This tip is for every single website owner out there. It doesn’t matter what kind of website you have, but you should always backup your website. It is extremely simple but even easier to “do later”. (don’t wait)

Why?

It doesn’t matter how new or old your website is, you should always have up to date backups. 

Here Are Just A Few Reasons Why

• Your Website can get hacked!

  • This is really a thing and it can really happen to anyone. There are tons of people out there on the web that really go out of their way to just disrupt websites. 
    • Unless you are a true expert in knowing how to find what a hacker altered (not easy), your website can be irreparable. This can really be a best case scenario in some cases. When a website gets hacked, many times content is the first thing attacked. When this happens this means all the time you put into your website can literally be lost. 

• You Can Accidentally Alter Code

  • For many people this may not be a real cause for concern. But, for many of us that decide to venture into the code of a website, it can be very easy to unknowingly break our entire website. 
    • Even though this mistake can sometimes be fixed, finding the issue can be incredibly difficult and sometimes require professional help (A possibly an incredibly expensive mistake)

• You Accidentally Deleted Something Important

  • I will admit that this happened to me on my first website and caused a serious face palm. Even though it was a terrible experience, I consider myself massively lucky. 
  • After taking a very very long time designing my website and putting in a few dozen posts I finally decided it was time to perform a backup.
  • But you know how it goes, I’ll do it in a bit.
    • After taking the dog out and looking over the website I noticed I had a setting wrong on the home page. Super easy fix, just a simple delete page and set a new home page.
    • I thought that I would make a simple fix so that my update would be fine. But, I was totally wrong and I massively broke my site. Honestly I broke my website and couldn’t find a way to fix it. And of course this was just before the backup so, basically I started over.:(

• Your Web Hosting Company Can Have An Issue

  • Even the chances of this a slightly less. This is completely possible and happens. This is a major reason why having your own copy of an update is so important. You shouldn’t count on your web hosting company performing all the updates for you. Just like any other company on the internet they are susceptible to hacker attacks and equipment failure.
    • Also note that if your web hosting company has an issue that causes your site to go down such as a hacker attack or equipment failure. Your backup of all the work you have put into your site is probably on that same sever that contains your website. Basically making your backup useless. 
  • You may have noticed that there is always a new website that gets attacked from hackers. Don’t trust all your hard work in a company just because they seem big.

So What Should I Do

I will admit that when ever possible I try to save money. So paying for services that I believe I can get for free I usually look everywhere.

Updraft Plus (WordPress Plugin)

This is currently the backup service that I currently use. And it really has been a handy tool. Above all IT HAS A GREAT FREE VERSION!

A Few Tips!

• It is a really good Idea to get a backup outside the internet. This means save a copy of your backup files to your personal computer or external hard drives. 
  • Many people may believe you need special hardware to save a completely backup of your website. But, most websites can fit on an inexpensive thumb drive. 
• Save multiple copies of your backups from different times. Your site may have been broken from before your latest backup. 
• I probably have used this way too many times. This maybe the fact that it is simply so easy to restore my site from a backup. And this has just allowed me to experiment much more with my site. 
• One of the biggest tips that I found helpful is when performing updates or restores, perform a full update or restore. This WordPress Plugin Actually gives you Five files that are separate areas of your site. I just wouldn’t recommend restoring one of them at a time because, for me they don’t restore smoothly. 
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The Biggest Tip Of ALL!

GO GET A BACKUP OF YOUR SITE!

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