I was at a WordPress meetup the other day where the topic was about website security. And of course, one of the key ingredients in a solid, secure website is making sure you’ve got solid, consistent backups.
The recommendation the presenter gave was that you backup at least every day if not in real time. And there are naturally tools out there (most of them that you’ll pay some sort of monthly fee for) that handle this elegantly for you. This daily backup business is a recommendation that’s pretty prevalent out there.
I disagree with the blanket daily backup recommendation
At the risk of being shunned by the WordPress developer community, for many of my clients (myself including), I don’t recommend daily backups because:
- it’s often overkill for the solopreneur or small business owner who isn’t posting fresh content every day;
- and if you back up every day and your software only saves the last say, 14 backups, then you can only recover your site as of 2 weeks ago. What happens if you need something that you lost months ago?
I had a client recently who needed a bunch data from her site that it turns out had been inadvertently wiped out by another developer when they redesigned the site the previous year. I just happened to have a very old backup of her site that I was able to extract that data from and saved her hours of recreating content.
Some backup strategies to take into consideration when you’re setting your backup schedule…
- Think about how you use your website – how often do you make updates to it. If you’re not making content changes or adding new blog posts more than a couple of times per year, then a daily or weekly backup may not be all that useful for you.
- Create a full backup of your site before you update WordPress and your plugins. WordPress and plugin updates are fairly easy to implement these days. What’s not super easy to do is get back to where you started when one of those updates breaks your site. Like my client above, you might someday be really grateful that you’ve got that snapshot of your site handy, and often, it’s not the circumstances you can foresee that are the ones you end up needing it for.
- Once you’ve created your backup, make sure that those files live in multiple locations – not just on your web host. I like to have them automatically emailed to myself so I can easily download them.
Backups are a must – no doubt about it. But instead of just going with the prevalent theory of all backups all the time or the default schedule the backup plugin du jour creates for you, take some time to think about how you actually use your site and what might be a prudent backup scheme for your business.
If you’d like some help making sure your site is backed up consistently and has a caring eye watching over it, be sure to check out my Mindful Monitoring program.
