10 Trusty Ways to Bakcup WordPress Site: With and Without Plugins
As you landed this page, you must have been aware of the significance of a site-Backup. A blogger or site owner cannot imagine his/her site continues journey without Backing up. A professional site left unbacked-up means sending soldiers to the battlefield without leaving a standby hospital behind.
Same declaration goes in case of a WordPress site or blog. Our current study is to walk you through the step-by-step process to backup WordPress site almost all possible ways.
First of all, let’s look at a glance why we do and should we backup WordPress site.
Why should you Backup WordPress site?
Simple logic- there is no site around the globe which is not within range of being attacked or harmed anytime. Even Google is too. So let’s avoid quibbling and point out the evils that push every websites to hide under BACKUP covering to get reproduced in time of need.
Here are the factors why you need to backup WordPress site—
- Hackers are always active and your website may get hacked anytime that may cause destruction of your data or the entire site.
- Data-Loss occurrence from your site may happen anytime due to any cyber attack or anyhow by your hosting provider.
- You or any of your users may delete any important structure file that may cause your site fall down.
- Virus or Malware attack
- Server failure
- With a view to changing Hosting Server
All these things and also there may have other reasons that may result in losing your site and ultimately you may go bankrupt.
What are you going to Backup?
You can throw an instant answer: Why- my Posts and Pages.
Yes! This is an important answer but there are more important things you must lose if your site ever gets hacked or destroyed for any reason or other.
Suppose you have a simple popular site; if accident happens, all the Comments that were built up gradually day by day will be lost. What about your image and their configurations? If you have to reset all, it may kill hundreds of work-hours from your busiest life.
So, what do you need?
You need a Complete Backup.
If you take a complete Backup, you needn’t worry about anything. Lost your site, you can regain it as a brand new form by investing a few clicks.
And your complete Backup can be divided into two parts—
- Your Files: Includes your Theme, Plugin, WordPress Configuration files and Uploads like image, video etc.
- Your Database: Includes your Posts, Pages, Users, Comments and others that are built up following the development process of your site.
For a complete and subtle understanding of what to backup; check-out this guide—
How to Backup WordPress site and restore
Restoration or Recovering site is essentially entangled with Backup.
Suppose, you backed up your site properly. After ‘Disaster’ story ends up, you tried to recover an element but found no Original shape. It took much time and energy to drag it to the right track. Isn’t this scenario disappointing?
So, you should follow the policy ‘Look before you leap’ for any attempt to Backup.
In fashion, there are two ways to Backup—
- Manual or Without Plugin: You need to employ your time, energy and routinely efforts to Backup manually. This will ensure your control and satisfaction which, many think, is the most reliable.
- Automaic or With Plugin: You can leave your backing up process to the hand of Plugin but you have to compromise on some hassle and cost (money).
Both the processes have both Merits and Demerits or Positive and Negative. Following Comparison Tables will certainly clarify everything.
| Sl. | Positive | Negative |
| 01 | You can store backup in Hard Drive which remains fully under your control | time-consuming |
| 02 | You needn’t pay a penny for this | needs routinely attention to perform backup task |
| 03 | Manual Backup is less likely to be hacked or harmed | lengthy and difficult process to download and store files by using Cpanel |
| 04 | Removes worry about site security | almost impossible to keep track with daily database update |
| Sl. | Positive | Negative |
| 01 | Simple and easy to use, keeps you carefree | Few features are available for free account of any Backup Plugin |
| 02 | You needn’t spend time, attention and energy for backup expedition | You needs to pay for Plugin to have full control over Backup |
| 03 | Backup Plugins support Cloud Storage or Paid Storage. So you needn’t spend space from Hard Drive or External Storage | Your Cloud Storage or Paid Storage may also be hacked or harmed |
| 04 | It is automatic. So you can keep updated with all backups daily or even hourly basis | Plugin loads are added to your site that results in slowness |
However, now that you are clear about Positive and Negative sides of both the processes, we’re walking you through the every probabilities of applying Manual and Plugin-based Backup. Hope this will expand your insight to take firm decision on which route to take.
Multiple ways to Manually Backup WordPress site or blog
Before we proceed, let’s look up at a glance again which files we’re backing up in our total operation—
- FILES: Theme, Plugins, WordPress Configuration, Image, Video etc.
- DATABASE: Posts, Pages, Users, Comments etc.
However, you should purposely keep in mind that a single process may not be sufficient to have a complete Backup. If you’re serious about Manual Backup, our suggestion is to adopt at least two ways that will fully ensure completeness of Backup.
Whichever Hosting Platform you use; either Bluehost, DreamHost, GoDaddy, HostGator or others, Backup privilege must be featured there. In other word, you can both Backup and Restore your site by using your Hosting C-panel.
For this, follow the following steps—
- Log in to your C-panel Dashboard
- Under File section, click Backup
- First Enable Backup if it is Disabled entering Backup→ Configuration. You can also accomplish other Configuration here.
