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How to Backup WordPress Site Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve never fallen victim to a malicious hacker, or mistakenly had your database deleted by your developer, you might underestimate the importance of a backup.

Losing a website that took you years to build can be incredibly scary. You can go crazy if there’s nothing you can do to restore your beloved WordPress website to its former glory.

The good news is that there’s a solution to this to backup WordPress website easily. With a good backup system in place, you can hit the restore button, and you’re back up and running.

In this post, you’ll learn what it How to backup WordPress site, and how to do it effectively.

1.What Does Backing up a WordPress Site Entail?

Backing up consists of saving a duplicate version of your WordPress site. This can include your website theme, plugins, and your database (posts, comments, users, etc.).

Backing up is just like saving a vital document to your Dropbox or Google Drive and your desktop.

It’s always advisable to save essential items in different places or through a medium (such as on your computer, an external hard drive, thumb drive, on the cloud, etc.).

Your WordPress website is no exception.

Suggested Read: – What is WordPress Maintenance? And Why You Really Need It?

2.How to Backup WordPress Site Without a Plugin?

To easily backup your WordPress database manually without using a plugin we need to use PhpMyAdmin.

PhpMyAdmin is an open-source software that lets you manage your MySQL database via a web-based interface. Most notable WordPress hosting providers often have it pre-installed.

The first step is to log in to your web hosting cPanel (control panel). Once you’ve logged into your account, click on the “phpMyAdmin” icon located under the database section:

how to backup wordpress site

This will open up the phpMyAdmin window. You want to ensure that you selected your WordPress database inside phpMyAdmin.

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If it’s not, simply click on the name of your WordPress database to select it. Once it’s selected, you will see a list of WordPress database tables.

And once this is done, click on the Export tab from the top menu bar to proceed to the next step.

how to backup wordpress site

Here, you’ll be asked to choose your desired export method. It’s advisable to select the custom export option as it will offer you more options to explore.

how to backup wordpress site

Once you choose the custom option, more options will be revealed to you. First, you’ll see all the tables in your WordPress database as selected.

WordPress plugins usually add their own tables to your database sometimes. And if there are any tables you wish to exclude from the export, you can simply deselect them. But if you are not sure, then it is better to leave them all selected.

how to backup wordpress site

Now, move down to the output section. phpMyAdmin will show you the export process output as text by default.

You’ll need to change that by ticking the “save output to a file” option. And for compression, you need to choose either the zipped or gzipped option.

Once all these are done, scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit the “Go” button to begin your database export process. And once it’s all done, phpMyAdmin will send you the export as zip or gzip file.

That’s it; you have successfully made a manual WordPress backup using the database.

But that’s not the only way to do this; you can also perform a manual WordPress Database Backup from your cPanel

The most popular WordPress hosting companies also provide easier ways to download on-demand backups of your site. Here’s how you can use that to effortlessly make a manual WordPress backup.

As always, the first step is to log in to your hosting cPanel and go down to the “files section,” and you’ll see the “Backup” icon. SiteGround, HostGator, and Bluehost all have similar options.

On the ‘backups’ window, scroll down to the “partial backups” section and click on the name of your database to download your database backup file.

how to backup wordpress site

You can equally download your website file backup from this window if you wish to.

It’s worth mentioning that you can manually download your WordPress database backups, but keep in mind that it is not a replacement for a proper backup solution for your website.

There are circumstances where you may not have access to your database at all. For instance, if your hosting provider loses your data or suspends your account.

Another possible scenario is when a hacker has injected malicious data into your WordPress database; it’s often more difficult to clean an infected database.

In this case, you can use a good backup plugin to store your WordPress database backups on the cloud automatically. Let’s look at some plugins that can do this for you.

3. 4 Best WordPress Plugins for Creating Backup Automatically

3.1 VaultPress

how to backup wordpress site

This is part of the Jetpack WordPress plugin and was developed by the creators of WordPress.com. VaultPress offers real-time backup (meaning any change you made on your website is instantly backed up) and one-click restore.

Apart from those excellent features, VaultPress also comes with:

  • Ability to migrate websites from one place to another.
  • 30 days cloud backup.

Interestingly, the plugin is straightforward to use. However, to make use of it, you need both the Jetpack and VaultPress plugin.

Once configured, VaultPress will always backup your website in the cloud from where you can restore them easily. But you may equally download saved copies to your hard drive. It’s pretty much a set-it-and-forget solution.

The only drawback, however, is that there is no free version. You’ll have to pay $39 per year to use VaultPress for your daily WordPress backup.

On its higher plans, you’ll enjoy the aforementioned automatic file repair, real-time backups, and other fantastic features.

3.2. UpDraftPlus

how to backup wordpress site

UpDraftPlus is a very popular backup WordPress plugin with impressive ratings. One of the primary reasons for its popularity is because it offers a bunch of features for free that you would have to pay for in similar plugins.

Some of these features include:

  • Full or partial website backups.
  • Automatic database backups with configurable intervals.
  • Remote backup to Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.
  • Easy restore from a saved version.

Using UpDraftPlus is pretty simple. Just click on the big blue “backup now” button in the settings and follow the instructions:

how to backup wordpress site

The plugin equally lets you send your website backup to your desired location or just keep them on your server. Apart from that, it also keeps a list of existing backups which you can download or from which you can restore when necessary.

how to backup wordpress site

It’s important to note, however, that the plugin divides the backup into many parts (database, themes, plugins, downloads, etc.) so you can manage them separately. It equally offers scheduled backups through time intervals.

how to backup wordpress site

Although, you’ll need the premium version of the plugin for more detailed scheduling. That equally includes migration tools and costs from $70 and above (depending on your license) per year.

3.3 BackupBuddy

how to backup wordpress site

This is one of the most popular premium backup solutions for WordPress.

BackupBuddy has lots of impressive features such as:

  • Remote storage to different locations.
  • Website migration.
  • Backup scheduling.
  • Ability to create partial or full backups.
  • Real-time backup in their own stash service.

As should be expected from a premium solution, BackupBuddy offers lots of beautiful features compared to its free counterparts. Especially the real-time feature, which is great for really busy websites that change often.

Once you sign up, the plugin will run backups automatically and notify you whenever they’re done.

And if you wish to use a different storage location, BackupBuddy also offers a bunch of options, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Additionally, you can set the schedule to daily, weekly, and monthly backups, depending on what you want.

You can also decide to set separate schedules for different parts of your website. This means that you can run daily backups for your database and weekly backup for the entire website.

For the restoration part, you need to download and upload the files to your server. While there are more convenient ways of doing this with other backup plugins, it’s equally not the most complicated.

Finally, BackupBuddy pricing starts at $80 per year, and for any of their licenses, you get updates, support, and access to their Stash service for one year.

3.4 All-in-One WP Migration

how to backup wordpress site

This is a migration plugin that also functions as a backup solution.

Features include:

  • Partial and full website backups.
  • Easy restore.
  • Website migration.

One thing I love about this plugin is that it offers you more control over the export process.

how to backup wordpress site

This comes handy if you want to exclude some parts of your site from being backed up. The free version, however, doesn’t provide off-site storage, you can only download it to your computer. For off-site storage, you need to buy premium extensions.

Interestingly, All-in-One WP Migration makes the restore process pretty simple. Just hit the restore button on the list with available backups, and the process will begin instantly.

how to backup wordpress site

Alternatively, you can equally import a backup that you exported earlier. Regrettably, there is no automatic backup scheduling (which is somewhat baffling), so if you have a website that’s updated a lot, it’s perhaps not the best plugin for you.

Suggested Read: – 7 Best WordPress HelpDesk Plugin to Manage Customer Support

4 3 Best Web Hosting Services that Offer Free Backups For WordPress Sites

4.1 SiteGround

SiteGround has been in business since 2014, and they pride themselves on top-notch customer support.

In 2008, they had a 98% client satisfaction rate and responds to live chats in a matter of seconds, reply to support tickets within 5 minutes on average.

Aside from excellent customer service, performance is a major benefit for SiteGround customers as they also saw an average of 99.99% uptime in 2018.

SiteGround is built on a very stable Linux server and can handle even frequent traffic spikes. They equally have impressive page load times.

The basic plans of SiteGround start at $3.95 per month (plus a $14.95 setup fee), and this comes with:

  • Daily automatic database backups.
  • Free Let’s Encrypt SSL.
  • Unmetered traffic.
  • It can handle up to 10,000 visitors per month.

4.2 Bluehost

Launched in 1996, Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting solutions on the web with over 750 employees. They boast of a 99.99% uptime, making them a very dependable hosting option.

Their hosting plans come with:

  • A free domain.
  • 1-click WordPress install.
  • Free database backup.
  • Free SSL included..
  • FTP.
  • 24/7 customer support.

Bluehost is an all-inclusive hosting platform tailor-made for WordPress and powers more than 2 million websites from around the world.

One of the major selling points for me was Bluehost’s security and integration with Cloudflare (a content delivery network). CDN helps to increase website loading time and also prevents DDoS attacks and fake traffic from different sources.

It’ll also interest you to know that Bluehost is one of the official WordPress.org recommended hosting platforms.

Their hosting plans start at $3.95 per month and offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

4.2 InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is one of the most widely used hosting providers in the industry. While they do not offer the cheapest hosting services, it arguably provides the perfect value for your money.

Its $2.95 per month basic Shared Web Hosting package comes with all the essentials for optimal website operations together with marketing tools for attracting visitors and improving conversion rates.

Impressively, InMotion is one of the best hosting companies on the market that offers free database backups as standard, and also boasts of outstanding customer support to help you whenever you need their assistance.

Apart from responsive customer support, InMotion Hosting also offers:

  • Unlimited disk space.
  • Free SSL with a basic plan.
  • Free website migration and more.

From our research, we found InMotion to be one of the best for Shared and VPS hosting. However, it also provides WordPress, Reseller, and Dedicated hosting, with pricing starting from $6.39 per month.

5 Conclusion

Backing up your WordPress website regularly is one of those tasks you shouldn’t ignore for any reason. This will enable you to always be on the safer side in case of any problem.

With the tips shared above, you will find it very easy to carry out this task effortlessly. Just decide on which WordPress backup approach is best for you and proceed accordingly.

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