Ensuring your WordPress site is backed up regularly is vital for protecting your data, maintaining business continuity, and safeguarding your business’s reputation. In this guide, the KIJO team will walk you through how to backup a WordPress site effectively, ensuring peace of mind and keeping you prepared for any unexpected issues.
Backing up your WordPress website is crucial for several reasons, as it ensures you have a safeguard against potential issues that can disrupt your website’s functionality, security, and data integrity. Here’s why backups are essential:
Having a reliable backup system provides peace of mind and allows for quick restoration, ensuring minimal downtime and disruption to your website.
Storing your WordPress backups securely and accessibly is vital for effective disaster recovery. Ideally, backups should be stored in multiple locations to minimise risks.
Cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS S3, or OneDrive are excellent choices because they are secure, accessible from anywhere, and integrate well with WordPress backup plugins. To enhance security, ensure your backups are encrypted and restrict access to authorised users only.
Hosting providers often offer backup services as part of their plans, but it’s imperative you ensure your provider is fully comprehensive and reliable. If your hosting server fails or is compromised because it’s cheap or of poor quality, your backups might be affected too. Using hosting backups in combination with other methods does provide an extra layer of protection.
Physical storage options like external hard drives can also be useful, giving you direct control over your backups. However, they are vulnerable to theft, damage, or hardware failure, so storing them in a secure, climate-controlled location is essential.
Remote servers or dedicated backup services, such as Jetpack VaultPress Backup or Solid Backups, provide specialised storage and restoration solutions for WordPress websites, though these do come with additional costs.
For ultimate security, it’s recommended to follow the 3-2-1 rule: maintain three copies of your backups, store them on two different types of media, and keep one off-site.
Regardless of where you store your backups, automation and regular testing are key. Use plugins like UpdraftPlus to schedule automatic backups, ensuring your data is always up to date. Additionally, periodically test your backups to confirm they are complete and functional, so you can restore your website quickly in case of an emergency. By diversifying your backup storage and adopting good practices, you can safeguard your WordPress website against data loss and downtime.
There are three primary ways to backup a WordPress site:
Let’s explore all of these options.
A manual backup involves downloading your website’s files and database to your local computer. Here’s how to do it:
Whilst effective, manual backups can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially for those without technical experience. If you want to take charge of your backups (and not work with a hosting provider who would do all your backups for you), we’d recommend backing up your WordPress site using a trusted plugin.
Related Read: KIJO’s 15 Best WordPress Plugins
The most hassle-free option if you’re managing backups yourself are backup plugins. These tools automate the process, saving time and reducing the risk of human error.
Working with a professional hosting provider that offers routine backups is truly the best way to go if you want to remove the hassle of backing up your website yourself. Our hosting solution creates full backups automatically without a plugin or manual action. All of the 100+ websites we look after have 99.99% uptime and load in under a second in time too.
You can read more about our KIJO Cloud service below.
Related Read: KIJO Cloud – Our Comprehensive Hosting Service
Having a backup is just the first step. You should develop a disaster recovery plan outlining how to restore your website quickly if needed. Share this plan with your team so everyone knows what to do in an emergency.
Backing up your WordPress site isn’t just a technical task—it’s an essential part of managing your business’s online presence. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can safeguard your website against unforeseen issues and focus on growing your business with confidence.
Need help implementing a reliable backup solution via a comprehensive WordPress hosting service? Book a complimentary, 30-minute consultation with our Head of Partnerships & Co-Founder, Kirk Thompson. During your call, we’ll review your website’s current performance, discuss your goals, analyse competitor insights, and explore the potential of a WordPress-powered site. Let’s bring your vision to life—book your free consultation via the link below:
