Backing up your WordPress website

Backing up your website is an essential, regular task but one that often gets overlooked or taken for granted. Should you assume that your hosting company does it for you? Or your website designer? Or do it yourself? I automate the task using a WordPress plugin called BackupBuddy.

Most WordPress plugins are free but BackupBuddy is a premium plugin. For an annual fee of US $150 I can use it to back up an unlimited number of clients’ website, which makes it great value. I simply wouldn’t have time to backup a couple of dozen sites manually every week.

Once installed on your website, BackupBuddy checks that the hosting server’s settings are conducive to doing a backup, and if there are problems, gives you advice on how to resolve them. In practice, I’ve found that only about one in four hosting packages needs tweaking in some way.

The plugin also runs a check for malware – handy, because if your site has been hacked you can revert to a previous backup.

Unlike some backup plugins, it can backup everything: your MySQL database, WordPress core files, theme, uploaded images and documents. And it saves it as a single compressed file.

You can set up a schedule – I tend to do weekly backups but the can be daily, fortnightly or monthly – and BackupBuddy will automatically do the backup and send you an email to tell you it’s ready. Then you can login to WordPress and download the backup. Even better, you can have the backup sent to your Dropbox account, or sent by FTP to another location for safe keeping.

All in all, it’s a great plugin and a reliable solution to keeping your website safe and secure.