If you don’t know how to backup your WordPress site, you should learn now! Backing up WordPress websites is one of the most important things that you can do, and we highly recommend doing it every once in a while.
“How to Back up Your WordPress Site in Simple Steps? Everything You Need to Know” is an article aimed to teach you how to backup WordPress site properly. Every piece of element present on your website is stored on your WordPress database. Every blog post of yours, every product detail, every comment, your replies, the follow-ups, the react, everything is stored.
However, the WordPress backup might get corrupted anytime, and this means that you’ll lose all of your data. We’re not saying that it has a high possibility of happening, but you can never rule this out.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to back up a WordPress site. So, sit tight, and follow us to the end, and hopefully, you’ll learn a lot about how to backup WordPress site!
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How to Back up Your WordPress Site? Here are 5 Simple Steps!
You need a third-party plugin to backup your WordPress site, and there’s no way around it. Most tutorials that you’ll find online will suggest you paid software or plug-in, but we understand if you don’t want to pay the extra bucks.
This is why we looked for the best free plugin that you can find online, and we did find one! Today, we’ll talk about Backup Guard, and it’s a free plugin that will allow you to back up a WordPress site in five simple steps only!
1- Installation:
Before we get started, we need to install the Backup Guard plugin to your WordPress dashboard. Follow the steps below to add Backup Guard to your WordPress dashboard:
Firstly, you need to go to the Plugins tab. From there, click on Add new button. Once you click on this, you’ll get a pop-up window where you’ll see tons of plugins. You need to search Backup Guard from here. Click on it once you find it, and then click on the ‘Activate’ button. This ends the first step.
2- Setting up Backup Guard:
Once you set up Backup Guard, you need to go to the settings tab, and you better add your email address there. There are a lot of people who don’t do this, but we highly recommend doing so. If you add your email to this page, you’ll receive emails if anything goes wrong. In such a way, you’ll be able to restore any backup of your website if it goes down.
Then again, you can fine-tune this plugin to select which files you want to backup. There are a lot of elements on the website that might not be important for you. For example, if a certain thread has a lot of unnecessary comments, then you may not regard that as necessary.
While setting the plugin up, you can select which elements you want to keep, and which ones you don’t. This will help you save a lot of space in your plugin.
3- Initiating the Backups:
Once you’re done playing with the settings, it’s time to initiate the backup. At first, go to the backup tab of Backup Guard. It’s very simple to use, as you only need to press the backup button. However, this isn’t the last step.
The developers of this free plugin left some options for customizability here. How to fully backup a WordPress site? Well, you can select from here! You’ll see two buttons here, one of which will allow you to backup your site fully, and another will allow you to customize the backup.
Another amazing thing is you can save your backup anywhere you like. If you want to backup your website to a cloud, you can connect Backup Guard with Dropbox. How to backup WordPress site to computer? Well, you can do that easily by selecting the computer option from here.
4- Restoring a Backup:
It’s very easy to restore a backup of your WordPress website with Backup Guard, and we didn’t expect a free plugin to be this user-friendly. All you need to do is go to the dashboard of Backup Guard, and then you need to select the ‘Backups’ option from there.
Once you click on this, you’ll find all the backups you stored from the time you are using Backup Guard. It’s super easy to restore a backup, as all you need to do is click on the backup that you want to restore.
The best part about this plugin is that you can backup multiple versions of your WordPress site. How is this necessary or useful? As you can see, there are a lot of instances where you’ll find that a certain change to your website isn’t working well for you, and you’ll feel like reverting to the previous version.
However, there’s no easy way of doing this, and you need to make the changes manually. Sometimes, when you end up changing a lot of elements, you’ll need to put an equal amount of effort into reverting to the previous setup. This is why, backing up your website before every change is a great move, as you’ll be able to revert to a certain version with the tap of a single button!
If you’re worried about losing the comments or some other elements like blog posts, then you can also choose to back them up separately, and then you’ll be able to add them once you’re done reverting to the previous version.
This is why we highly recommend backing up the version of the website you’re using before making any change. This will help you by making your workflow much smoother.
5- Setting up Automatic Backups:
No matter which backup plugin for the WordPress site you’re using, you need to set up some sort of schedule for your plugin. Setting up a schedule of automatic backups will allow the plugin to back up the most recent version of your website consistently.
How does this come in handy? Well, when it comes to WordPress sites or any type of site for that matter, you never know when the website may crash. If the website crashes, there will be no way to restore the website to the version it was just before the crash. What you can do is, you can restore it to the version you backed up.
