How to backup WordPress website?

WordPress themes are made to be flexible, allowing them to be conveniently customized to fit the needs of specific websites. It’s likely that you’ve modified your WordPress theme to improved aesthetics or functionality. If something goes wrong with your website, you won’t be able to just uninstall the theme and reinstall it. Any customization you’ve made will be lost, and you’ll have to start again. So, to be on the safe side you need to backup WordPress website to avoid such happenings.

A backup is basically a copy of your website that you can recover if anything goes wrong. It’s a failsafe, preventative measure that will save you a lot of aggravation. It’s like getting an insurance policy for all the time, effort, and money you’ve put into your WordPress website. There are different ways you can backup your website.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through different manual and automatic ways to backup your WordPress website, reasons why you should backup your site, and step by step setup process of UpdraftPlus along with various features and settings.

If you’re looking for a free way to back up your WordPress account, UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular and well-rated choices. It not only allows you to manually backup your website but it can also backup your website to the cloud on a schedule of your choice and restore a backup with only a few clicks.

What does WordPress backup include?

Now, in order to give you a great perspective, I’ll explain what a complete WordPress backup includes. There are two parts to the WordPress site.

• The first is the files that make up the configuration and features of your website, such as theme/plugin files, scripts, and media.
• And there’s the MySQL database. This is where your blog posts, comments, and settings from your WordPress admin area are saved.

These two components make up the entire WordPress website.

Reasons to backup WordPress site

Most low-cost web hosts claim to have backups, but all they do is back up the MySQL database. They don’t back up all of your files, so if your website is damaged, you won’t be able to restore your updates. You obviously don’t want to lose your website data.

A major data loss may occur due to a variety of causes like; website hack, server crash or failure, unsuccessful updates, human error, and many other reasons. Requesting a replica of your website from their backups is also a burden, so it’s better to backup your account yourself.

Just to make sure everything is secure. The full backup we’re assisting you with here would secure all your files and your database. This means that if your site is lost, all you have to do is reinstall the backup and you’re done.

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to back up a WordPress site easily for free on your own.

2 Easy Ways to back up your site (step by step)

If you’ve implemented security measures to protect your site, the data on it may still be vulnerable. Hackers accessing business your data or an innocent coding error dragging the site down is still a possibility. This is where having a good backup comes in handy. A decent backup solution makes a copy of the most recent data and saves it securely so that it can be restored quickly in the case of a disaster. SO, let’s check out the different ways to back up your website.

How to Backup WordPress website through Cpanel?

Backup Your WordPress Files Manually via cPanel. You may have an automatic WordPress backup plan in place, we highly suggest providing multiple backup solutions. You’ll have a recovery device to fall back on if one of the backup systems fails. Backup your WordPress files manually via cPanel is one easy way to back up your site.

The process to do so are listed below:

• Navigate to cPanel after logging in to your web host.
• Click on the backup Wizard Icon.
• Click on the button back up.
• You will find the “Select Partial Backup” header then click on the “Home Directory” link.
• To download a compressed copy of your home directory, click the “Home Directory” button.
• The next move is to download a copy of your WordPress database after you have a copy of your home directory on your local machine.
• To return to the previous tab, choose “Go Back.”
• Tap the “MySQL Databases” icon under the “Select Partial Backup” header.
• Finally, to download a copy of your WordPress database to your local machine, click on the link.

• We suggest that you store your WordPress files in a convenient place now that you have a local copy of them. You should also save them to an offsite data storage provider.

How to backup WordPress Website using Plugins?

When you run a WordPress website, you must keep backups on a frequent basis. It will prepare you to deal with unknown problems that can result in data loss. Backup is more important if you’re running an online store with WordPress, such as WooCommerce.

It’s likely if your hosting provider has backup plans for your website. However, they might not be as secure as keeping your own backups. Some might not have it for too long, and others might bill you if you tried to recover it.

There are several plugins in the WordPress plugin directory that will assist you with creating periodic backups.

Automatically Backup your WordPress website with UpdraftPlus

• You’ll need to install the UpdraftPlus plugin first to back up your WordPress account for free. To do so, go to your WordPress dashboard’s menu bar, Plugins > Add Plugins.
• Then, in the Search Bar, type UpdraftPlus. Install Now > Enable the UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin after installing it.UpdraftPlus is a free tool for backing up a WordPress account.
• Select Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups from your WordPress menu.
• This will take you to the UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore tab, where you can tailor the UpdraftPlus settings to your backup requirements.
• Configure schedule backup.
• Choose a remote storage location as per your liking.

Since each storage solution has its own set of integration instructions, simply follow the instructions they have provided, and then the last step is to select the Complete Setup button to connect the two solutions.

Manually backup with Updraft

If you don’t want to schedule your backup and want to manually backup your site then follow the process mentioned below for time to time backup.

