How Do You Back Up a WordPress Website the Right Way?

A proper WordPress backup is an automated, off-site copy of your whole website, both the files and the database, taken regularly, stored somewhere other than your hosting account, and tested every so often to make sure it actually restores. If your only backup lives on the same server as your live site, it isn’t really a backup, it’s just a second copy sitting next to the same risk. Get this sorted once and a hack, a bad plugin update or an accidental edit becomes a quick fix instead of a crisis.

What actually needs backing up

A WordPress site is really two things: the files (your theme, plugins, uploads and core WordPress files) and the database (every post, page, product, order and setting). A proper backup captures both, because restoring files without the database gets you a working site with no content, and restoring the database without files gets you content with no design. It sounds obvious, but plenty of backup setups only cover one half.

How often you should back up

For a brochure style site that changes every few weeks, a daily backup is plenty. For a WooCommerce store, orders and stock levels change by the hour, so you want a plugin or host that offers real time or at least hourly backups. Otherwise, a server issue at 2pm could wipe out a whole morning’s worth of sales that never gets captured.

• Content site updated occasionally: daily backups, kept for around 30 days
• Active blog or news site: daily backups, kept for 30 to 60 days
• WooCommerce store: real time or hourly backups to protect orders, daily for everything else

Where your backups should actually live

Store copies somewhere separate from your hosting account, think Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 or a dedicated backup service, so a hosting outage or billing issue can’t take out your live site and your backups at the same time. Most decent hosts include some backup tool, and plugins like UpdraftPlus or Jetpack VaultPress can push copies off-site automatically on a schedule you set and forget.

Test the restore, not just the backup

A backup you have never restored is a guess, not a safety net. Every few months, restore a recent backup to a staging copy of your site (most decent hosts offer one click staging) and check that pages load properly, images appear, and checkout still works if you run a store. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that matters most on the day something actually goes wrong.

Common backup mistakes we see

• Relying only on the host’s built in backups, which are often overwritten weekly and stored on the same server
• No off-site copy at all, so one hosting problem can take out the site and the backup together
• Never actually testing a restore, so nobody finds out it’s broken until it’s needed
• Backing up files but forgetting the database, or the other way around
• Keeping only the latest backup, with no history to roll back to if a problem isn’t spotted straight away

When it’s worth calling in help

If a restore goes sideways, or the real problem turns out to be custom code rather than something a backup can fix, that’s when it pays to bring in a developer rather than guessing your way through it. Our WordPress development team handles exactly this kind of troubleshooting, and for sites with more involved custom builds, a specialist like Smart Coding can dig into the code itself.

A solid backup routine is one of the cheapest forms of insurance your website will ever have. If you’d rather not manage it yourself, our ongoing website care plans include automated off-site backups as standard, tested restores, and a real person to call when something breaks. Give us a ring on 02 9834 4119 or get in touch via our contact page and we’ll sort it for you.