How To Back Up Your WordPress Website (3 Ways)
Even a slight plugin update can trigger serious issues or critical errors on your WordPress website, potentially leading to difficult recovery scenarios. Similarly, the unintentional deletion of pages or posts can feel like a digital disaster if there’s no backup.
But when you maintain a robust backup strategy for your WordPress site, you essentially equip yourself with the power to reverse damages and restore your website to its previous stable and operational state. It’s like having an insurance policy for your website. You’ll learn 3 methods to back up your WordPress website in this tutorial, there are two easy ways and one hard way.
Method 1: Through Hosting Provider
A reliable hosting backup system operates independently of your WordPress installation. They function at the server level, entirely outside of your WordPress installation. This is very beneficial if your WordPress site becomes severely corrupted, hacked, or inaccessible, even to the WordPress dashboard. In that case, a WordPress plugin for backups may become unusable.
But hosting backups will easily restore your website to a previous, healthy state. Hosting backups are mostly automatic meaning you don’t have to remember to backup, they run silently in the background on schedule such as daily or weekly, ensuring consistent protection without requiring your ongoing effort.
Unlike WordPress backup plugins that have a higher fee, hosting providers typically include automated backup services as part of their managed WordPress hosting plans.
How Do You Back Up Through The Hosting Provider?
Go to your website’s dashboard from your hosting provider (depending on your hosting provider’s backend interface).
Now, find the “Backup” section.
You’ll be able to turn on the automatic backup option depending on the user interface of your hosting provider. Some hosting providers may charge separately for daily backup features.
Method 2: Through WordPress Backup Plugins
Whether you should use free or paid WordPress backup plugins often depends on the scale, criticality, and technical requirements of your website. Free WordPress backup plugins can be a good starting point for small websites like personal blogs or websites with limited content and traffic. They typically offer basic backup functionality, allowing you to manually backup and restore your site.
However, they have many limitations, like no automatic backups, restricted storage options (forcing you to manage storage yourself), slower backup and restore speeds, limited features (like incremental backups or cloud storage integrations), and crucially, often very limited or non-existent customer support.
If you encounter issues or need assistance, you are largely on your own, relying on community forums or documentation, which can be time-consuming and potentially unreliable in urgent situations. Paid or premium WordPress backup plugins, on the other hand, are designed for more demanding websites, particularly businesses, e-commerce stores, and sites with critical data.
They offer more advanced features such as incremental backups (which are faster and more efficient), automated backups to secure cloud storage locations (like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon S3), faster and more reliable restore processes, website migration and staging capabilities, and perhaps most importantly, dedicated and responsive customer support.
UpdraftPlus Backup Plugin
UpdraftPlus is a good WordPress backup plugin with millions of active installations. It’s user-friendly and great for small websites.
They also give remote storage features in their free plan to save your backup directly to Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and more cloud storage platforms.
However, it’s not ideal for big sites and may cause errors in restoration in our experience. So, you must test your backup on a local WordPress environment with software like WampServer before you rely on it.
How to Backup Your Site Using the Updraft Plugin
To take a backup from the Updraft plugin, click on the “Backup Now” button from the dashboard.
You can also choose what to backup specifically, like only Plugins or Theme Only.
Click on Backup Now.
All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin
All-in-One WP Migration and Backup is actively installed on 5 million+ WordPress websites and is a free WordPress backup plugin that’s easy to operate and create backups.
The free plan includes creating backups and storing them on your website as well as downloading the backup file that you can store on local storage and use to restore the website.
Paid features include Reset Hub which lets you reset individual parts like themes or databases only and schedule backups.
How to Backup Your Site Using the All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin
To create a backup through the All-in-One WP Migration and Backup plugin, click on “EXPORT SITE TO”
Click on “FILE” or any cloud storage option if you have the premium version:
Now, the plugin will start creating the backup. The bigger the website, the more time it’ll take.
Now, click on ‘DOWNLOAD YOURSITENAME” to download the backup.
The backup will also be stored on your website and you can download or restore it directly from here.
Keep in mind if your backup is too large to exceed your PHP upload limit then All-in-One WP Migration and Backup will show an error while importing your backup.
In that case, you can either invest in their Unlimited Extension plugin or manually increase your PHP upload limit.
How Do You Manually Back Up Your WordPress Website?
To create a manual WordPress backup, you will need either of two things:
- Hosting file manager
- FTP client like FileZilla(to access your WordPress files)
Once you access your WordPress files, select all and download them.
Secondly, you’ll also need to create a database backup separately. From your hosting’s website dashboard, go to the database management and click on PHPMyAdmin.
Navigate to the Export section from there.
Click on Export to export your database.
Backup Through USDigitarget’s WordPress Backup Services
Even if you use automated plugins, WordPress backup is still a hassle. If you’re a busy and non-technical WordPress site owner, we highly recommend our WordPress backup service, where our experts will manually take your WordPress website backups daily without slowing down your website and store the backups on our servers as well.
USDigitarget guarantees website restoration in any emergency, whether it’s an update crash, hack, WordPress critical error, WordPress white screen of death error, or even undoing mistakes of deleting any file.
Dos and Don’ts when taking your WordPress Website Backup
You must at least create a new backup every week or daily (if possible) and store it in multiple storage locations, like on your computer and Google Drive.
Secondly, you must test your backups on your staging WordPress website or set up a local WordPress environment to see if they’re working.
At USDigitarget, we’ve seen some large backups created through plugins failing to restore, so you must be careful. Thirdly, take backups when it’s a low traffic hour of your website so it won’t slow down your website.
