What is a website backup?
Simply put, a website backup is a saved copy of your website at the time and date the backup is created. Think of it as a save file in a video game, as progress is made, or before a difficult part, you can save the game and continue from this save file if needed.
The main reason for a backup is a point to revert to if something goes wrong, it’s quite surprising the amount of things that can go wrong. It’s something you really need to be using to keep your website and business safe.
How often should I backup my website?
We backup all our sites daily automatically, and recommend this as the base for all websites. You can increase the frequency if needed, depending on how the website operates.
If you’re constantly having changing data (such as storing and updating users details), you might want to consider increasing the backup frequency to ensure no data is lost.
We always recommend backing up a website before any major changes, such as plugin updates or moving a staging environment live.
1. Updating your website
In the world of the web, there are continuous updates required to keep the website smoothly and working efficiently. Authors of plugins and software are constantly working to provide reliable, up-to-date software to works on multiple devices across multiple platforms.
As much as we’d all love to think clicking “update” would just work, the sad reality is it’s simply not that simple – and any developer will tell you the hassle caused by updates can be tremendous. We know we’ve lost our fair share of hair over the years due to updates.
Should you avoid updating because of this? Absolutely not. Updates are essential to keep things running smoothly, or provide new features, otherwise they would never be an update. It just means that you need to be more cautious when you perform updates. Having a revert point is essential if something was to go wrong, you can revert to when everything was working smoothly, and amend the problems separately.
2. Accidents can happen
People make mistakes. After all, we’re only human.
Have you ever deleted, or removed something from the website? It’s so easy to remove the wrong thing. Then, next thing you know, you’re missing a blog post or page that should be published, resulting in a 404 error page.
Sometimes you can get lucky with a dedicated trash area, that temporarily stores deleted content, but this isn’t always the case. The thing you deleted could be lost forever. Having a backup point makes this lost content retrievable.
3. Prevent hackers
Hackers are a very real threat, whether you like to believe it or not.
You might be thinking, “it’ll” never happen to me, my website doesn’t have a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, it isn’t a case of “if”, but “when”. Hackers have no regard for your company or website purpose, it can be a malicious attack because someone got bored, which is the horrible truth.
Are you using WordPress? This isn’t a problem, but with WordPress being open source, anyone can view the source code of the basis that forms your website.
With each core update, WordPress updates their files, removing any vulnerabilities that may have been present, great! Unfortunately, hackers now know these weaknesses too and can act upon it.
Should your website get hacked, you’ll be able to revert any changes done, back to when the site was safe and secure. From there, you can work on how you were hacked and improving your security.
4. Software compatibility
Looking to add some new functionality to make your site even better? Awesome! But, how does this work with the existing software on the website?
When software is created, it’s designed to work and perform as the developer intended, but what happens when another developer has built something a different way? Well, they’re going to clash and cause some issues. You need to be cautious adding or choosing off-the-shelf software to your site because of this very reason.
5. Peace of mind
You have enough on your plate with your day-to-day tasks, it’s one less thing for you to worry about.
If at any point an error occurred, you can simply just hit rewind and it’s like nothing ever happened, and breathe a sigh of relief.
Start backing up your site today
At DigiRex, we understand the importance of having a website backed up. Some providers don’t provide this functionality without an additional fee, we think that’s horrific – there’s so many reasons things can go wrong with modern day websites.