As a WordPress website owner, you need to protect your data from unexpected events. Creating a website backup is one way to do this.
Security threats like hackers, malware, and phishing attacks can compromise your site. Additionally, human errors, plugin conflicts, and server failures can also put your site at risk. Without a backup, recovering your site can be challenging.
A WordPress backup saves a copy of your site’s important files, folders, and databases. This includes your content, plugins, themes, images, videos, settings, and other information. You can easily use the backup to restore your website in case you get locked out because of an error or cyberattack.
However, WordPress doesn’t offer any automatic backups. You can either manually back up using your hosting provider’s cPanel or an FTP client. Personally, we recommend using a plugin as it is much easier and gives you more control, making it a beginner-friendly solution.
Generating backups is a crucial task for any website. Not only will it increase your security, but will also provide you with a reliable way of restoring your site in case of unexpected errors or issues. You can perform a backup manually or use automation. The manual process would involve downloading the files and the MySQL database of a WordPress site.
However, if you make lots of new posts, changes or manage several different websites, downloading everything manually each time can be a real hassle. In addition, nowadays, most hosting providers offer automated account backups. As an extra security measure, you can use WordPress plugins to automate backups monthly, weekly or even daily. They will save you lots of time and also give the option of storing the backup WordPress files and database to a remote location such as DropBox. You can use such plugins as,
UpdraftPlus a plugin with the ability to backup WordPress to a remote location and restore it.
BackUpWordPress is a light-weight backup plugin with automation. It allows you to exclude certain folders, schedule the execution time and has support for several different languages.
These are some of the basic steps that you can take in hardening WordPress.
