accessible even after a disastrous strike. Your mental health will also do better knowing that your website is safe from hackers or other malicious attacks.
When to Backup Your WordPress Website
Backups aren’t easy to do. They require planning, preparation, and execution — and sometimes, they just don’t seem to work out. It is risky to do it manually, especially when you are not from a developer background. A user would not know when any technical glitch comes, and they lose their website data. You can get help from WordPress maintenance services, and WordPress maintenance services benefits you in several other ways and not only with backup.
Our recommendation is to always backup your WordPress website at least one time per week. This way, you’ll never miss essential files or databases, and you’ll be able to recover quickly if anything does go wrong.
If you’re comfortable with the idea of risking critical data, you can try backing up your website every day. Just remember that you won’t be able to restore everything immediately, and you’ll have to reupload your images, videos, and other media to your server.
What is the best way to backup a WordPress Site?
There are several ways to backup your WordPress site. Manual backups include copying files offsite manually, either via FTP or cloud storage like Dropbox. Other options include free plugins such as BackupBuddy, WP-DBManager, and others. The paid plugins include Duplicator Pro, BackWPup, and others.
Backup a WordPress Site Manually
Manual backups are essential to protecting your web presence against data loss, but they aren’t always easy to do. In fact, there are several steps involved in manually backing up a WordPress site, including creating a folder structure, and exporting the site files and database from two separate locations Here’s how to perform each step.
How to Backup a WordPress Website Files Manually
There are many different ways to back up your WordPress file manually. Let’s know how to back up your files in three different ways. However, all these ways are difficult to do and require lots of technical knowledge and risks.
A. Backup file With CPanel
Manually backing up your WordPress files with cPanel might just be the easiest way because it requires no technical knowledge. All you need to do is log into your host’s dashboard and download the files manually. You can find instructions here. However, not all web hosts offer cPanel, so you might have to use another method if that’s the case.
You can access your cPanel on your host’s dashboard. You can download the file from the cPanel that is located in the home directory.
B. Backup file With FTP
For this process, you need to connect to your server via FTP and download the files: Find application credentials: You’re looking for a server address or hostname, username, and password. Sometimes, you may also need a port number. Generally, you’ll find them on your host account’s dashboard for your site.
Find out what type of connection your hosting provider offers. Some providers offer both secure and unsecured connections; others only provide one or the other. Secure connections encrypt data during transit, ensuring privacy and security. Unsecured connections don’t encrypt data, making it easier for attackers to intercept traffic.
C. Backup file With SSH
SSH (Secure Shell) allows you to communicate directly with your web server. It doesn’t provide a pretty user experience, nor does it offer a nice graphical user interface. However, its sheer power, speed, flexibility, and level of automatization can be an absolute lifesaving tool for any developer who needs to migrate websites quickly and easily.
It’s also worth mentioning that developers do not only use SSH. Many sysadmins use it as well. For example, if you’re running a Linux-based web server on the cloud, you might want to connect to it via SSH instead of using a browser or some other client application. This way, you’ll have complete control over what happens on your website.
How Back Website Database Manually?
There are two ways to go ahead and do it – either you can export the entire database via phpMyAdmin, or you can use the built-in backup feature within WP itself. We’ll take both methods one step at a time.
A. Backup Database with phpMyAdmin
The process involves exporting your database to a text file, which you can then upload to your computer. You can log into phpMyAdmin. It can either be done directly from your web hosting control panel or through cPanel.
Navigate to the Databases tab, export it, and select the file type you’d like to download (.sql). Finally, store the file under the name you want. And then you will get a copy of your entire database stored locally. Now, you just need to upload it somewhere safe.
B. Backup Database with SSH
You can use SSH to store the database too, you just need to have WP-CLI installed for this. In your site’s root directory navigate to the wp-config.php file. Rename the file with an appropriate name for your database and download the file to your local machine. Now you are all done with backing up your database.
Backup a WordPress Site With a Plugin
Plugins are an easy, fast way to perform backups of your WordPress sites. They’re especially useful if you’re not comfortable doing it yourself because they make the process much simpler. But what happens when you choose one of the many free options out there? Does it really cover everything? And how do you know whether or not you’ve backed up the entire site? We made some research on some popular solutions and found they offer different levels of coverage.
Here are our picks for the best free plugins for backing up your WordPress site.
- BackWPup
- WordPress Backup Pro
- UpdraftPlus
- All-in-one WP Migration
How to Backup your WordPress Website with BackWPup
BackWPup is one of the finest plugins for users to back up your site, and it is easy to use compared to other backup plugins. This plugin will help you to save your complete installation, including wp-content. Learn step by step to create a WordPress site backup with the BackupWPup plugin.
Conclusion
“Backing Up Your Site Is Time Intensive And Risky”.
Manually backing up your site can be time-consuming and incredibly risky because it involves backing up your files and databases separately. You could lose everything. Thankfully, there are plugins that make this process a little less complicated and ensure that you never lose a single piece of content again.
We strongly advise you against it. Instead, we recommend using a WordPress backup plugin. There are amazing different options like using WordPress maintenance services to back up your WordPress website.
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