Why You Should Backup Your WordPress Blog

March 3rd, 2016 Posted in wordpress plugins

There are many reasons to backup your WordPress blog. Of course you need to make sure you always have a copy of it in case something goes wrong.

Your database might crash, you might accidentally delete some of your posts or files, or, more worryingly, you may be hacked.

In any event, you'll need to roll back to an earlier version of your WordPress blog. It's a simple fact that computers fail all the time.

Hardware Failures Are Common

A hard drive might crash out and many people don't realise that your website is simply sitting on a computer somewhere that has all the same problems as your computer. That computer might blue screen, it might not turn on one day, the hard drive might stop. But either way something might go wrong and databases crash all the time.

If the database crashes it might lose the entire thing. It might lose several year's worth of WordPress posts, comments and users.

You Might Have Been Hacked

Worse still, you might have been hacked.  No-one is immune to hacking. You can take precautions, and of course you should. Several of my other posts here involve protecting yourself. But if you're hacked, everything might be gone in a single second.

With no backups, you have to start again from scratch.

But if you've backed up your WordPress site you can restore it later on and get access to it any time you want. Even if everything goes wrong, set it up again exactly the way it was.

And even ignoring database crashes you might accidentally delete something. I know I do that all the time. You might delete the wrong comment, the wrong blog post and even empty the trash and never have a way to get that back.

I know that sometimes even my webhost is fixing a database issue and they will delete something without me having to do anything. So even if you think you're perfect and you never make a mistake you might delete something and it's better safe than sorry. It's worth taking those few seconds to backup your WordPress blog so that you can get it back whenever you need to.

Speaking of getting stuff back whenever you need to, would you write a 50 page term paper in Microsoft Word and never save it along the way? Of course not. You might type one page and save it, another page and save it.

Why not treat your WordPress blog like a Word document? Which means you might set up the WordPress theme, now you want to take a backup right at that point. Then add in some extra posts, take a backup right there.

Backup Frequency

Every week take a backup so if you ever need to get back to an earlier part, maybe you made one change to your theme and you liked it, but then changed a graphic and you didn't like it. You want to get back to that earlier change that you backed up your site at every point along the way, you can get back anything you ever need.

That's why you should routinely back up your WordPress blog. So in case your database crashes, you accidentally delete some stuff, or in case you're hacked, you can always go back to an earlier version.

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