It’s the 2nd in our series of chats called the ‘A-Z of WordPress’ where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today, it’s the letter B and it stands for Backups.
For reasons that I cannot explain, my (Nathan) audio has some clicks in it from time to time. I listened back to it and it’s completely fine, but I’m just letting you know! Who’d use the internet, eh!
Everyone!? Even static sites should have one backup.
It gets more important with eCommerce, LMS and memberships sites with potentially 1,000’s of database changes per hour. Perhaps this is an argument for not using WordPress for this type of site?
David has 13 years experience of WordPress use I has not had a personal incident where a backup has been his only route to recovery. But he has helped others where it has.
So what might be some high-level uses of backups? The sort of thing that you could explain in simple terms to almost any client…
There’s likely a whole load more that we didn’t mention, but you get the idea that there’s no shortage of options in the WordPress plugin space for backups!
Cron job failure and issues on various servers can be the problem here. Also, it’s hard to know which plugin is good / bad because of environments variables and a lack of stats explaining in which environments they don’t work well.
This is more diverse than ever with WordPress specialist hosting and VPS cloud solutions becoming more popular. Most hosting (including low cost Cpanel shared hosting) offer daily back ups.
Matching solutions to budget and budgets to the value of sites is the hard thing here.
For basic mostly static self managed websites on a low budget, perhaps your hosting backup is enough with a plugin based backup as an additional layer of insurance.
Busy Ecommerce shops / membership sites and LMS. Perhaps they need incremental backups hosted with a 3rd party. You certainly don’t want a weekly backup, only to discover that your site was hacked 15 minutes after the last backup which is now a week out of date! Imagine the fury of customers who’ve paid but you have no record of their transactions. Ouch!
Have a backup system in place – period! Make sure that you’ve got something. I would recommend having a 3rd party store the backup in addition to anything that you’ve got stored on your hosting, because if your site is taken over, the backups on the server might be compromised (unavailable) as well.
The more places that you can afford to have backups, the better.
If you have a site that rarely or never changes then the rules about your backups will be different from a site with more traffic and website amendments. Those will need a greater frequency of backups and greater inspection to ensure that they’re actually happening on the schedule that you need.
If you’ve got anything to add to the discussion, please add a comment below or come to the WP Builds Facebook Group and post a comment there.
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