How to Backup Your WordPress Site (Beginner‘s Guide)

As a WordPress site owner, one of the most important things you can do is create regular backups. Backups allow you to quickly restore your site in case of failures, hacks, or accidental data loss.

After 15+ years as a webmaster, I‘ve seen countless sites go down losing months or years of hard work. Don‘t let that happen to you!

In this detailed guide, I‘ll show you the best practices I‘ve learned for backing up WordPress sites. I‘ll cover:

• Why WordPress backups are critical
• The best backup methods for beginners
• How to automate WordPress backups
• Where to store backups securely
• How to fully restore your site from a backup
• Tips for testing your backups

Let‘s dive in!

Why You Absolutely Must Backup Your WordPress Site

There are many potential threats and issues that can lead to losing your WordPress site:

• Hacker attacks are increasingly common. Sites get hacked every single day. Backups allow you to restore a clean, non-infected version of your site.

• Server failures can and do happen. Issues with a web host can cause your site to go down and data can be lost permanently. Backups provide a way to get your site back up and running on a new host.

• Incompatible plugins/themes are a big issue I see often. Conflicts due to outdated software can sometimes completely break a site. Backups make it easy to revert to a working state.

• Accidental deletions happen more than you‘d think. You or another admin may accidentally delete important site content, images, pages, custom code, etc. Backups are the only way to recover deleted data.

• Human errors like a wrong file edit, database change, or botched update can easily take down a site. Backups let you instantly undo these mistakes.

According to Sucuri, over 2 million WordPress sites are hacked each year.

And additional research shows:

• 32% of downtime incidents are caused by human errors.
• 21% of web hosting downtime is caused by server failures.
• 57% of sites have sensitive data or vulnerabilities due to poor coding and plugins.

Without proper backups, it can be impossible, extremely expensive, or very time consuming to recover your website from these types of failures or attacks.

Having recent, working backups gives you confidence that your hard work is safe no matter what happens. Just spin up a new site instance and restore your latest backup to quickly mitigate any WordPress disaster.

So let‘s go over the best ways to backup your WordPress site, store backups safely in multiple locations, and how to restore your site when needed.

Backup Method #1: Automated WordPress Backup Plugin (Recommended)

The easiest way to continuously backup your WordPress site is by using an automated backup plugin. This handles creating backups and storing them locally + off-site with just a few clicks.

Based on my experience managing many WordPress sites over the years, I highly recommend using Duplicator.

Duplicator is the most popular WordPress backup plugin with over 1 million active installs. Here‘s why it‘s great for beginners:

✔ Creates complete backups including your WordPress files, database tables, plugins, themes, images, design customizations, etc. Everything you need to recreate your site.

✔ Lets you set schedules to automate daily, weekly, or monthly WordPress backups.

✔ Simplified restore process using the installer file. You don‘t have to be a tech expert to recover your site.

✔ Stores backups locally + supports remote storage like Google Drive or Dropbox for off-site copies.

✔ Has advanced options like backup encryption, excluding specific files/folders, and more.

Let‘s walk through getting started with Duplicator to backup your WordPress site:

Step 1: Install and Activate Duplicator

Installing Duplicator is just like any other WordPress plugin:

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New.
2. Search for Duplicator.
3. Click the Install Now button.
4. Once installed, click Activate to enable the plugin.

Once activated, you‘ll find Duplicator in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard.

Step 2: Create Your First Backup

Creating an initial backup of your WordPress site only takes a couple minutes:

1. Go to Duplicator > Packages in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Click the Create New button.
3. Give your backup package a name like mysite-backup-1.
4. Scroll down and click Next to start building the package.
5. On the scan results page, click Build to kickoff the backup process.

Duplicator will now backup your entire WordPress site including all your files, database tables, plugins, themes, uploads, etc. It packages everything in a ZIP file along with an installer script.

This installer makes restoring your backup super easy. More on that later.

Once your initial backup finishes, you can download it and/or set up automated scheduling.

Step 3: Automate WordPress Backups

The real power of Duplicator is being able to schedule WordPress backups to run automatically. This ensures you always have the most recent files backed up.

Here‘s how to setup scheduled backups:

1. Go to Duplicator > Schedules and click Add New.
2. Give your schedule a name like Daily Backup.
3. Set how often you want backups by selecting the repeat interval. You can do daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
4. Pick a time of day that works best for your site traffic.
5. Click Save Schedule to activate automatic WordPress backups.

Duplicator will now backup your site on the schedule you chose. It maintains a certain number of previous backup archives.

You can download or restore the latest backup file any time you need to recover your site.

Step 4: Restore Your WordPress Site from a Backup

If your WordPress site ever goes down, restoring from a Duplicator backup takes just a couple minutes.

Here‘s an overview of the simplified steps:

1. Delete all existing WordPress files via FTP/cPanel to have a clean slate.
2. Reinstall WordPress to get a fresh set of files and databases.
3. Download your Duplicator backup archive and unzip it.
4. Upload the unzipped installer folder via FTP to your site.
5. Visit yoursite.com/installer.php to launch the installer.
6. Click Restore and follow the wizard to complete your restoration.

Within 5-10 minutes, Duplicator will restore your site to the exact state it was in when the backup was created. All your files, databases, plugins, themes, and content will be copied back in.

This makes recovering from any WordPress catastrophe a breeze. I have a detailed guide on restoring your WordPress site from a backup that covers more troubleshooting tips.

The key takeaway is that Duplicator makes backing up and restoring your WordPress site easy. You don‘t have to be a tech guru to protect your site with automated backups!

