Learning how to back up a WordPress site is one of those things that might feel like it isn’t urgent … until something happens to your site, and it becomes incredibly urgent (but maybe too late).
There’s nothing fun or exciting about backing up WordPress. But it’s something that you’ll absolutely want to learn to prevent yourself from heartbreak down the road.
In this post, we’re going to try to make the topic of WordPress backups as painless as possible by covering everything you need to know in one spot:
- How often to back up WordPress
- The different types of WordPress content that you need to back up
- Where to store WordPress backups
- The best WordPress backup plugins
- How to back up WordPress using a free plugin
WordPress Backups 101: Why They’re Important and How to Do Them
In a perfect world, backing up your WordPress site would be a waste of time and effort because nothing ever goes wrong.
However, your WordPress site doesn’t exist in a perfect world – it exists in the real world. And in the real world, there’s a lot that can go wrong with your WordPress site:
- You can make a mistake, like permanently deleting important content by accident (such as an Elementor design that you’ve spent hours working on!).
- A malicious actor might gain access to your site and inject malware or otherwise cause issues.
Your host might have a failure that leads to lost data. - A plugin or theme might crash your site.
- A newly-applied update might suddenly cause an issue.
In all of those situations, you’re dealing with the potential loss of all or some of your WordPress site.
Without a recent backup, any one of those situations can be catastrophic.
However, if you always have a recent backup on hand, the worst-case scenario is a minor inconvenience – not a catastrophe.
Long story short, if you have a WordPress site, you need to take backups of your WordPress site.