• First, you need to go to Settings » UpdraftPlus Backups and click on the ‘Backup Now’ button.
• In this popup, you will find the check box, with options to select files/database backup and the option to choose whether you want to send the backup to remote storage.
• After that click on the “Backup Now” button.
• You will be able to see the progress on the settings page. That is when the updraft will start creating a backup for your site.
• The backup process takes a little time based on the size of your website.
• Once it is done Updraft will also start uploading the backup files to remote locations.

Popular WordPress Website Backup Plugins

The best thing you can do for your website’s security is to make daily WordPress backups. Backups give you peace of mind and will save you from tragedies like being hacked or inadvertently locking yourself out of your site.

There are a variety of free and paid WordPress backup plugins available, with the majority of them being pretty simple to use. We’ll go through the top five backup plugins for WordPress in this post.

1. Backup Migration

Backup Migration plugin by Inisev is easy-to-use solution to create backups, automated backups, staging sites and to run a seamless migrations. This user-friendly plugin works great out of the box and runs the complete migration in a simple two-step process.

All actions associated with backups, restorations and staging sites are done within the plugin’s neat and intuitive menu, including the management of backup files and staging sites created by the plugin. All of these features come for free for all websites up to 2GB in size.

More sophisticated features and external storage options are available in the premium version of the plugin. Both free and premium plugin users are entitled to timely and top-notch support, and the team behind it is dedicated to see every process come to a success.

Price: Starting from $29.98 per month

Use discount code ALLEYTHEMES20 to get 20% off

2. Jetpack 

The easiest real-time backup solution for WordPress websites is Jetpack Backup. It will help you create regular frequent backups of your entire website as well as real-time backups. Backups can be recovered from your laptop or mobile device with a single click.

You can recover your site from any backup point if you select the real-time backup plan. This is particularly beneficial for e-commerce pages. A 30-day backup folder and a log of site changes are among the other functionality offered by Jetpack Backup. Jetpack Backup costs $8 a month on an annual basis.

Price: Starting From $9.95 per month for Daily backups

3. BlogVault

BlogVault is easy to use, safe, and makes backing up your website seamless.

You must first sign up for a BlogVault account before downloading and installing their plugin to build a backup of your web. As soon as you enable the plugin, it will provide a backup of your whole site, including your database and files. The plugin will then back up your site on a daily basis and make frequent backups of new site content.

You can easily return to any version from the previous 60 days. You can also use the feature to move a site to a different domain or hosting or to copy a full backup of your site to your computer.

Price: Starting from $89 per year

4. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy by iThemes is a premium WordPress backup plugin. You can use the plugin to back up the entire database and files, as well as easily transfer your site to a new server. You can back up your site to your hard disk as well as external storage services like email, FTP, Dropbox, and BackupBuddy Stash. BackupBuddy allows you to schedule WordPress backups when you’re on the go, giving you a backup tool unlike any other.

If you use their Stash service, you can do real-time backups as well. The most significant benefit of using BackupBuddy is that it is not a subscription-based program, which means there is no monthly charge. The plugin can be used on the number of websites specified in your plan.

Pricing: Starting from $89 per year

5. BoldGrid Backup

BoldGrid Backup is a website builder powered by WordPress that offers an automatic WordPress backup solution.

It helps you to quickly make website backups, recover your site after it crashes, and even relocate your site while switching hosting providers. With a single click, you can set up automatic backups or manually build backups. BoldGrid Backup has an automated fault protection feature that creates a backup to the site prior to any upgrades. If an update fails, the WordPress site will be rolled back to the last backup. It’s a great feature that guards you against upgrade errors. You can store up to 10 backup files on your dashboard and more in remote storage locations like Amazon S3, FTP, or SFTP with BoldGrid Backup.

Price: Starting from $60 per year

6. UPDRAFTPLUS

UpdraftPlus is the plugin to use if you want to back up your WordPress account for free. It is the world’s most common and trusted scheduled backup plugin, with over 14 million downloads. So, we recommend UpdraftPlus to update your WordPress site. UpdraftPlus is incredibly simple to set up. It works by backing up your website to a cloud-based solution of your choosing. It can upload backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and a variety of other cloud storage services automatically (see our step-by-step guide on how to backup & restore your WordPress site with UpdraftPlus).

UpdraftPlus helps you to restore backups directly from your WordPress admin panel, in addition to backing up each WordPress website.

Price: Free (UpdraftPremium Personal for $70)

Each WordPress backup plugin on the list has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but they do include complete WordPress file backup as well as a full database backup. This ensures that rather than backing up all of your files every day or hour, it just backs up the files that have been updated within minutes of the change. But we recommend you to use UpdraftPlus because UpdraftPlus is the most common and loved backup plugin for WordPress.This is perfect for any website because it helps us to make the most of our server resources.