Your web design/WordPress tip for today:
Always back your site up regularly!
These days, a lot of hosting companies offer site backups but if yours doesn’t or you want more control of exactly what gets backed up and when, there are several options on the market.
Here are the options I recommend most often:
- Updraft Plus – is a good plugin with both a free and premium version
- BackupBuddy – a premium plugin that’s $50/yr for 1 site and also includes migrations and more
- VaultPress – part of the Jetpack service. You’ll need a subscription for it, starting at $39/yr per site
- BlogVault – it’s not a plugin, rather it’s a SaaS solution that not only offers backups but migrations and is $89/yr
- BackWPup – a free plugin with several options
All of these options (and most others on the market) will allow you to set a schedule – daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Most of these options backup the WP database but some also allow you to backup everything. And most of them allow offsite backups – you can connect to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon AWS, or other services to store your backups. Some will even email you the backup files.
For most sites, I recommend the free version of Updraft Plus and if your site is mostly static or you don’t blog often, it’s adequate. You can probably also get away with only backing up your site monthly.
But if you have a big site or ecommerce or courses or other content heavy stuff like videos or long blog posts, I typically recommend BackupBuddy. And I recommend you backup at least weekly – unless you blog every day or multiple times per week. In that case, I recommend you backup (at least your database) daily.
I can’t tell you how many websites I’ve rebuilt for people because they had no backup of their site at all. You’re asking for trouble if you don’t have a backup solution in place.
Bottom line: BACK YOUR SITE UP REGULARLY!!!
(By the way – this goes for your computer too! Mac comes with TimeMachine and I know Windows based pc’s have solutions as well. External hard drives are cheap these days. Do yourself a favor: invest in one and get your backups scheduled, pronto.)
