Using WordPress to power your business website is a great move. It has a friendly and efficient interface that helps you manage and customise your website, a huge variety of plugins, and an amazing community.
There is however one thing that businesses sometimes forget about when running their WordPress website, and that’s backups, leaving their files and important data are vulnerable to damage, hackers, and data loss.
If you are using WordPress for business purposes, it’s important to backup your files remotely, and ideally in multiple locations, for extra peace of mind.
Remote backups are your websites insurance policy
WordPress is an extremely popular content management system, that is super easy to use. However, with its huge popularity, that also makes it more vulnerable to attacks and data loss – if you’re not careful, or your site has a security vulnerability.
If you are running an eCommerce site through WordPress, it’s even more important that you secure your WordPress website, since your website files and data are one of the most important parts of your business. The way to do this is through remote backups.
Remote backups are your website’s insurance policy. You don’t think twice about buying home insurance, travel insurance, or car insurance, so why not website insurance. Insuring your website (with backups) means you can get back online quickly after website hacks, server damage, or even catastrophic events such as fires, and get your business earning revenue again as soon as possible.
People tend to wait until the worst happens before mitigating against it, which has sadly resulted in a lot of businesses losing their website data (forever), simply because they didn’t have backups in place. Don’t let this happen to you.
Protect your business against the unexpected
It is easy to overlook the importance of safeguarding your website or business.
One recent example of why backing up your website remotely is so vital, is the recent unfortunate fire at the Strasbourg data center on 10th March 2021.
There was a huge fire at the OVH datacenter in France which took down millions of websites and businesses, and resulted in all files and data stored on them being permanently lost.
According to Netcraft, around 3.6 million websites across 464,000 distinct domains were affected. Some of these websites included government websites such as the Polish Financial Ombudsman; the Ivorian DGE; the French government procurement site Plateforme des achats de l’Etat; the Welsh Government’s Export Hub; and the UK Government’s Vehicle Certification Agency website. Some large WordPress based businesses that were affected include WP Rocket and Imagify.
The good news is, most of these were able to recover through remote backup restoration.
However, those businesses that did not have remote backup were more severely damaged than those that did, potentially losing all their data.
Protect your business against malware and hacks
Like your social media accounts and other online accounts, your WordPress website is at risk of being hacked at any time.
10 Ways To Make Your WordPress Website More Secure
Hacks happen for several reasons, sometimes it’s to promote a product/service, collect private/personal details, send out spam messages, or for financial gain.
You might think that your website doesn’t have much value and is therefore free from risk, but actually, hackers can use smaller websites to help them attack more valuable ones. The end result is that your business or website gets blacklisted by things like search engines. This is bad news if you run an ecommerce business.
So how can remote backups help? For one thing it means that your site can’t be held to ransom. Cryptowall ransomware has made many millions of dollars extorting money from businesses and individuals. What this means is they’ll encrypt your data, and request a ransom to be paid for them to give you your website back.
However, if you have secure remote backups, you can always rely on that data and will be able to recover the website yourself, so ransomware and malware have less leverage.
Backups make your online business reliable
When working with technology, it is inevitable that something will eventually go wrong and cause unscheduled downtime. This is almost guaranteed to happen whether you operate online or offline. The key to keeping your website running like a well-oiled machine is to use remote backups for those times when things just go wrong.
There isn’t a web hosting company in the world that can offer you guaranteed 100% security and uptime when it comes to running your website, even if that’s what they promise. WordPress doesn’t either, which is why you should use your initiative and backup your website remotely (separate from your hosting).
When you backup your website remotely, it means you can easily restore your website elsewhere, if something happens to hosting provider or server.
You can rely on human error
There is another threat to the safe running and operation of your business website, which is human error. Human error is inevitable, at some point in your business life cycle you will likely have to contend with overwritten or deleted files, or issues with updates.
Although it might not be the primary reason for creating remote backups, it is another one that a backup solution can solve. When you discover that some files have been lost or overwritten due to new employees starting or basic incompetence, you will be glad you have the same files stored on another server.
How can you backup your website remotely?
It’s recommended that you backup your files at least once per day, and keep those files for at least thirty days in case something goes wrong or need access to them. You can also use incremental style backups for efficient storage.
There are several ways you can remotely backup the important files for your website. The first step is to identify a reliable backup service.
One option is to signup for a WordPress Care Plan, which will usually include managed backups for your website, alongside plenty of other benefits to help protect your website and keep it running smoothly. These types of services will take care of backups, updates, security, and bug fixes for you, so you can focus on running your business.
Alternatively, you can manage backups for your website using a WordPress backup plugin. Some of the most popular options include:
UpdraftPlus
Price: Free, or £54 for Premium
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin, with over three million currently-active installs. Backup your files and database backups into the cloud and restore with a single click!
Backup into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email. The paid version also backs up to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.
BackupBuddy
Price: $80
Link: https://ithemes.com/backupbuddy
BackupBuddy’s backup includes everything needed to run your WordPress website. Backup all WordPress files, all files in the WordPress Media library, your WordPress themes and WordPress plugins, and more. Once BackupBuddy completes your backup, you get a downloadable zip file of your entire WordPress website.
BackupBuddy’s WordPress backup and restore feature is quick and simple. Simply upload the ImportBuddy file and your backup zip file, and ImportBuddy will walk you through the steps to restore your entire WordPress website, including your content, themes, plugins, widgets and everything else.
It’s important that you choose the right backup service for your business. Research ones that have upstanding reviews and offer enough range for you to cherry-pick the best option for your business.
Conclusion
It might seem like more trouble than it’s worth to remotely backup your website files, but you won’t be thinking that when something goes wrong and you discover there’s no way back. It is exactly this process that has led to insurance cover in every other area of life, so why not for your important website files and data. Remote backups are easier and less costly than you might anticipate.
If you need any help setting up backups for your website, feel free to get in touch with us.