However, with the automatic backups, you can make the plugin back the website up once or twice a day. In this way, if the file of the website becomes corrupted for some reason, and the website crashes, you’ll be able to restore the website to the version that was saved automatically.
In this way, you can always have the latest version of your website stored in the plugin, and you can always rest assured that you don’t have to back the website up every day.
It’s easy to schedule the automatic backup of Backup Guard. You need to enter the Backup Guard plugin at first. Once you’re at the dashboard, you need to browse the different options and find the ‘Schedule’ button. Click on it when you find it.
You’ll get to another page when you click on it. Toggle the switch of the automatic backup to ‘on’. Then, you’ll be asked to give a name to the certain backup schedule that you’re creating. You can name it whatever you like, but we recommend giving it a name that’ll be more appropriate for the purpose that it’ll serve. For example, if you’re creating an automatic backup that will back your website up daily, you can name it ‘Daily backup’ for an easier reference.
Once you’re done naming it, you need to set the frequency at which the plugin will back your website up. For example, you can set it to hourly, daily, weekly, or even monthly. We prefer setting it to daily, as hourly is too frequent. You can choose whatever suits you best. Remember, it’s okay if you have a hard time determining which frequency is more appropriate for you. Once you start using this feature, you’ll find out the right frequency for yourself gradually.
These were the five steps that you need to follow if you want to backup your WordPress website. Now that you know how to manually backup the WordPress site and how to fully backup the WordPress site automatically, we’re going to delve into some frequently asked questions, and we’ll try to provide the most accurate answer that you’ll find on the web.
How to Backup your WordPress Site GoDaddy?
GoDaddy is a widely used hosting service, and we have a lot of readers who use this to host their WordPress websites. This is why we always get the question of whether you can back up a WordPress site with GoDaddy or not. Yes, you can! Then again, we also get this “How to restore WordPress site without backup?” Well, you can’t!
If you’re using GoDaddy as the hosting service of your WordPress website, then you can use their backup services as well. You will get all sorts of necessary tools that will allow you to backup and restore your WordPress website, and you can also schedule automatic backups, which is another great feature.
However, you need to pay a hefty price if you want to use the backup service of GoDaddy. On the other hand, you can get all of these amazing features from Backup Guard for free. This is why we highly recommend you think twice before spending a lot of cash on something that you can get for absolutely free!
How to Choose the Right WordPress Site Backup Plugin for Yourself?
If you don’t want to use Backup Guard, that’s completely fine. However, you need to look for a plugin that features at least the essentials. If a plugin doesn’t feature the following features, then you shouldn’t go for that specific plugin.
1- Automatic Backup Feature:
This is the first thing that you should look for in the backup plugin or software that you’re about to use. If a plugin doesn’t offer the feature to back the website up automatically, then you shouldn’t go for it. Backing up your website manually will become very toilsome after a certain time, and you don’t want to do that. This is why it’s highly recommended to get one that offers this feature.
2- Frequency:
The backup frequency is also important. We highly recommend looking for a plugin that will allow you to back your website up hourly, daily, weekly, or even monthly. If you get all of these options, you can always choose the best one for you among them.
3- Ease of Usage:
There’s no point in taking a backup plugin that requires you to spend hours to get used to it. You can always find plugins that are very easy to use and require almost no previous experience. This is why we recommend getting plugins that are intuitive and easy to use. Trust me, you don’t want to spend hours learning this, no matter how important it may be, because there are plugins that are easier to use.
4- Storage:
The backup plugins allow you to store all of these data in your hosting service. However, we highly recommend saving them on physical hardware that’s completely disconnected from the internet. By doing so, you can make sure that the data is always safe. If you want to be completely sure that you will never lose your data, you can also store them on cloud storage.
If you look for a plugin for backing up your website, you should look for these features at least. If you can’t find them in a certain plugin, you shouldn’t go for that. Then again, we highly recommend using Backup Guard, as it’s completely free, and it offers all the mentioned features as well!
See also:
1- The Best Plugin To Backup WordPress
2- WordPress Backup and Restore: Everything You Need To Know (Best 4 WordPress Database Plugins)
3- WordPress Bug Fixing
WordPress How to Backup Site: Final Thoughts:
In the end, it all comes down to making your life easier. If you follow the five steps we mentioned below, you’ll not only be able to backup WordPress sites manually, but you’ll also be able to back them up automatically.
We highly recommend setting an automatic backup schedule. In this way, you’ll be able to save a lot of your time and effort.