- In the Backup page, Download Backup in your Hard Drive from where you can restore your Backup from the same Backup page.
Noted, you can choose for full Backup or do that individually such as Home Directory backup, Account backup, MySQL database backup, Email Forwarders and Filters backup which will include all your necessary files stated above. Whether you backup fully or separately, you have to restore them individually. Some C-panel structure may provide you full-restoration feature.
Database is the most important part of your site where all the running contents get stored bit by bit. This Database deserves special backing up for unfalliable security. You can Backup and Restore your MySQL Database from phpMyAdmin tab under Database section.
- Log in to C-panel Dashboard
- Click phpMyAdmin icon under Database section
- In phpMyAdmin page, you’ll find all of your created Databases listed in left panel. Click the Database name you want to backup
- Here all the database-tables are listed right. Select all by clicking ‘Check all’ box below the list.
- Now click upper Export tab
- From this page Export Method ‘Quick’ and Formats ‘SQL’ and click Go
- From next window, select Save and click OK
- Your Database will be downloaded in Hard Drive from where you can restore anytime if necessity arises
File transfer through FTP [File Transfer Protocol] is popular since the early days of Internet. If you aren’t quite sure of FTP, check out this guide spending a few minutes—
Many bloggers and site owners like to upload files to their Server By FTP Client like FileZilla, Core FTP or Cyberduck etc. You can also Download any files from your Server by FTP. In question of WordPress Backup, we can use FTP for downloading or saving backup-listed WordPress files in our Hard Drive.
Now question, what will we download from our Server?
Among many WordPress Files and Folders in public_html directory, we need to download the followings—
- wp-content folder that include all of your Plugins, themes and uploads
- wp-config.php file that contains WordPress Setting Information
Noted, you cannot download Database this way. For MySQL database backup, just follow the previous method.
Now let’s see Practically how to download these files and folder by using most popular FTP Client FileZilla—
- Open FileZilla
- Enter your Server by providing Host name, Username and Password. Noted Host name is your domain name and Username and Passoword are those of your C-panel.
- If you’re successfully connected, appeared window will show two parts: Left-your computer Hard Drive and Right– your remote server
- Now From left, select the Folder where you want to store your Backup. In the left-down part, all of the files and folders under selected folders will be shown.
- Next, from right panel (down), select public_html. All the WordPress files and Folders inside it will be shown in down window.
- From right-down, highlight wp-content and just Drag it to left-down window.
- Again From right-down, highlight wp-config.php file and drag the same way.
- You’re all done. WordPress files and folders are saved in the selected Folder of your PC.
Now you can restore them anytime.
For a complete WordPress Restoration guide, follow this link—
This is a very simple way. You can Backup almost all of your WordPress site by using WordPress Export tool (if it is available in your WordPress version). For this just—
- Log in to WordPress Admin Panel.
- From the left panel, click Tools→ Export
- Appeared window will ask you to choose which elements to export. Select All content
- Click Download Export File. Download will start and finish in a few minutes
In this process all of your files (Posts, Pages, Media) will remain stored in XML format in your Hard Drive. If necessary, you can import them by entering the same Tools→ Import spending a few clicks.
However, if anybody doesn’t encounter a disaster with his/her site, it is difficult to guess what WordPress Restoration is and how and how much each method works. Contextually, I backed up my site Netplanter by using Export Tool and led an expedition to restore it to a Test Site in my PC’s Local Server having installed WordPress. I observed that it worked excellently. All Posts, Pages, Media, and Comments were reproduced cleanly except Theme and Plugins.
The hard labor and drudgery that you employ most in the development process of your site is for the Posts and Pages created working day after day, month after month and even year after year. Probably nobody wants to lose a single line of his/her invaluable works let alone lose the site.
So, when comes the question of storing your hard-earned posts and pages in Hard Drive, I suggest you build up a parallel WordPress site (the same as your original one) hosted to the local Server installed in your PC. Whenever you can publish a post or page, copy the same along with everything in that alternative site.
In this way, you’ll always own a clone site of the original stored in your fist. When necessary, you can also accomplish editing and updating of the post and pages here and copy them to the original site.
Backup WordPress site with Plugins
All these are we discussed so far is about Mannual Backup. Beyond this scenerio, there is also an expanded scope for you to backup your WordPress site by help of Plugins. But we’ve illustrated 5 other ways to backing up with Plugin in another article. Here is the link—
Anyway, I cannot think of compromise about Backup of my sites. For Netplanter, I take my database backup through phpMyAdmin and a complete backup by C-panel. I also manage a clone site for editing and updating which incidentally keeps all my posts backedup. All these are my pluginless backup programs I maintain regularly.
Hope this tutorial on Backup WordPress site satisfied you. If you are a conscious WordPresser; you must have adopted a backup work-plan. What process do you use? Or do you use any of the suggested ones? If so, which one? Share your experience with my readers.
