If you’re managing your website yourself then as a matter of importance you should be backing up your website.
Over time websites can be infected with malware and they can also stop working when WordPress and its plugins update and conflict with one another. Therefore its important that you have a clean backup copy to fall back on that can be reinstalled should the worst happen.
Fortunately its very easy to backup your website. You simply need to install a backup plugin and ideally have some storage space in the cloud and/or on an external hard drive where you can install your websites files.
There are many to choose from but our backup plugin of choice is called ‘UpdraftPlus’ and you can install this on your website by logging into your dashboard, and selecting ‘Add Plugin’ from the left hand menu. Search for ‘Updraft’ and it will appear in the search results. Click the ‘Install’ Button and after a few seconds you will be prompted to ‘Activate’ the plugin. Once you have done that Updraft is installed on your website and can be located within your ‘Settings’ menu again on the left hand side menu bar of your dashboard
Within the UpdraftPlus options, from the above Backup/Restore menu tab you can make an immediate backup of your website that you can download to your computer.
We recommend though to schedule a regular backup to the cloud, which you can configure by clicking on the Settings tab. From the list of backup files you will be presented with make sure you are backing up your Database, Themes, Plugins, Uploads and Other files. The Core files are not important – these are common WordPress files that will automatically be created if you needed to restore your website.
