At some point, you’ll need to restore a backup of your site. Maybe your WordPress website got hacked, or something went wrong during an update. Whatever the case might be, backing up your website regularly is the best way to ensure that you never lose any important data. 

Fortunately, there’s more than one way to back up and restore a WordPress website. Knowing how each method works will enable you to decide what option to use.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the reasons why you need to back up your WordPress site. Then we’ll talk about the different types of backups and help you decide which method works best for you. Let’s get to work!

It’s every site owner’s worst nightmare — you visit your website and find that it’s completely down. What do you do? Where do you go from here?

There are a variety of reasons your website might be inaccessible — it was hacked, there was a theme or plugin conflict, you accidentally deleted something — but it can be crippling no matter what. If your site is down even briefly, you could lose customers, clients, or followers. If it’s down longer (especially because of a hack) you could lose your cash flow, drop in search engine rankings or suffer permanent damage to your reputation. And, of course, if you have no way to restore it, you might lose your past orders or content, and then need to hire someone to fix it for you.

That’s where backups can save the day! A good backup plugin requires very little setup on your end but saves your site automatically so that, if the unthinkable happens, you can get back up and running again quickly. It’s more than just a handy tool; it’s peace of mind.

But there are a lot of good options out there. How do you know which one to choose?

We’ve examined the best WordPress backup plugins and compared them based on their features, pros and cons, ease of use, and pricing.

If you’ve ever experienced a broken website, you know just how devastating it can be to try to recover or rebuild if you don’t have a copy to restore from. It can cost hours, days, or even months of downtime; leading to revenue loss, increased expenses, and emotional distress for you and anyone who relies on your site. Being able to restore your files and database if anything goes wrong can prevent this kind of painful situation. This is why making backups of your WordPress site, with a tool like Jetpack Backup, is absolutely critical. 

In this article we’ll walk you through:

• What is a WordPress backup?
• Why do you need a backup of your site?
• Methods for creating a WordPress backup
  • Automatic backups from your web host
  • Manual backups
  • Backups using plugins
• Which manual backup method is the best?
• How often should I back up my WordPress site?
• Where should I store my WordPress backups?
• How do I know that I haven’t missed any files when performing a manual backup of my WordPress site?
• What makes WordPress backup with a plugin better than manual?
• How many backups should I keep?