There are many reasons why you need to back up your website. You KNOW that you need to do this. You realize the importance of keeping a regularly scheduled routine to backup and keep your site up to date.
But… do you do it?
Let’s face it – you know that you need to keep a backup of your own HOME computer… How often do you back that up? That is one of the tasks that everyone says
You may think your site is invulnerable to any sort of mishap – and we all like to think that. However, that is NOT the truth. There are a lot of things that can happen to your site (and not all of them are from the Big Bad Hackers)! Here are a few things that can have you wishing that you took the time to have someone managing your Backup and Maintenance on your website.
Hosting Mishaps
This rarely happens, but trust me it happens! A month ago I had a client who was emailed by the hosting company that their server had a hard drive failure and all files on those drives are inaccessible anymore. And you know what? His website was on that server! The hosting company offered to give him free premium servers and asked him the question – do you have a backup on your website?
He just sat there, staring at a blank screen, trying to browse his website because he didn’t have any backup on his website! What will you do with the free premium servers if you’re gonna start all over again? What if it happens to you? You have a blog of more than 1,000 articles, or you have an E-commerce website that already has tons of products for sale, or you have a booking website for your business? Are you ready if that kind of thing will happen to you? Backup your website now!
Website Hacking
You have hired an IT guy who has high credentials to create your website. You have tons of security plugins setup. You think your website is impenetrable. If that is you, think again. Because even if your website may seem secure, there are sometimes holes in the code used to build your website that have exploitable vulnerabilities. There may be bugs in the codes with the theme or plugin you are using because let’s admit it, no code is perfect – there will always be bugs in the code.
And the web standards are constantly updating, that is why from time to time, the code that may seem perfect for now, may not be as perfect later on. That’s why you need to constantly backup your website and update it because you’ll never know when these hackers will strike. And when they strike, you won’t even know. You’ll just see your website non-existent anymore. Imagine if it happens to you now. Your website is hacked and you have no backup, what will you do? Just sit and cry? Backup your website now!
Updates That May Break Your Site
Updates are important because like what we said above, web standards are constantly updating from time to time and that creates a need for your themes and plugins code to be updated too. But a word of caution, you can’t just update and update stuff. You need to check the changelogs of the new update, search if there are dependencies on your current system.
There was one time where there was this huge update of a plugin that a client had installed on her website. Because she wants to keep everything up to date in a jiffy she just updated it without reading the change logs of the plugin and you know what happened? The update broke the whole site! The whole site! A simple update can break your website and what do you plan to do when that happens? How do you revert that updated plugin back to the compatible version – you need a backup! Backup your website now!
Human Error
Let’s face it, programming code is not perfect, so much more are humans. You may have hired the smartest developer there is but you know, sometimes, some accidents just happen. I’ll tell you another story… I had a promising web developer, he was managing my booming E-commerce website. One day, I asked him to create dozens of new functionality for the website. For the first set of functions, the site was still okay, we checked and tested! But next set of updates, he got too sucked in into programming the functionalities he forgot to check – it broke the whole website! Now he can’t tell which part of the code broke the site.
There was like hundreds and lines of code and we were already using the first set of new functionalities he made. But now that the site broke down the new functionalities are useless. You know the good thing though, we created backups every time we updated something on the website. Not the kind of nightmare you imagined right? That is why it is pretty safe and important to back up your website so you can just easily revert all the files when everything was still imperfectly perfect. Are you still having second thoughts? Backup your website now!
Were you struck by those compelling reasons above on why you need up to date backups on your website? Then start backing up your site now! Don’t lose hours, days, or even years of hard work just because you haven’t made any backup on your website. Always think ahead, don’t just focus on what is happening now. Be ready. Backup your website now!
If you would like to have your site backed up and maintained for you, contact us!
About 22 months ago, my blog was hacked. (Not terribly surprising, since I rarely hesitate to take a stand,) Without a timely backup, I could have lost 1000 posts and 10000 comments.
(Yes, my servers and computers are also backed up. I’ve lost way too many important documents to acceed to such travails.)
Gotta love backups! Backups are like insurance – no one wants it until they need it!