It’s important to backup your site. You may find that something goes drastically wrong with your site and you need to restore your site. You may find there’s security issues, you may have been hacked. There’s many reasons why you may need to rollback your site.
Install a backup plugin such as UpdraftPlus (other plugins are available, but this one has my personal seal of approval, it’s saved my skin a few times, especially when using some complex plugins together:
It’s really easy to use, in a nutshell you:
- Install it through your admin panel.
- Activate it.
- Do an initial backup (you can choose to keep this backup indefinitely so you can always roll back to it.)
- You can choose whether to back up manually, or whether to automate the backups. I have an e-commerce site I run that requires a daily backup, other static sites may only need a weekly backup.
- Choose a backup schedule (you can choose to backup content/files separately from your database).
- For extra security you can backup remotely to Dropbox / Google Drive / AWS in addition to FTP backup.
- That’s it.
I’ve used backup files from Updraft to restore to a brand new installation before with complete success. If you haven’t got backup software on your site, do it today!