Better Way To Backup Your WordPress Website [Tutorial]

An excellent webmaster always keeps multiple backups of his or her websites. Backups not only protect your website from server failure and security attacks but are also needed while changing your host. Here you will be going to learn about ways to backup your WordPress website.

Now some of you may question, “Why should I take regular backups when my hosting provider is already doing that for me”? And the answer to that will be, what if their server gets compromised or they suddenly suspend your account.

In such a situation, there will be no way to access your Backup. Therefore having update backups on your computer as well as cloud storage is a must.

What To Backup In A WordPress Website?

For any WordPress blog, there are two key things that you need to Backup.

1. WordPress Installation Directory

In most cases, you need to Backup of 3 directories i.e., wp-content, wp-admin, wp-config. It contains everything that you need to create a copy of your websites like your posts, themes, plugins, etc.

2. Database

Next is your database. It includes things like category, tags, your wp-login credential, and the changes you have made in your themes, etc.

So now that we know what to Backup, let’s see how to take Backup.

Well, there are two ways of doing it:

Method 1: The Obvious – CPanel

This is the traditional way of taking Backup of the WordPress blog. Most people take the Backup by manually downloading all the files using the host’s file manager. To do this, login to your website’s panel and go to the root directory.

Once you are inside the root or ‘www’ directory, you will see files like wp-content, wp-admin, etc. And then, select all of them and then compress them into a single zip file. Download the zip file. You can also use FTP manager like FileZilla to connect and download the data from the server.

3. For database backup, head over to your database → phpMyAdmin → Export the database.

However, this method is tedious. Moreover, due to the large no. of small files, you may face connection timeout error and have to start download from the beginning.

The webmaster doesn’t have time to regular Backup manually. So how do we automate this process? Let’s find out.

Method 2: Backup WordPress With BackWPup

BackWPup is a WordPress plugin that schedule WordPress backup. I have been using it for months now, and it works great. And here is why you should also use BackWPup:

It’s free, reliable and easy to use
You can schedule backups on a daily, weekly or monthly basis
Option to store backups in cloud storage

So you see, BackWPup is fantastic, but it comes with a little learning curve. Let’s see how it works.

1. Head over to your WordPress dashboard and download and install the plugin BackWPup.

2. Once it’s installed, you will see it listed on the right side of your WordPress dashboard. Hover on it and select ‘Jobs‘.

3. Since it’s your first time with the plugin, you will have to set up a new job. Click on ‘Add new.’

4. Once you are inside the ‘New Job’ menu, you will have to make various changes like what you want to Backup, where you want to store your Backup, how often to schedule it, the format of your Backup, etc. If you find this overwhelming, then stick with default settings.

5. Once done, run your job. And the backup process will start.

Bonus Tips

My recommendation is to stick with the default setting, i.e., Take database backup, files, and plugin list. And the complete Backup of your website. So there is nothing to lose.

Newer one replaces old Backup. So don’t worry, you won’t run out of your storage.

If you are on shared hosting, then schedule this Backup when you experience less traffic to avoid access load on your server.