After working in IT for 30 years, I have learned the hard way of the importance of doing a backup of your project. It seems obvious to say backup your website, but how many people actually do it? We have been contacted numerous times by people who have issues with their websites that haven’t done backups and the only solution is to completely rebuild their website.
Backup Plugin
With WordPress, there are a number of backup solutions out there. Our favourite is UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus has over 1 million installs and has a 5-star rating in the Plugin Repository.
It enables you to back up your WordPress site automatically into the Cloud and in the event of any issues, you can restore with a click of a button. The free version enables you to utilise popular cloud services such as Google Drive or Dropbox. The premium version also enables you to back up to your own FTP server and also allows more control over when the backups are run.
Backup Strategy
At Lens Digital, we are big fans of this plugin and install it on every WordPress site we build. However, it is not just about performing backups, you need to think how about your backup strategy. How often do you need to backup your site? How many copies of backups do you need to keep? Have you tested that you can restore from your backups? Are your backups secure? Are you backing up all of the components of the website?
Unless the site has a lot of changing content, then, in our opinion, daily backups are more than enough. We will also do extra manual backups if we are making any significant changes to the site or upgrading WordPress core, themes and plugins. It is also a good habit to make this the first plugin that you setup and install, even during development.
Don’t wait until it is too late. Make sure you think about your backup strategy before you start building your website.
Lens Digital offer a WordPress Care plan where, for a fixed monthly fee, we take care of managing your WordPress installation for you. For a free no-obligation chat, please do get contact us.
