How to Backup a WordPress Site: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide
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A WordPress backup is an insurance policy for your website.
It is boring to think about when everything is going well. But when something goes wrong? That’s when you want a backup.
The quickest way to backup your WordPress site is with a backup plugin.
While backing up your WordPress website can seem like a big task, it doesn’t have to be. In this article, we will show you different methods on how to backup a WordPress site, and make sure it stays safe.
TL;DR: Backup your WordPress site in minutes with BlogVault, the best WordPress backup plugin. Install the plugin on your website, let it sync and you’re done. Get automated, scheduled backups for your site, and never experience downtime again.
Understanding WordPress backups
A good WordPress backup is a reliable, restorable copy of your website. You don’t want to need a backup and realise that it is corrupted, hacked, or simply incomplete.
This is a reality because all backups are not built the same.
There are different types of WordPress backups:
đź’ˇ WordPress backups are your website’s safety net. Whether you’re running a personal blog or a business website, backing up WordPress website content protects years of hard work from disappearing overnight. The good news? They can be completely automated, so you can backup WordPress without lifting a finger once it’s set up.
Option 1. Plugin backup [Recommended]
Backup plugins for WordPress save you unending hassle.
No messing about with FTP or cPanel to download copies of your website.
Backups take place automatically everyday. Need an additional backup before an update? Backup on demand.
The best part? Plugin backups are reliable.
All of these features, and much more in the best-in-class WordPress backup plugin, BlogVault.
Plus, setting up BlogVault on your website is super easy.
- Create an account on BlogVault, and simply add your site.
- Choose Automatic Installation and enter your wp-admin credentials.
And that’s it!
The site immediately starts to sync, which means a WordPress backup is in progress. The sync process will continue in the background, and you can go about your day.
Why we recommend BlogVault backups
WordPress Backups are a tedious necessity. The good news is that they can be automated.
You only need to think about backups when restoring your site or a part of it.
This is truly hands-free maintenance for your website.
BlogVault are the best WordPress backups because:
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many reasons why BlogVault backups are the best. We should know; we tested many of the backup plugins that are available.
Option 2. Web host backups
Most web hosts offer backups as a part of their services, sometimes as an add-on or bundled with their hosting plans. Some hosts will also backup their servers regardless, as a safety measure in case of failures.
To backup your WordPress site with your web host, first you need to figure out if backups are included in your plan or not. Either read the terms of your agreement, or reach out to their support.
With some web hosts, you can customise settings too. Set up automatic scheduled backups, choose how many backups you want to store, and so on.
We have complete reviews for backups and restores for the major web hosts: GoDaddy, Siteground, WP Engine, and Bluehost.
Why web host backups shouldn’t be your only backups
Web host backups are a good option for swift restores. They are generally stored on the same server as your site, so a full site restore is pretty fast.
However, they cannot and should not be your only backup solution. There are several occasions where people have lost their websites entirely, in spite of getting web host backups.
Common reasons why web host backups are unreliable:
These are only a few of the reasons that you should consider opting for independent backups for your website. Web hosts take a lot of precautions to protect their systems, but they are by no means invulnerable.
In August 2021, Web Host Canada experienced a major security breach, where hackers deleted much of the data on their servers. Through their live updates on the situation, it emerged that Web Host Canada was unsure about being able to retrieve the data at all. Fortunately though, after several sleepless nights, they were able to restore most of their clients’ sites.
A few months later, GoDaddy had a huge security breach, which compromised the database and SFTP credentials of about 1.2 million users. Data wasn’t lost at that time, but the hackers had access to the websites’ databases and backends for over 2 months. Anything could have happened.
Option 3. Manual backup
Manual site backups are the least time-effective and most tedious to take. If anyone has to rely on a manual backup process, chances are they will start cutting corners and skipping backups, regardless of how dedicated they are. Manual backups are time-consuming and that time is honestly better spent doing something more productive.
Having said that, it is useful to know exactly how to take a manual backup; a bit like knowing how to drive a stick, when all the other cars are automatic.
The first thing to understand about manual backups is that you are going to have to take two partial backups for a complete WordPress backup. That means, you need to backup the files and the database separately, and save the two backups together each time.
If you need a copy of your site, we still recommend using a backup plugin to ensure the copy is error-free. You can then export the site easily from a backup
Part 1: File backups
- cPanel backups: Most web hosts provide cPanel, a popular control panel software, to manage your website. However, your web host may use a different one, like Plesk or Webmin. There will be a tool like File Manager on cPanel or Plesk, which will allow you to see your website files. Select all the folders you can see, and download them from File Manager as a zipped archive.
