Do you want to back up your WordPress?

 

How to backup your WordPress website with a simple free plugin?

Backing up your website means that you are saving a copy of your website at a designated date and time. So if your website crashes or you are not happy with some recent changes you made, you can restore the backup to recover your old website. We highly recommend taking regular backups of your website, and here’s why.

#1. Updates can go wrong

Plugins and themes require occasional updates. Updates can sometimes cause your website to break or malfunction.

#2. Chances of getting hacked

Getting hacked is one of the unfortunate possibilities.

#3. You may lose payments and details

If you get a new bank card and forget to update your billing information with your current hosting company, your website will be taken down.

#4. Unexpected things happen

Random errors and crashes can pop up unexpectedly anywhere and for seemingly no reason. So it is always good to backup your site.

I’m going to teach you how to do this in just four simple steps.

#1. Install the backup plugin:

To do this from your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins section. And then click Add New. Now from here, go to Search Bar. Type the plugin called Updraft here. Now click Install Now. And then click Activate. Now, Updraft will walk you through a simple tutorial. So you can press here to start, or you can just go to Settings.

#2. Take a Backup:

So to take a backup, all you need to do is click the Backup Now button. And then make sure these two boxes are checked, namely: include your database in the backup; Add your files in the backup. Then just click Backup Now. So now our backup is running and it will take few seconds. And you can see that backup by simply scrolling down.

#3. Schedule an automatic backup

So you don’t have to do it manually every time. We highly recommend it to you. So to do this, just go to Settings. Change ‘Files backup schedule‘ from Manual to Weekly. Same as ‘Database backup schedule‘. And then set it to four, which means it will take one backup every week. And it only keeps the last four weeks. That way you have an entire month’s worth of backups.

And next, we’re going to choose where these backups go. So my favorite to choose is Google Drive. So, just click on Google Drive. And then scroll down and you can skip all those settings. If you want, you can allow Updraft to email you whenever a backup is taken. So I go ahead and click Save Changes. So now you need to give Updraft permission to go to Google Drive account. So go ahead and click the link. Then sign in to your Google account. And then click Allow. And now, click complete setup to go back to WordPress. And each week these backups accumulate until they become four. And then it continuously replaces old backups with new ones.

Now how do we use these backups? You are probably wondering. Well, this brings us to step four.

#4. Restore the backup

Guess we accidentally messed something up and deleted our homepage. Consider our web pages completely missing here. What should we do in this case? Well, we can get it back to normal by going back to our Updraft plugin. Scroll down to our existing backups, then go to old backup and click Restore. Make sure you check all of the following boxes: Plugins, Themes, Uploads, Others, and Database, and then click Restore. Now our website will complete restoration in few minutes. So let’s go back to our homepage, and then click Refresh. Now our website is the same as before.

So now you know how and how easy it is to backup your WordPress website.