Regular backups are important for every WordPress website owner. You should not rely on your web hosting provider to keep a backup of your site for you. It is important to proactively backup your entire website on a regular basis to avoid a catastrophe.
The half-hour inconvenience in backing up your website will help save a lot of costs and headaches later on. In this blog post, we have listed best practices for backing up WordPress websites.
1. Select the Right Backup Type
You can carry out full, cumulative, or incremental backup of your WordPress website. A full backup is recommended if you don’t have a large website. The backup involves creating a new backup by overwriting the existing one.
You should consider a cumulative backup if you make frequent changes to your website that are not too large. It involves creating a new backup each time without overwriting the existing backup.
An incremental backup is recommended if your website is large. This type of backup involves saving only changed files during each backup while full backup involves saving every file during a backup.
2. Save Backups at Multiple Locations
You should consider backing up your website in more than one location for maximum protection. A recommended practice is to save your website in three locations as follows.
- Cloud (online) backup
- Local backup on a hard drive
- Local backup on a removable drive
You shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Backing up your website in more than one will ensure that if one of the backups is corrupted you can restore your website from another one.
3. Use a Backup Plugin
Using a plugin is more convenient as compared to manually backing up the site using FTP. A lot of plugins are available online that you can use to back up your entire WordPress website. One of the best tools to back up your website is ManageWP. The tool allows you to easily create backup and restore sites whenever required. You can manage backups of multiple websites using the tool.
Other WordPress plugins that you can try or back up your website with include BackWPup, UpdraftPlus, and Duplicator.