WordPress Backups: Yes, You Need To….

Let me ask you a question that I am afraid to hear the answer… Are you making  backups of your WordPress site? Do you regularly and consistently copy your entire site (database, widgets, themes, plugins, the whole kit and caboodle) in the event something goes wrong? I hope so!

I have personally been saved by my backups on many occasions. I have worked with clients (some that are happy and some that are not so happy) when they tell me they have been hacked. The happy ones have a recent backup of their site. The not so happy clients are the ones that never made a backup and truly lost everything!

There are many reasons to backup your WordPress blog and make sure you always have a copy of it in case something goes wrong. Just a couple reasons include:

• Your database might crash
• You might accidentally delete some of your posts or files
• You might even need to roll back to an earlier version of your WordPress blog
• Installing a plugin that conflicts with your theme can render your site useless

It’s a simple fact that computers fail all the time. A hard drive might crash out and many people don’t realize that your website is simply sitting on a computer somewhere that has all the same problems as your computer!

That computer might blue screen, it might not turn on one day, the hard drive might stop. But either way something might go wrong and databases crash all the time. If the database crashes it might lose the entire thing. It might lose your several last year’s worth of WordPress posts, comments, users, everything might be gone in a single second.

Just because a you are paying for hosting, it does not ensure that everything will always work!

All is not Doom & Gloom! If (or I should say, WHEN)  you’ve backed up your WordPress site you can restore it later on and get access to it any time you want. Even if everything goes wrong, set it up again exactly the way it was. And even ignoring database crashes you might accidentally delete something. I know I do more times than I want to admit

We are human – we make mistakes! I work late at night – sometimes I am not thinking straight (of course, that would never happen to you!) You might delete the wrong comment, the wrong blog post and even empty the trash and never have a way to get that back. I know that sometimes even my webhost is fixing a database issue and they will delete something without me having to do anything.

So even if you think you’re perfect and you never make a mistake you might delete something and it’s better safe than sorry. It’s worth taking those few seconds to backup your WordPress blog so that you can get it back whenever you need to.

Speaking of getting stuff back whenever you need to, would you write a 50 page term paper in Microsoft Word and never save it along the way? Of course not. You might type one page and save it, another page and save it. Why not treat your WordPress blog like a Word document? Which means you might set up the WordPress theme, now you want to take a backup right at that point. Then add in some extra posts, take a backup right there.  Every week take a backup so if you ever need to get back to an earlier part, maybe you made one change to your theme and you liked it, but then changed a graphic and you didn’t like it. You want to get back to that earlier change that you backed up your site at every point along the way, you can get back anything you ever need.

That’s why you should backup your WordPress blog, in case your database crashes, you accidentally delete some stuff, you need to go back to an earlier version.

Either way you should backup your WordPress blog right away, right now. Use this backup plugin to safely keep copies of your WordPress blog at: Backup Creator