How to back up a website: a complete guide

Websites fail in ordinary ways. An update breaks a theme. A plugin corrupts the database. Someone deletes the wrong folder. An attacker plants malware. A hard disk fails. In every case, the question that matters is how quickly you can return to a good copy.

Without a backup, the answer might be never. With a recent, tested one, it is usually minutes. That is the whole argument. The cost of backing up is tiny, and the cost of not having one is, at worst, the loss of the site, the orders and the work behind it.

A bakery has a WordPress site with a menu, a gallery and an order form that stores orders in the database. Orders arrive daily, so the database changes far more than the files do. The owner decides what a loss would cost: a week of orders would be painful, a month would be a disaster.

She sets up three layers. The hosting account already keeps weekly remote backups for about a month, which is her safety net. On top of that, a plugin takes a full backup of files and database every night and sends it to cloud storage that she controls. Once a month she downloads a complete copy to an external drive kept at home.

Three months later a plugin update breaks the order form. She restores last night's backup to a test copy first, confirms the orders are intact, then restores it to the live site. The outage lasts about twenty minutes. Without the nightly copy she would have fallen back to the weekly one and lost days of orders.

The most important habit is to test a restore. Backups fail quietly: a plugin stops running, a storage account fills up, a database dump is cut short. You usually learn this at the worst possible moment unless you check.

Once a quarter, restore your latest backup to a test location, such as a subdomain, and look through it. Open a few pages, log in, check that images load and that recent posts or orders are present. Note how long the process took, because that figure tells you how long an emergency would really last. If anything is missing, fix the backup method that day.

If the restored site shows a database error, the database backup may be incomplete or restored into the wrong database name. Check the connection details in the site configuration match the database you restored into.

If pages look broken after a restore, clear any caching plugin and your browser cache, and check the site address settings, which can carry over from a different domain. If a large restore times out, ask us in live chat, open 24/7, or restore in smaller parts, files first and database second.