WordPress is currently the most popular CMS platform for blogging thanks to its flexibility. The CMS platform offers the right balance between features and ease of use, giving even the most inexperienced site owner the opportunity to develop a robust, visually pleasing, and functional site.
That popularity, however, also means that WordPress is the most targeted CMS platform right now.
There are also attacks designed specifically to damage your site and its contents.
There are other risks such as hardware failure to mitigate. Can you recover your site and its contents quickly when a catastrophic error does happen? There are a few things you can do to make sure that the answer to that question is a big YES.
Multiple Backup Routines
Having complete and incremental backups of your site is a must. Sure, you can rely on your web hosting provider for an automated backup routine, but using the automatic hosting backup function as your only safety net is not recommended.
At the very least, you want to maintain two separate backups of your WordPress site and its contents. You can use the hosting company’s backup routine as one security measure. As an extra measure, consider storing an offsite backup in the cloud or an offline backup altogether.
You can then customize the routine to update those backup images every time you post new content, or there are important changes to the site (i.e. new comments from your readers). When an error brings your site down, you have raw backup images to turn to as your recovery options.
Different Backup Types
There are also multiple ways to back up a WordPress site. You can start by using plugins like BackupBuddy to back up the site directly from the wp-admin. There are solutions like WP Automatic Cloud Backup by WPvivid that you can use to maintain an offsite backup too.
At the same time, you want to manually back up the files in your wp-content directory along with the SQL export for your site. This combination of backups lets you recover from even the worst cyberattack without going through extra troubles.
Know Your Options
As mentioned earlier, maintaining offline backups of your site is a good habit to get into, and there is a specific reason for that. Cloud backups may not be accessible in the event of a severe attack or catastrophic hardware failure. Even your offline drives can fail.
Offline drives, however, can be recovered with the help of companies like Secure Data Recovery Services, which means you have a much higher chance of recovering from the worst kind of data loss. Something as simple as having an up-to-date offline backup of your WordPress site can save years of content.
Offline backup is actually the last piece of the puzzle. Now that you have multiple backups of your site, you can start focusing more on securing your site and preventing a catastrophic error from occurring in the first place. We have the best tips on the matter too!