Backing Up Your WordPress Website
While security is very important to WordPress, bad things can happen, just as they can on any other site. Websites can be hacked, updates can go wrong, servers can go down, etc. You can sleep more soundly at night if you know your bases are covered with WordPress backups.
Some hosting companies do make automatic backups of their hosting accounts so it may be worth investigating as to whether that is the case with your own host. It’s up to you on whether you deem that sufficient coverage if they do offer it. Personally, I would recommend having a solution in place that creates full site backups that are stored externally from your server/host. If your server gets hacked and that’s where your backups are, it won’t do you any good. It’s relatively simple to get added coverage in this department through several plug-in options:
PAID WORDPRESS BACKUP OPTIONS
- VaultPress: Vaultpress is created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. You pay a monthly fee and there are scheduled backups and security scans run on your site.
- BackUpBuddy: Instead of a monthly fee, this is a one time fee and it also offers backup scheduling and you can backup to your host or external sites like DropBox.
FREE WORDPRESS BACKUP OPTIONS
- BackUpWordPress
- BackWPUp
- WP-DB-Backup (this plug-in backs up the WordPress database only, no files)
- WordPress Backup to Dropbox