Clicking update on your WordPress website can be a scary task! If you’ve ever clicked update and found the white screen of death AKA a broken website – you know how true this statement is. So how do you backup your WordPress Website?
Check out this video
UpDraft Plus
https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/
Backup Buddy – Premium
https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
WordFence
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/
More for WordPress Backup Plugins
Video Transcript
Really what I want to walk you through are my top three favorite plugins for backing up your WordPress website. And here’s the reason why it’s so, so important. Because really if you’ve ever hit that update button and a plugin breaks or your whole website goes white or you can’t even log back in, what do you do? You go into panic mode and you typically end up having to call somebody or get on a forum somewhere, ask for help, beg for help, call your hosting company, pay them like crazy to get that backup in place. We don’t wanna do that.
Automatic Backup
This is super, super important in every single WordPress website out there anywhere, no matter how small, how big. It needs to have some sort of game plan in place for doing a backup and setting it to be an automatic happening so that you don’t have to remember, oh, it’s the 15th of the month, I’ve gotta go in and click backup. No, we wanna use a plugin that will allow us to automatically set a rhythm so that we know for sure that’s taken care of.
Restore
We also wanna be sure that that plugin will allow us to easily click restore. This is a big part of using a plugin that will allow that backup to take place because your hosting company more than likely has already a set-in plan happening for your website to be backed up already. They probably just tell you, oh we back it up every 24 hours. No big deal, but you need to be sure that they’re backing up not only your files but also your database, that’s a big deal. And then you also need to ask them, okay, if I ever do need to restore it, how much is that gonna cost me, right? So we wanna be sure that there’s no fees attached to that restoration because nine times out of 10, you are gonna have some sort of an issue happen to where your website’s either been hacked because you don’t have a secure plugin in there or possibility of you’ve clicked update and now everything is breaking because things are not compatible anymore. Does that make sense?
Updraft Plus
Alright, so my top three plugins. The very first one that I wanna mention is one that Yusuf with our WordPress meet-up group taught us about. This is UpdraftPlus over on the codex for WordPress. If you go through here and check it out, you’re gonna see that this is an amazing, amazing plugin. Look how many times it’s been downloaded. Look at the ratings for it, that’s wonderful. It’s compatible with 4.0, up to, right. And we’re gonna see a little bit later on that it was just actually updated a week ago so that’s wonderful. You need to be sure that you check out those statistics whenever you’re looking at any plugin for that matter. And then right here, this backup and restoration made easy. Restoration, that’s the word we wanna be looking for because anybody can have a backup in place. It’s what do you do to get your website back up and running because you know you’ve got the backup file, how do we actually get it back and running? So this is a free plugin. Free is always in the budget, right, so we wanna check out this plugin. I’m gonna give you the link in the description area below of this video.
BackupBuddy
Also, there’s BackupBuddy. Now, this is a premium plugin but we’ve used it for many, many of our clients and we really, really, really love it. It’s a great system, it can backup to several different places, to Dropbox account for you, it could back up to your server, wherever you want it and again there’s a way that you can go in and do a restoration. It’s not as simple as Updraft, I will tell you that.
WordFence
Wordfence is probably my third top favorite and it is again a free, totally free plugin that you can get in here and use and they’ve got some really good screenshots for you through here that they walk you through how to do everything and how to get it all set up. So that’s definitely, definitely user friendly.
Updraft Installation
What I wanna do today, though, is walk you through how to use Updraft, basically how to install it. So I’m gonna move right over there and I’m gonna go to plugins and I’m gonna say add new. And let’s go do a search here really quickly for UpdraftPlus. Do a quick search, okay, there we are. Fantastic, now I can do an install. Now, this is where you’re gonna see that… I’m pointing to the screen but I’m actually over here. Last updated one week ago. So if you see that, that’s fantastic news for us. So I’m gonna click install now. Are you sure, yes, absolutely, I’m wanna use this backup program on my website. So it’s thinking about going. It’s grabbing it right there, there we go. Now I can click activate.
Typically what happens when you throw in a plugin, you know that sometimes it puts it over here in this left side as its own individual menu option. Sometimes, it hides it. This one does hide it under settings. So we can go here to UpdraftPlus. And now it gives us this screen that allows us to manually click backup now.
So if you were to come in here and you realize that Benny has just been released, right, 4.0 is here and I’m ready to make my update, I’m super excited about it. What do I need to do before I click that update button? You need to come here and click backup now. And be sure that you run a backup of everything. Notice that it says files and database, brilliant. So we know that this plugin backs up both, phenomenal. Super important.
So if you just follow the instructions here as it walks you through what to do, it tells you that if you’d like to set up specific settings on this plugin, you can go to the settings tab and right here, you can walk through how often you’re going to be running these backups and what files you want to include all the way down here and figure out what all you wanna do.
How Often Should I Do A Backup
Some people ask, well, how often should I be backing up my website. Truth is, if you’re blogging every single week, you probably need to be backing it up weekly. If you’re blogging every single day, you need to be backing it up daily. Minimal, you should be backing it up every 30 days, though. Does that make sense?
So keep that in mind whenever you’re walking through these settings. And be sure that you have some sort of fail-proof plan in place because nine times out of 10, the day’s gonna come when you’re gonna click update and you’re gonna wish you hadn’t and you’re gonna need some sort of system in place to do a quick restoration.
Alright, so I hope that helps you today. If you have any questions, be sure to give us a tweet or visit our website. I’ll put the link below in the description box. Join us here every single Wednesday for WordPress Wednesday and don’t forget, subscribe to the channel. I’ll put the link up above so that you’re sure to catch every single video. We’ll see you next time, bye-bye.
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