How to back up your website (and why your host's backups aren't enough)

A backup is the difference between “we lost an hour” and “we lost the business website.” Most people don’t think about it until the day they need one — so here’s how to get it right before that day arrives.

What a complete backup actually includes

A website isn’t a single file. A real backup needs all the moving parts:

• Files — your themes, plugins, images, uploads, and code.
• The database — for WordPress and most modern sites, your actual content (pages, posts, products, settings) lives in a database, not in files. A backup without the database is half a backup.
• Email — if you run mailboxes on your hosting, your mail history matters too.

If you only ever copy your files and forget the database, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised when you try to restore.

The 3-2-1 rule (simple and effective)

The standard that professionals use:

• 3 copies of your data,
• on 2 different types of storage,
• with 1 copy kept off-site (somewhere other than your server).

You don’t need to overthink it. In practice: your live site (copy 1), your host’s backups (copy 2), and your own download stored somewhere else like cloud storage or your computer (copy 3, off-site).

How often should you back up?

It depends on how often your site changes:

• A brochure site that rarely changes: a weekly backup is plenty.
• A blog or active business site: daily.
• An online store: daily at minimum, ideally with the ability to restore to a specific point — because every hour can contain orders you can’t afford to lose.

The honest test: how much work are you willing to redo? Back up at least that often.

Why your host’s backups aren’t the whole answer

We keep daily backups of customer sites (with 30-day retention on E-commerce plans), and they’ve saved plenty of people. But you should still keep your own copy, for three reasons:

1. They’re for disaster recovery, not a personal undo button. Host-level backups are designed to recover from server-side problems, not necessarily to roll back the change you made five minutes ago.
2. Independence. If anything ever happens to your account, an off-site copy you control is your safety net.
3. Control. Your own backup is yours to restore, move, or hand to a developer whenever you want.

Think of it as belt and braces: the host’s backups handle the big infrastructure failures; your own copy handles the everyday “I broke it” moments and gives you independence.

The easy way to do it (WordPress)

For WordPress, a reputable backup plugin handles everything:

• UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, or similar can back up files and database on a schedule and send the copy off-site automatically (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.).
• Set it to a schedule that matches how often your site changes.
• Test a restore once so you know it actually works — an untested backup is just a hopeful guess.

Before you make any big change

The single most useful backup habit: take a fresh backup right before updating a major plugin, changing your theme, editing code, or migrating. Most “my site broke” emergencies happen during changes, and a pre-change backup turns a crisis into a 60-second rollback. On our Business plans, daily backups plus staging make this even safer — you can test changes off to the side first.

If it all goes wrong

If your site is broken or gone and you have a good backup, restoring is usually straightforward — through your backup plugin, your control panel, or with our help. If you’re on one of our plans, open a ticket and we can restore from our backups or walk you through yours.

The takeaway: keep your own off-site copy, match the frequency to how often your site changes, and always back up before big changes. It’s ten minutes of setup that one day saves you a very bad week. Hosting with a provider that also backs up for you — like our plans do — means you’ve got two layers instead of one.