How To Backup a WordPress Website

How To Backup WordPress

There is little point spending hours optimising your WordPress site, server and set up if you don’t protect your hard work with a proactive backup strategy.

By running security plugins like the ones we suggest, you will be protecting your site against attack. However, you should automise your backup process so that if something ever happens to your server, website or site files, you have a complete copy safely saved elsewhere.

We use Updraft to automise the backup process.

You can set Updraft to backup as often as you wish and to save your website files on a variety of cloud locations.

We use Dropbox and choose to backup the majority of the sites we build on a monthly schedule. This provides us with a reasonably up to date copy should the worst ever happen & we suffer a complete failure of a server.

Dropbox can be set to store as many archive versions as you wish.

Our standard backup process retains the previous 2 months versions as standard. We have some larger clients that change their sites more frequently and we retain weekly and in a few instances daily backups of those sites for additional fees.

Updraft is a free plugin that is straightforward to set up and link to your Dropbox account.

Once set up is will take a complete copy of every file in your site including your Themes, plugins, database, uploads and ancillary files.

Most web designers don’t support their customers unless they pay them to do so. We think a little differently.

We hold a backup because it is prudent to do so. Most of our clients have never even thought about what would happen if the server room containing their web server burned down or even if the server just failed….. and many do, every day……

So we think about it for them and save our clients from worrying about something that they didn’t even now they needed to worry about!

The bulk of lower cost hosting companies have no backup support in place but the majority of business owners have no idea that their website is as vulnerable as it is.

A little additional effort at this stage will save you many, many hours in the future.

Tutorials – How To’s

Important Wordpress Set Up Factors:

  1. Choice of Hosting
  2. Choice of Theme
  3. Choice of Plugins
  4. Loading Content
  5. Managing Content

For 2020 and beyond, there is one website metric that is more important than ever...... performance.

Little by little, Google is dragging all website owners kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, pushing them towards fast loading, high performance, mobile friendly website to represent their businesses.

The days of publishing something that looks like a website but doesn't perform like one are long gone.

If you want search engines and your customers to take you seriously, you need to tick ALL the performance boxes, not just one or two...... so here is a comprehensive guide to set up and optimise wordpress to work like a finely tuned machine for your business.

Wordpress - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Wordpress is a great platform for any website, flexible, endlessly customisable, open ended and with a seemingly endless supply of functionality in the form of Wordpress Plugins.

However, Wordpress does have its issues too.

Left to its own devices and not managed correctly, Wordpress can be susceptible to chronic weight gain!! If you don't look out, your Wordpress website will have its head in the biscuit barrel and before you know it, you'll have a heavy old Hector on your hands.

It's easier to set up Wordpress to stay slim and fit than it is to lose the weight once its gained it!

Weight is important for websites because all the code in your website has to be delivered to whoever wants to view your pages.

Each time a request for one of your pages is made, the whole page has to be packed up and sent across the ether to their device.

While of course some users will be on superfast broadband, many won't be. Spare a thought for the man stood in a field using a 3G mobile connection to attempt to read your page content. He needs to get the page loaded just as much as the city dweller with his 4 or 5G download speeds.

What makes this even more critical, is that Google use just that scenario - a man on a 3G mobile connection - to assess website load speed before they decide whether they will include your site in their all important search listings.

If your Wordpress site is data heavy, it won't get delivered to that mobile device in the field before the chap presses the back button and looks for a better alternative.

You may offer the best service, products, advice or whatever, but if your website set up doesn't deliver the goods fast enough, it won't matter..... Google will hate you!

WP Hosting

Fast hosting is a necessity if your WP site is going to load quickly. Free and low cost hosting options are a mistake that many business owners make, thinking that good quality hosting isn't very important.

Think of your web server as the engine in your car. You wouldn't put a diesel van engine in a Ferrari would you? Not if you expected it to perform when you pressed the pedal hard.

A website is the same, if you want a high performance site, you need a high performance server.

Not all hosting companies provide the same quality of server, so it pays to choose wisely. Otherwise your website will be parked on a rickety old server, creaking at the seams, unreliable and slow.

More about Wordpress Hosting

Getting Wordpress Right

Getting Your Wordpress Set Up right is important.

Wordpress Core is quite slim and efficient code.

However, it soon becomes bloated when you start adding Themes, Plugins & Addons, much of which you don't need or won't use.

Every bit of code adds to the overall size of the files that need to be sent and received. The more code you can trim the less data you will send and the faster your site will load on each request.

Next - Choosing Your WP Theme