I can’t stress enough how important it is to backup your WordPress website regularly. If anything goes wrong with your website, you need to have a backup of the files and database for your website, and have a way to restore from that backup successfully.
If your website gets hacked and has malicious code injected into your website, the best way to recover is from a full backup of your site from before the hack took place. This means you need to have a consistent backup plan, so you can recover if you need to. Sometimes manually cleaning your website and removing malicious code from a hacked website will not work efficiently. The best option is to restore from a backup to be certain the issue is resolved.
You might be making changes to your website, or you might be performing a software update that goes wrong. In situations like this it’s important to have a backup if you can’t fix the issue with your website easily. Having full backups of your website can mitigate and resolve these issues, in a worst case scenario.
Sometimes your website will crash and have glitches that cause unfixable damage to your WordPress website. This can happen at any point with WordPress or any kind of software on the web. You need to have a backup system in place once again, to solve this issue if it occurs.
“A backup is the main guarantee that your site can be completely restored after any problems and crashes.”
There are multiple ways to backup your website. One method is to manually backup all your files and your database on your web hosting cPanel server. Your hosting providers cPanel server has a backup and restore utility. Backing up your website from this system requires a manual approach but is very effective.
There are WordPress plugins that are designed specifically for backups. You can find one of these plugins and have it provide regular automated backups for your website.
My favourite way to keep all my clients website backed up is via GoDaddy Pro. It can automate a backup for all my clients websites, and provided a solution for a one click restore for each website. The system isn’t perfect, however. When dealing with backups it’s important to have the knowledge and skills to know how to use them effectively, as things can go wrong.
When it comes to restoring backups, it’s not always as straightforward as you may think. Things can go wrong and once a backup is restored, sometimes there are a list of other troubleshooting tasks to get the website back up and running as it should. You should consult an expert in situations like this, and it’s a good idea to have an agreement with your developer so that they can get things back up and running again successfully and quickly.