Why Backing up Your WordPress Site is so Important

There is nothing more devastating than having all of the blog articles, representing hours or days of work, disappear from a WordPress blog. Not only does it render the time spent developing the posts wasted, but it also decreases the amount of content that a blog contains, decreasing its readership. In order to prevent this heartache, and for many other reasons, it is critical to backup all WordPress sites and blogs.

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Advantages Associated with Backing Up WordPress Sites:

The first advantage is that, by backing up a site a person is able to feel must more confident in taking risks that could make his or her site more efficient or increase readership. Any changes that are made to a site have their own risks. It is far too easy to accidentally delete entire files when the code behind a site is being augmented. It also makes it easy to restore a site to its original functioning should the changes that are made be displeasing. Backing up a site simply makes taking risks a lot less damaging than they would be otherwise.

A second advantage is that backing up a WordPress site will ensure that any and all content is safe from being deleted or otherwise lost. Along with the content, any saved settings, widgets, themes, plugins, and other add-ons that make a WordPress site complete will also be saved. Should the worst happen and the entire site go down, it will be possible to have it restored in a short enough time to not lose a great deal of readership or business.

The final reason why it is incredibly important to backup a WordPress site is because it increases a person”s confidence. There are a million different things that can go wrong with a WordPress site. It could be hacked. An employee could make a change that results in important information being deleted, viruses and spyware could accidentally be downloaded, or an update could go tragically wrong. By having the site backed up, it is possible for the business or person maintaining the site to feel confident in the knowledge that any problems will be able to be dealt with quickly and efficiently, ensuring that the damage is minimized.

There are a few different warning signs that indicate that there might be a problem with the site. The main problem a site encounters is the existence of malware. The best way to deal with malware is to never let it happen in the first place by installing strong antivirus software. If a virus should invade, certain files will be missing for no reason, new error messages, an extremely slow load-time, and malfunctions when encountering other devices. If these symptoms should start occurring, a site should be backed up before more data is lost. The site also should be backed up if drives are being formatted or if a website manager is going through a file-deleting craze. More information about different signs that a site needs to be backed up can be found here.

How to Backup a WordPress Site:

There are many different ways that a person can use to backup a WordPress site. The first is by checking to see if the server that is hosting the site will be able to backup the files as part of a service. Many different serving sites will offer this service for a small fee.

Another way to backup a WordPress site is to create sync with it. One way to do this is to use WinSCP, which creates a mirror of any content that is on a site. It saves this mirror on both the server and on the hard drive, ensuring that the most recent versions of all of the files are available in both places.

A third way is to have all of the content and settings copied to a file on a computer. This can be done using FTP Clients or UNIX Shell Skills. These files can be subsequently zipped or compressed in order to save as much space as possible. This will let all of the different content be recovered without too much difficulty.

The final way that a person is able to backup his or her WordPress site is by using plugins that will automatically save all of the files. Some free plugins include Backup Plugin by blogVault and DreamObjects Connection. One paid plugin that is highly reviewed is BackupBuddy. All of these plugins will save content and settings in the case of a disaster.