- FTP: If your host doesn’t provide a control panel, then you can use FTP to download a copy of your website’s files. It is a little more time-consuming to do so though, and you will need an FTP client like FileZilla or Cyberduck to connect to your site.
- SSH: If you are comfortable with the command line, you can use WP-CLI and SSH to download your site files in a zipped format.
Part 2: Database backups
- phpMyAdmin: If you have cPanel access, click on phpMyAdmin to access your database. You will need your database login credentials, which are available in your wp-config file or your hosting account. You can also get database backups by accessing phpMyAdmin directly from your browser.
- SSH: As a companion to file backups from SSH, you can also download a database backup with WP-CLI.
Why we strongly recommend against relying on manual backups
Perhaps you want to make a one-time archive of your site, and feel that springing for a plugin is overkill. However, manual backups are plagued with problems.
These scenarios may sound nightmarish—because they are—but they are actual experiences of customers before they chose to use BlogVault.
What to back up on a WordPress site
The short answer to this question is everything.
Full backups with a plugin are your safest bet.
Partial backups are useless for restores, causing many failures and crashed sites. We don’t recommend ever taking backups of just this or just that.
You can partially restore a website, say a file or a plugin, but always from a complete WordPress backup.
When we say everything, it is sometimes tricky to understand exactly what we mean. So here is a short primer on the structure of your WordPress website.
There are 2 main components of your WordPress website: the files and the database.
- The files contain WordPress core files, plugin files, theme files, configuration and settings files, and uploaded files.
- The database contains everything else, like user information, posts, pages, links, comments, and other types of user-generated content. This data is stored in the form of tables like wp_posts and wp_comments for example.
Together, they constitute your WordPress website.
You will see a lot of ways to back up the WordPress database or just the WordPress files, as we mentioned before. We advise against doing this, because it becomes much more difficult to restore a website from a partial backup. Always take full WordPress backups, and cherry pick the bits you want to restore thereafter.
Backups are non-negotiable
WordPress is prone to errors on occasion. Therefore, to protect your website if it crashes or if content gets inadvertently deleted, you need to have a recent WordPress backup stored on an external server; that is, at a different location from your web host server.
Recent backups can save your website, tons of work and all the resources you have invested in your website.
Web host or server issues
Independent and redundant backups are a must.
Your web host stores your website on a server, which is essentially a computer. And just like any other computer, servers can also crash for various reasons. Software issues can lead to servers getting corrupted in unrecoverable ways. There can be network connection errors due to outages, electricity surges, or physical damage caused by animals chewing through the cables.
Even environmental issues such as natural disasters can cause server unavailability. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused flooding and power outages to many data centers in New York, affecting millions of websites. In another instance in May 2021, a fire destroyed one of the data centers of OVHCloud.
Therefore, an externally stored WordPress backup is critical. If your backups are stored on the same server or even with the same host, there’s always a possibility that you can lose both of them with no chance of getting your website back. But if you have backups stored independent of the host, you can restore your website on a different server without issue.
Many backup plugins can connect to external cloud services as well, so you can backup your site to Dropbox or even the odd archive on Google Drive if you so choose.
Errors due to installation or updates
Who hasn’t had a site crash because of a failed plugin update?
Themes and plugins improve the functionality of your website greatly. However, as these are often developed by different programmers, they don’t always play well together. Avoiding them is impossible, but you can prepare for potential compatibility issues.
Take an on-demand backup right before you install or update your site.
Over and above that, BlogVault does a visual regression test before an update. If there are differences, you’ll get an alert instantly.
Therefore it is important to backup WordPress sites, especially before updating complex plugins such as Yoast, WooCommerce, and Elementor.
Malware infections
On average 30,000 websites are hacked every day. Even the best security systems are not 100% invulnerable.
Malware causes a lot of distress and loss to a business, but in different ways.
Redirect malware steals organic traffic and visitors from your website and sends them to a spam website. A phishing attack tries to scam your visitors into giving up personal information. Other hackers just wipe out data and content from websites in defacement attacks.
A security plugin like MalCare can clean most hacks from your website in minutes, but it cannot bring back content and files if a hacker has deleted them. In this scenario, backups are the only saving grace.
We don’t recommend backups as a way to recover from malware attacks, because backups can also have malware on them. But in cases of defacement, it is the only way to get your website back.
Human error
Human error is inevitable, especially when it comes to things like maintaining a website. You may forget to renew the hosting on time, or pages or posts may get deleted or changed accidentally. Or there may be errors of judgment, for example, if you applied some settings that result in a side effect or if you made certain changes to the UI but didn’t like it afterwards and therefore want to roll back to the previous version. To avoid getting stuck in circumstances such as these, you should have a frequent backup of your website.