Did you know that 222 million websites use WordPress?
You might wonder what that has to do with the title of the post:
Everything.
Since WordPress powers so many websites, it's a perfect target for hackers.
And since hacked websites usually don't work the way they're supposed to, having a backup of your WordPress site is crucial.
Let me explain:
Professional hackers make huge amounts of money. We're talking about several $10k for certain types of attacks.
Attacking millions of websites in one attack is perfect for hackers, which is why WordPress sites are constantly threatened.
Caring about WordPress security is more important than ever.
Your site too small to get hacked?
If you think that, you've got a huge problem.
You probably don't know that hacks are automated these days.
Software tools search the Internet for WordPress sites and attack every single site they find.
Do they care about your traffic statistics, number of posts, monthly revenue?
What do you think?
Now that you understand you've got to protect your site from data-loss, let me show you an easy way to automate your WordPress backups.
Professional web hosts (I recommend Cloudways & WP Engine) do backups for you, but that's not sufficient if you're serious about your WordPress site.
What if you can't access their backups for whatever reason and you need to restore your site?
Owning your WordPress backups and storing them on your storage is key.
A free Dropbox account is the perfect storage for automated WordPress backups because you don't lose the backups when your hard drive crashes.
If you don't want to deal with backups of your WordPress and just want to be safe, having a service doing the backups for you is the best way to go.
In that case, I can highly recommend Blogvault.net.
The only thing you need to do after signing up is to install their WordPress plugin and to enter your account details.
Blogvault takes care of the rest:
In the next section of this post, I'll show you how to automate your WordPress backups manually.
If you don't want to deal with that, go with Blogvault. They're cheap and rock-solid.
Their CEO Akshat Choudhary was an expert speaker on The WP Summit, sharing his best strategies on WordPress security and backups.
You can get his interview as part of the All Access Pass.
Alright, on to automating WordPress backups on your own.
There are a number of good and free WordPress plugins in the official repository.
I'll walk you through my personal favorite: BackWP Up.
You can install it directly from "Plugins" -> "Add New" inside your WordPress.
Here's a video tutorial on using BackWP Up to automate your backups.
I recorded it a while ago, so please bare with me 🙂
In case you need to recover a backup, simply follow this tutorial:
I use the exact steps on most of my websites; they're proven to work.
Again, if you don't want to deal with this process, a service like Blogvault might be a good fit for you.
If you have questions or encounter problems when following my tutorials, either comment them on Youtube or leave a comment here.
