The Easy Way to Backup Your WordPress Website

Something that I didn’t realize until a few years ago is that your website, just like files on your computer, need to be backed up every once in a while. A website, including a WordPress website or blog, is basically a collection of files that sits on a server somewhere for everyone to access. Unfortunately, that means that those files can be destroyed, corrupted or hacked. Not fun. Your webhost should be backing everything up too, but you definitely shouldn’t rely on that, nor will they back up on your schedule. The good news is that it’s super easy to back up your WordPress website, because there are some awesome plugins out there.

Manual Backup with Duplicator

I’m rather fond of the plugin Duplicator. I even use it to launch websites. It’s primary function though is for back up. Here’s how to use it:

1. Install the Duplicator plugin.
2. Once it’s installed, click on it in your sidebar menu.
3. Once you see Duplicator, click on the icon shown below to create a zipped backup file of your website.
4. In the screen that pops up once you’ve clicked the icon, click on the button that says ‘Create Package Set.’
5. Once the package is finished click on the right-hand package button to download the zipped files for your website.
6. Once you’ve downloaded the zipped package of files, make sure to stash them somewhere safe on your computer, and maybe even make a copy on your computer’s back up system as well.

Automatic Back Up with WPB2D

Now, Duplicator only works if you actually remember to back your site up yourself. Another option, which I’ve recently started using on my own site, is the plugin WordPress Backup to Dropbox (WPB2D). True to it’s name, it will automatically back your site up to your Dropbox account. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Install the plugin. It will show up as WPB2D in your sidebar menu.
2. Authorize WPB2D to access your Dropbox account by clicking on the authorize button. (If you don’t have a Dropbox account, sign up for one in this step too.)
3. Once you’ve authorized Dropbox to access your WordPress site, edit WPB2D’s settings to reflect a backup schedule that works for you. If you’re blogging on your site regularly, I’d back your site up every couple of weeks, if you’re not blogging much or at all, monthly or every two months should do the trick. Here’s what that screen will look like.
   You may want to exclude some of the files that are included in your site, though if the only thing you have on your webhost is your website, I wouldn’t recommend that. You can exclude certain files by checking them off at the bottom of the WPB2D screen.

Now that you have your backup system or systems in place, there are some other times that you should back your site up. It’s pretty important to check in with your site every once in a while, to ensure that all of your WordPress plugins and WordPress itself is up to date. Before updating your plugins or updating WordPress itself, is another good time to back your site up. If you’ve chosen a plugin like WPB2D, as long as you back your site up with some frequency, you may not need to back up before updating, but if you’ve chosen a plugin like Duplicator, this would be a great time to backup your site.

There are, of course, other ways of backing up your WordPress site. These are just two plugins that I’ve tried and really liked for their simplicity. If you find others that you like too, please leave me a note in the comments so that I can check those out too!

Whatever you do, have a back up system in place to save you lots of frustration and trouble later on.