If you’ve been blogging for a while, your website is something you’ve put a lot of time, effort, and passion into. Choosing a reputation, choosing the right website design, picking a theme, installing plugins, and curating content is all part of the process of building your website. Unfortunately, a virus attack or even a little code fault may bring your website to a halt in a matter of minutes.

Why Are Backups Necessary for Blogging Websites?

While you can never be too certain what will bring your website down, you may have a safety net to fall back on. This is something that your backups can test for you.

First and foremost, what is a backup? A backup is a copy of your WordPress website that you should use to restore it if anything goes wrong with it.

So, why should a blogger worry about having a fantastic backup strategy in the first place?

Let’s take a look at what may happen if you don’t have a good backup plan in place:

After a hack, you may lose vital information and incoming site visitors.

The assumption that hackers “only happen to huge websites” is a common blunder made by website owners. Unfortunately, WordPress hacking attacks are common and have been proven to target both small and large websites. A successful hack may harm your site in various ways, including a lack of information. This may include things like your blog postings, reader comments, and blog followers, among other things. Furthermore, depending on the kind of attack, hackers may redirect your incoming readers to other unsolicited websites or post unwanted adverts on your blog.

Downtime caused by a major hacking attack might result in your website being banned by your hosting company, or even worse, being blacklisted by Google. This may cause any incoming site visitors to your website to become sluggish.

In this instance, the most recent backup may be able to assist you in restoring your blog website to its previous condition without wasting time and avoiding these fines.

A server outage may cause your website to become unusable.

Regardless of how stable your WordPress internet host platform is, your server might still malfunction and crash completely in the worst-case scenario. The risk is raised when your website is hosted on a shared internet hosting platform, where several websites use the same server resources. One website’s excessive usage of server resources might impact the others. Downtime on a website is bad information for everyone.

A change that might go wrong

One of the reasons you should have picked WordPress is its free updates, correct? Unfortunately, if you update any plugins or themes, you can have a clean website presentation. It’s possible that the most current plugin/theme model won’t operate with an older WordPress version (or vice versa). This may result in difficult-to-resolve incompatibilities.

An unintentional blunder might put your whole website at risk.

Haven’t we all unintentionally erased a crucial file or folder at some point in the future? A major mistake might bring the whole website down. This might also happen with your WordPress database. Furthermore, if you like playing with WordPress, you may accidentally create a problem by making a code mistake.

Backups from your website hosting company that aren’t trustworthy

Backups are provided by Webhosting companies to their customers, either as part of their standard plan or as an additional cost. If anything goes wrong with your website, you should restore it using a backup provided by your web hosting company. However, the question remains as to how reliable these backups are. Do they include all of the most recent website and database records? These are important considerations, and they emphasize the need not to depend exclusively on the online host’s backups.

Furthermore, web hosting companies are vulnerable to hacking and server disruptions, putting your backups at risk.

Natural catastrophes may have an impact on your website.

Finally, an unanticipated natural disaster in the region where your server is located may impact your WordPress site. While we can’t prevent natural calamities, a backup strategy that stores your website backups in many storage regions is a wise safeguard.

As a blogger, it is ultimately your responsibility to protect your online business to the best of your ability.

Now that we all understand the need for backups for your blog site let’s move on to the many methods for taking a WordPress backup and which one is the best.

Learn how to create a backup of your WordPress site.

There are three options for WordPress users to back up their websites:

Backups of the handbook

Backups from your WordPress web hosting company

WordPress backup plugins are used to automate backups.

Backups of the Handbook

If you have a basic understanding of how WordPress works and its technical capabilities, you can take a backup on your own. The WordPress website records data, and the WordPress database tables are frequently included in manual backups of WordPress parts.

You should be familiar with the mechanics of FTP tools like FileZilla or Transmit if you want to make backups of your website’s data. You should be familiar with the phpMyAdmin program for database records data.

The problem with manual backups is that the whole process will be lengthy and time-consuming, in addition to needing technical knowledge. It is inconvenient for many people who do not know how to fix difficulties.

2. Backups from your web hosting company

Internet hosting companies may include backups in their packages or charge extra for them. While this is convenient, it restricts customers’ visibility and control over when and where backups are taken and kept. Furthermore, host backups aren’t designed with your specific backup requirements in mind. For instance, you could be looking for daily backups, yet the web hosting provider might only be doing weekly backups.

Other issues might include:

• Additional monthly fees for performing backups.
• Complex backup procedures (depending on the hosting company).
• Delayed backup restorations that would impact your website.

When choosing an internet host, you’ll need to think about all of this.

3. Using WordPress backup plugins to automate backups

Using a backup plugin is probably one of the easiest methods to back up your WordPress site. UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, and BackupBuddy are three of the best on the market. Why are these tools the only ones available to bloggers? It’s because they’re easy to install and use. They’re also highly user-friendly and don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to work.

If you spend a lot of time each day maintaining a blog, you probably don’t have much time to back up your data. Backup plugins automate the backup process by doing it at predetermined intervals according to your preferences (as soon as day by day, week, and even each hour). That is to say; your important backups are taken care of without you having to interfere.

Backup Requirements

When deciding on a backup strategy, keep a few things in mind. A few of the choices that your backup should include are listed below:

Backups that don’t overburden your server or slow down your website include incremental backups that only back up changes to your website after the first full backup, reduce website load, and speed up your site.

You’ll be able to choose from various backups during the restoration process.

A user-friendly backup and restoration procedure that anybody may complete.

Help is available for both scheduled and on-demand backups.

Help for a multisite community or a lot of WordPress web pages.

Staging a website allows you to test current backups before restoring them.

Which is better: free or paid backup plugins?

While free backup plugins provide a cost-benefit, premium or paid plugins are a better option since they’re reasonably priced and include benefits like regular updates and 24/7 customer support. In addition, a backup plugin like BlogVault offers useful features like staging, migrations, and security. It also stores all of your website backups on its servers, ensuring that your server isn’t overburdened—a feature that isn’t often provided by a free plugin.

Final Thoughts

We hope that this article has assisted you in determining which backup method is appropriate for you. Whatever backup solution you choose, the most important thing to remember is that your blog website needs a proper backup strategy. Automated backup tools for WordPress websites have greatly simplified the backup and restoration process, allowing you to be more productive while being safe. So, happy blogging, and congratulations on being one of the best!

Akshat Choudhary has always taken pleasure in his ability to expose oneself to problems. Since launching BlogVault, Akshat has transformed his side project into a profitable business breaking new ground in the Indian startup scene. Akshat has been a part of the WordPress community for about a decade and is keen to learn about the issues that customers’ issues. When it comes to building a product, Akshat’s main goal is to make sure the end-user doesn’t need assistance and to assist them in the best way possible if they do.