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Think of WordPress backups as an opportunity to safeguard the hard work you‘ve put into crafting your site. You won’t be in a tough spot if an emergency such as a security breach, malware issue, or human error occurs. WordPress backups ensure that your site data is accessible if you need to go into recovery mode to get your website up and running again.

woman makes a wordpress backup of her site

Best of all, there are some great plugins that help you put your WordPress backups on autopilot. While we will show you how to back up a WordPress site manually, you’ll usually be better off using one of the backup plugins that we cover (or your host’s backup tool, if it stores backups in a secure way).

In this post, you’ll learn everything that you need to know about how to back up WordPress, including the following:

Why are WordPress backups essential?

Most WordPress hosting companies offer some type of website backup tool nowadays. However, many hosts, especially the cheaper ones, don’t store these backups in a separate area from your main website.

That means if the host goes down, you could lose access to both your live website and your backup data, either temporarily or permanently.

When you have your own WordPress backup policy in place, you can rest assured that a hosting provider malfunction doesn’t mean trouble for your WordPress site.

If you‘re wondering if WordPress backups are worth the additional effort, the answer is an easy yes. If anything goes wrong, you can restore your website promptly so your business won’t miss out on revenue opportunities due to the unnecessary downtime from the crash.

Your site can encounter all sorts of issues, from non-malicious issues like human errors or bugs to malicious issues like a hacker inserting malware into your site.

When you have a recent backup, the worst-case scenario for all of these issues is some temporary downtime while you restore your backup. Without a backup, the worst-case scenario could be the permanent loss of some or all of your site’s data.

How Often to Backup Your WordPress Site

How often you backup your WordPress site will depend on how often your site‘s content/data changes. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for every single website.

If you have a static website that doesn‘t change very often (e.g., a portfolio site), you might be fine with backing up your site’s data every week. In general, weekly backups should be the bare minimum for most WordPress sites.

However, if you have a blog where you‘re posting multiple times per week and receiving lots of user comments, weekly backups might be insufficient. If you were to lose a few day’s worth of data, that could mean your site would be missing multiple blog posts and comments. Not good!

Instead, you would likely want to back up your site every day. That way, the worst-case scenario is losing just a few hours worth of data, which might not even mean any missing content.

For some sites, even daily backups might not be sufficient. For example, if you have a WooCommerce store, you might be receiving multiple orders every day or even every hour. Because order data is such an important part of your business, losing even one order could have negative effects.

For these mission-critical sites, you might want to implement real-time backups. With real-time backups, every single change to your site will be backed up right away, which means you’ll never lose any data.

Of course, the tradeoff is that you‘ll usually need to pay extra to access this real-time functionality, so you’ll only want to make that investment if your site really needs it.

To find the right backup schedule for your site, think about the answers to these questions:

How often do I publish new content on my site?
How often do users submit content/information to my site? This could be comments on your blog, orders on your WooCommerce store, leads in your lead capture form, new registrations on your online course, and so on.
How often do I make changes to my site’s settings?

For example, if your answer to one or more of the questions is “a few times per week,” then you should consider using daily backups at a bare minimum.

On the other hand, if your answer is “a few times per day,” you should probably use hourly backups or maybe even real-time backups.

What is the best way to back up a WordPress Site?

There are several ways to back up a WordPress site. In this post, we’ll focus on four different methods:

A WordPress backup plugin. There are tons of great free or paid options. For most people, a WordPress backup plugin is the best option.

cPanel Backup Wizard. If your host offers cPanel, you can back up your WordPress site via the cPanel dashboard.
Manual backup with FTP and phpMyAdmin. We don‘t generally recommend backing up WordPress manually because it’s more time-consuming than the other methods (and harder to restore), but it might be handy to know how to do this in certain situations.
Custom host backup tool. Many managed WordPress hosts offer custom backup tools, which can be a great option as long as the host is storing the backups separately from your main site.

Each option has its pros and cons, so pay attention to what you value most to make the right choice.

WordPress Backup Plugins

There’s a plugin for everything. So, unsurprisingly, there’s an option to help you back up your WordPress site. For most people, WordPress backup plugins offer the best solution for how to back up WordPress.

Beyond letting you take a complete backup of your site’s files and database (including plugins and themes), most backup plugins also let you schedule your backups to run automatically and also store backups on external cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and more.

You can also find some backup plugins that backup changes to your site in real time, which can be great for WooCommerce stores or other sites with constantly changing data.

However, one downside of backup plugins is that you might need to pay money to get the best features. We will show you how to use a free backup plugin in the tutorial below, though, and most “regular” sites will be fine with the free option.

Another potential downside is that backup plugins usually require you to be able to access your WordPress dashboard to run an on-demand backup. So, if you’re locked out of your dashboard for some reason, you might need to perform a manual backup instead.

Manual WordPress Backups (cPanel Backup Wizard or FTP/phpMyAdmin)

If you opt for manual WordPress backups, you’ll have to actually go through the full process of backing up your site every time you want to back up your data.

If your host offers cPanel, you can take a manual backup from the cPanel dashboard. Or, you can manually create a backup using FTP and phpMyAdmin on any host.

The advantage of this method is that you can back up your WordPress site even if you don‘t have access to your WordPress dashboard. It also lets you download your site’s raw files and database, whereas some backup plugins use a custom format for backup files.

The cons are that this option is time-consuming and that human error is possible, so you might accidentally save an incomplete copy of your site. (Later in this article, we’ll walk you through the process of manually backing up your site using two different methods, so you know what to do.)

In general, we don‘t recommend this option unless it’s your only choice.

Managed WordPress Host Backup Tool

If you’re using managed WordPress hosting, your host might offer a built-in tool to back up your site from your hosting dashboard. These types of hosts typically automatically back up your site every day and also give you the option to perform an on-demand backup when needed.

The important thing about these types of tools is that your host will store the backups in a separate location from your site‘s files to avoid creating a single point of failure. This means that you can still restore the backup copy of your site even if there’s an issue with the hosting server of your live site.

If your host‘s backup tool doesn’t store the backups separately, you should not rely on it.

While these tools are very convenient, one downside is that you‘ll typically only find them on more expensive managed WordPress hosts. So, unless you’re willing to pay a little more for your site’s hosting, you might need to rely on the other methods instead.

How to Backup a WordPress Site

Because the best way to back up a WordPress site varies depending on your budget, knowledge level, and current situation, it’s up to you to decide which option you want to use moving forward.

We’ll cover four different methods below. And again, for most sites, we recommend using a WordPress backup plugin, which is what we’ll cover first.

How to Complete WordPress Backups Using a Plugin

While WordPress offers many features, there‘s still no magic button you can click to create a backup of your current website. That’s where WordPress plugins come in handy. These software bits add helpful functionality to your website without having to code.

There are many different WordPress plugin options available, but the most downloaded backup plugin is the UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin. If you’re looking for other plugins for WordPress backups, check out our comprehensive guide.

Beyond offering a solid set of features, another advantage of UpdraftPlus is that it has a free version that should work fine for the vast majority of WordPress sites.

Here are the steps you’ll need to take to complete a WordPress backup with the assistance of the UpdraftPlus plugin.

1. First, log into your WordPress dashboard.

2. Navigate to the Plugins tab. Then click the Add New button.