Hopefully, you’re already among the 80% of people who understand How to Backup Your Website and Protect Against Data Loss(if not, right now is a good time to start). Too many computer owners have discovered the hard way the importance of creating regular backups.
Do you, however, do the same for your website?
Technology is capable of incredible things, but it is also fallible. Nobody wants to risk losing all of their digital files in an instant.
Take into account the time and effort you invested in creating your website. Isn’t losing everything you’ve made a serious loss? On the other hand, a website is just as susceptible to dangers as a computer.
Investing in regular backups is an important step you can take to protect your website. That way, you won’t have to start over if something unfortunate happens. However, your website can easily be restored from an earlier backup.
What Is a Website Backup Service?
All of the data on your website is copied during a website backup. Your online backup provider will determine what the backup storage includes. The more data that is included in the data backup, generally speaking, the better.
This is particularly true if your website is powered by a content management system like WordPress, as you’ll need all of your site’s files, content, media, and databases to restore it to full functionality.
How Often Should You Back Up Your Website?
Just like computer backups, regular website backups are also advised. Weekly or daily backups, or roughly as often as you update your website, would be ideal. For instance, if you only make one blog post and one update to your website each week, weekly backups are sufficient.
Why You Need to Back Up the Data on Your Website
Backups of a website can aid website owners in disaster mitigation. When necessary, it aids in recovering the information on their website as well as crucial customer and business-related data. Here are a few of the main justifications for backing up the information on your company website.
1. Avoiding significant losses brought on by employee mistakes or other technical disasters
Accidents and errors do happen, especially when employees are involved. Website backups will enable you to recover earlier versions of it even if an employee deletes something by mistake, saving you from having to start over or losing all of your valuable content files or data.
You can prevent business disasters and lower the likelihood that you’ll suffer a significant business loss by regularly performing website backups.
Additionally, technology isn’t always dependable; servers and computers crash frequently. Therefore, in case of technical difficulties, you’ll want to make sure your database and website files are backed up and saved in your archived files on an external drive or somewhere in the cloud.
Regular website updates can inadvertently delete, corrupt, or damage specific files or even entire websites because they don’t always go as planned.
However, regular backups keep website files archived so they are always accessible and close by. Your trustworthy backup files will be useful in the event that a routine website update fails or results in more issues than it solves.
2. Maintain the Safety, Security, and Usability of Your Business and Customer Data
You keep your website secure and up to date by routinely backing up customer and business data. Although hackers may attempt to access your databases or website, regular backups will guarantee that your website is free of malware and that all of its data and files are encrypted and secure.
For example, when open-source content management systems like WordPress update their core files, hackers can use bots, malware, and other tools to infiltrate out-of-date websites and databases.
However, websites that regularly back themselves up are much less likely to be hacked and have their customer and business data stolen or compromised.
Overall, regular website backups keep your company’s and customers’ data safe and secure so that clients continue to depend on and trust your company when making orders or requests because they are confident that their private data is safe.
Website backups also shield your databases from online rivals or hackers who might otherwise compromise the integrity and worth of your client and business data.
Additionally, if your data has always been accurate and up to date, you can use it to improve business and marketing decisions.
How to Back Up Data on Your Website
Fortunately, there are several options for backing up the information on your website.
1. Schedule manual backups with your IT team or manually save ZIP files
You can make sure that your IT staff schedules website backups on a daily or as-needed basis if you have one. However, doing this manually can take some time.
They’ll probably look for and want to rely on automated platforms or systems that will run website backups according to a predetermined schedule.
You could also ask your website developer to perform a backup for you, though it’s unlikely that they would do this frequently given that their primary focus is usually on creating websites rather than regular backups.
If you are your website’s sole administrator and owner, you could manually save data files and ZIP files from it every day or once a week to your hard drive, cloud drive, or flash drive.
However, doing this can take a lot of time, especially if you’re also trying to run a business, and eventually, you’ll run into storage problems. Additionally, routine maintenance can slow down the system.
2. Use automatic backups
Check to see if the web hosting company you use offers daily or multiple times daily automated website backups. This option is one of the simplest, most affordable, and hassle-free ways to back up all of your databases as well as the information and files on your website.
For daily automated backups, you would typically only spend a few dollars (or less) per month. In the event of a computer malfunction or accident, you can even use this option to restore specific files or databases as well as entire sets of files and databases.
Additionally, you will have the option to download ZIP files of the information and materials on your website to your computer or cloud storage for archiving and future reference.
And for an additional layer of security and disaster recovery, if you want to be extra watchful and organized, you might also want to rely on a third-party backup service.
3. Rely on Plugins
You probably already have access to backup plugins that you can install and turn on for your WordPress website. View this list to learn the advantages and disadvantages of some of the more well-liked options and how to use them.
Fortunately, you don’t need any coding experience or sophisticated technical knowledge to back up your website.
In Summary
Regular backups that are redundant and verified should be made. It is crucial to think about backups from crucial service providers who handle other aspects of your site, like newsletters, in addition to having accurate, properly-run backups of your site.
Furthermore, it’s a good idea to have a backup plan in place in case your website is unavailable. This kind of strategy will enable you to reduce the amount of time that your website is unavailable to users.
And finally, taking into account everything mentioned above, we need to develop a plan that’s appropriate to the size and significance of our online presence; a business site that receives a lot of traffic handles numerous transactions or gets frequent updates will require a more robust plan than a straightforward informational site that has no active components and isn’t updated often.