This article will show you an easy way to create a periodic backup of your website, as well as how to restore the site if you find yourself in a situation where your site has crashed.
Why should you backup your site?
There are plenty of reasons why you should backup your site. Your website can suddenly crash due to various scenarios. For example, if certain updates have gone wrong, they might cause issues that lead to your site crashing.
Moreover, if you find yourself in the unfortunate situation of someone trying to hack your website, having a backup will ensure that you do not lose any of your content.
Having a backup for your site means that you can have a similar copy of your content and data you’ve lost.
This way, whatever happens to your website, the data will be available to you, and you can restore your website to the last version that you’ve backed up.
How to backup the site
There are plenty of plugins that can be used for this purpose. In this article, I will use UpdraftPlus as an example.
Install the plugin
In order to use the plugin, you will first have to install it from the WordPress admin dashboard. For that, in the left sidebar, click on “Plugins”:
This will open the list with your installed plugins. Here, click on “Add New”:
In the top right side of the screen, in the search bar, type in “UpdraftPlus”:
Then, once you find the card with the plugin, click on “Install Now“:
Once installed, you will also have to activate the plugin:
Then, you will be taken back to the plugins section of your site. You will see this pop-up, and you can click on “Press here to start” to get started with the plugin:
Take a new backup
Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can go ahead and start the backup process. For that, you will have to take a new backup.
To do that, you can either continue from where the “Press here to start” button led you to, or you can hover over “Settings” in the left sidebar of the WordPress dashboard, and click on “UpdraftPlus Backups”:
Then, click on the blue “Backup Now” button:
A pop-up will open. Here, make sure that the first two options are checked, and click on “Backup Now”:
The backup process will then begin:
When the backup is done, you will see a success notification on your screen. You will also be able to see all of the backups in the “Existing Backups” section:
This is it! Now, you have a backup of your site and, if something happens to it, you will be able to restore the site to the backed-up version.
If you want to take it even further, you can set up an automatic backup, so that you will not have to keep creating new ones manually. Here is how to do that:
Schedule an automatic backup
In the UpdraftPlus dashboard, go to the “Settings” tab:
Then, it depends on you to decide how often the backup should be done.
For example, you can set a weekly backup.
For that, change the “Files backup schedule” and the “Database backup schedule” from “Manual” to “Weekly”:
Then, choose the number of backups to be retained.
For example, if you choose 4, this means that a backup will be created every week, but only the backup from the last 4 weeks will be retained. This way, you will have an entire month worth of backups that you can go back to:
What comes next is to choose the storage service where the backups should be stored into. For example, if you want the backups to be stored into Google Drive, click on it, from this list:
You can go ahead and continue setting up the exact folder where the files should be stored.
When you’re finished, scroll down to the end of this page and click on “Save Changes”:
After doing so, a pop-up will open, where you will have to authorize access to the selected storage service. Click on this link to continue:
Then, sign in to your account, and click on “Allow”:
All you have to do now is to click on “Complete Setup” from the page that opens:
Everything is now set, and your website will automatically back up.
How to apply a backup on your site
You’ve seen why it is important to create backups of your site, and how to do so. Now, what happens if you find yourself in a situation where your website crashed and you need to restore it using a backed-up version?
What you have to do is go to the UpdraftPlus dashboard and scroll down to get to the “Existing backups” section:
Here, find the backup that you want to use to restore the site, and click on “Restore”:
Make sure all of these components are selected:
Click on “Next” to start the backup:
Finally, click on “Restore”:
This process is finished when all of the items from the “Restoration progress” section are green:
The website should be restored back to the respective version.
These were the ways to create a backup for your site, as well as how to restore the site to one of the backed-up versions.
Don’t forget to check out our knowledge base, for more information about Thrive Themes and all of the features it comes with.
Hopefully, this article was helpful. If so, make sure to leave a smile below 😄