You’ve spent hours designing and developing your WordPress site to build your brand and provide prospects with valuable information. Now what? With all of your efforts and the costs associated with the development of your site, you need to protect your investment. This starts with taking steps to minimize the risk of losing your site to host outages, hack attacks, or someone holding your site hostage.
Back up your site with your host
Most hosts provide tools and services that backup your website and this is indeed a great step that you need to have set up at the moment your site goes live. After all, having the ability to go back in time to fix fatal site errors can be crucial and a huge time saver when having your site down can be costly.
Now back it up again
Don’t let all of your hard work be for nothing because you didn’t put some preventative measures in place. As great as it is to take advantage of your hosts’ backup system you should also create backups on your own. This allows you to keep a copy of your site on your hard drive which will provide an extra layer of benefits and protection.
Having an up-to-date copy of your site on a hard drive not only protects your WordPress site from Host outages, it will also protect you in cases of your site being held hostage by hackers. In both instances, having a backup will allow you to access your copy and migrate your site to a new host in no time.
Don’t just set it and forget it
Regular site updates are another preventative action you can take to protect your site. Making sure you update plugins, themes, and WordPress core should be a weekly practice. This can help close vulnerabilities and reveal improvements within your site that have been uncovered and addressed by WordPress, while failure to regularly update can create fatal site errors.
Before performing any updates, it’s a good idea to create a backup of your site to prevent a design disaster if updates create incompatibilities with other site elements. If you find yourself in a situation where this is the case, you can always revert to your backups to get the site up and running while you investigate the cause of any errors that prevent you from accessing the WordPress Admin Dashboard.
Still have access to Admin Panel after a plugin, and the update has generated a site error? You can deactivate your plugins one by one to see if you can locate the culprit.
The 2 free plugins we recommend to protect your WordPress site are:
- Updraft Plus – With 2 + Million active users and a 5-star rating, this plugin is reliable and provides several different options to back-up your site.
- All-in-One WP Migrate – This plugin has 2 + Million active users and a 4.5-star rating. While this plugin is more of a migration tool used to move sites from one host to another, it can be a quality and reliable backup tool as well.
You can use either plugin in combination with your hosting backups to provide a level of protection that most sites don’t have on their own.
Remember, you can never backup your site too many times. The more often you backup your site when you perform updates the better off you’ll be in the long run.