Backup Method #2: Manually Backup WordPress via cPanel

If you have access to your web hosting cPanel, you can manually backup WordPress by compressing the files:

1. Login to your web hosting cPanel dashboard.
2. Go to Files > File Manager.
3. Click on the public_html folder.
4. Locate your WordPress site root folder and right click it.
5. Choose Compress to create a .zip archive of your site‘s files.
6. Once compressed, select the .zip file and click Download.
7. Save the backup .zip file locally on your computer.

You now have a complete WordPress backup containing all your site‘s files and folders. In case your site goes down, you can restore this backup via cPanel.

However, the big downside to this manual method is that you have to repeat the full process whenever you want a fresh backup. And there are extra steps involved in restoring backups created this way.

That‘s why using an automated WordPress backup plugin like Duplicator is far better. It handles doing continuous backups and restorations for you with just a few clicks.

But this cPanel technique does work in a pinch if you need to manually backup your WordPress site.

Backup Method #3: Export the WordPress Database

Your WordPress database contains all of your site‘s content, users, plugin data, settings, etc. Manually backing it up allows you to recover that data if needed.

Here‘s an overview on how to backup your WordPress database via cPanel:

1. Login to your web hosting cPanel.
2. Go to Databases > phpMyAdmin.
3. Click on your WordPress database name.
4. Select the tables you want to backup. Or choose all tables to backup everything.
5. Click the Export button at the top.
6. Set format to SQL and click Go to export the data.
7. Save the .SQL file backup to your computer.

Now you have a backup of your WordPress database tables that can be imported if your database gets corrupted, hacked, or accidentally deleted.

However, a database backup only contains part of your WordPress site. For full protection, you also need to backup your WordPress core files, plugins, themes, uploads folder, etc.

That‘s why a complete backup solution like Duplicator is much more convenient. It automatically handles backing up your WordPress databases AND all other files that make up your site.

Backup Method #4: Manually Backup WordPress via FTP

FTP allows you to access your web hosting server files directly. You can use an FTP client to manually download WordPress files for backup.

Here‘s an overview on how to backup WordPress via FTP:

1. Connect to your web server using an FTP client like FileZilla.
2. Navigate to the root directory of your WordPress site.
3. Select the specific files or folders you want to backup.
4. Right click each file/folder and choose Download.
5. Select where to save the files locally on your computer.
6. Repeat this process whenever you want to create a new backup.

The advantage of FTP backup is you have full control to selectively download WordPress files like just your wp-content folder.

However, using FTP for backups takes more effort on your part. You have to manually select, download, and organize each file or folder you want to save.

An automated WordPress backup plugin like Duplicator simplifies the entire process. It crawls your site and builds a comprehensive backup archive with a single click. Much easier than doing FTP backups manually!

Where to Store WordPress Backups Securely

To fully protect your WordPress site, it‘s critical to store backups in multiple locations. This guards against data loss if one of your backup destinations becomes unavailable.

I recommend keeping WordPress backups in at least 3 places:

• Local: Save WordPress backups to your computer or a local external drive that you own. This gives you direct access to backups and protects against web host issues.

• Off-site cloud storage: Services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or iDrive give you remote backups that are available from anywhere. Choose a provider with high uptime and redundancy.

• Secondary web host account: You can occasionally store backups on a second host or staging site to have an additional off-site copy not connected to your primary hosting account.

For ultimate security, I also suggest encrypting your WordPress backups prior to uploading them to cloud storage or secondary hosts. This ensures no one else can access the backups.

Duplicator has built-in encryption and also supports saving to many popular cloud storage services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon S3, and more!

How to Test and Restore WordPress Backups

Once you have WordPress backups via any of the methods above, it‘s critical that you test restoring from a backup to confirm they work.

Don‘t wait until an emergency to find out your backups are corrupt or invalid!

Here are some tips on testing and restoring from WordPress backups:

• Do sample test restores – Periodically restore a backup to a staging site to verify you can cleanly recover WordPress. Fix any issues before you actually need the backups.

• Diff backup data – Use a diff tool to spot check that your latest backup contains the correct, up-to-date WordPress files and database tables.

• Validate backup integrity – Scan your backup archives to make sure there is no corruption or missing files.

• Keep backups recent – Don‘t let backups languish for too long. Automate daily or weekly backups so you always have a fresh copy.

• Store backups redundantly – Maintain both local and cloud copies of WordPress backups to protect against data loss or unavailability.

• Follow the 3-2-1 rule – Have at least 3 copies of backups, using 2 different storage mediums, and with 1 copy being off-site.

Testing your WordPress backups gives confidence that you can successfully restore your site should it ever go down.

Be sure to occasionally do test restores to staging environments. And address any issues before you end up needing the backups for real.

Final Thoughts on WordPress Backups

I hope this guide has impressed upon you the importance of backups for protecting your WordPress site.

Don‘t wait until disaster strikes to think about WordPress backups!

Based on my experience managing many sites over the past 15+ years, I highly recommend automating your WordPress backups using a dedicated plugin like Duplicator.

The little upfront time investment is well worth it for securing all your hard work. And it can save you from countless headaches if your site ever goes down.

Start implementing daily or weekly automated WordPress backups. Store them both locally + remotely in multiple locations. And be sure to periodically test restoring your site to confirm your backups are valid.

Following the tips in this guide will give you confidence your site is properly protected. Don‘t risk losing months or years of work should anything ever happen!

Let me know if you have any other questions about WordPress backups. I‘m happy to help you secure your site.