Not sure how to backup your WordPress site and database without missing anything important? Sometimes it gets too complicated to take a backup of a WordPress site, and in some places, we all suffer from it.
If you’re facing this issue and aren’t quite sure about the complete backup process for your WordPress website, then this article is just what you need. By the time you finish reading this, you’ll be fully confident about creating backups and restoring them on a new WordPress site without any hassle.
In this guide, I’ll share methods to back up your website and set up automatic backup retention to your preferred cloud storage. Trust me, it’s going to be straightforward and helpful.
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Try UpdraftPlusWhy Do We Need to Take Backup of Our Website?
WordPress is one of the best CMSs which is available in the market, and it provides a weekly or monthly update of the CMS with bug fixes, better optimization & features, and better security. In this case, we all want to upgrade our website to the latest version of WordPress, or sometimes the upgrade is automatic.
But during the upgrade of WordPress, we lost complete access to our website due to technical glitches, and it messed up everything and we lost access to our website and its files completely. Here, if we don’t have a backup of our website saved, then we’re in big trouble. It is not just with the WordPress update, but sometimes, due to server glitches or glitches in the coding of the plugin/theme, we lose access to our website.
So, In situations like this, we have to make sure we have the latest backup of our website saved before making any changes to our website. It can be helpful to restore the existing backup of our website if anything goes wrong in the future.
How to Take Backup of WordPress Website?
Not sure how to take a complete backup of your WordPress website? Here, we’ll discuss a few steps through which you can take a complete backup of your website without losing anything.
We’re going to cover the three most useful ways to take a complete backup of your WordPress website.
- Manually Backing Up Files
- Using WordPress Plugins to Automate Backups
- Taking Backups in Managed WordPress Hosting
Manually Backing Up Files
Taking manual backup is the first method that we’re going to talk about. It is convenient and easy, but sometimes, during manual backup, we miss a few things and regret about them later.
So, if you’re someone who is not much into WordPress or servers, I don’t usually recommend you to use this method for taking the backup.
To take the complete backup of your site manually, log in to your cPanel and then click on the “File Manager” option you find there.
Once you’re in the file manager, double-click on the “public_html” folder to open it. It is the folder where cPanel stores all the files and folders of your WordPress installation.
Now select all the files and folders and “right-click” > then click on “Compress” (as shown in the image above). It will create a .zip file of your WordPress files and folders. Once the .zip file is created, double-click on the file to download it.
Once you take the backup of your files and download it to your desktop, you’ve to take a backup of your SQL database, and to download it, again go to cPanel Home > phpMyAdmin (as shown in the image below).
Once you click on the “phpMyAdmin“, it will redirect you to the MySQL database page. Here, WordPress stores the content and settings of all the changes you applied to your website. You can read more about it here.
Now click on the “Export” button on the database page. Once you click on this, it will open a page from where you can export the database of your current WordPress website.
When the “Export” button is clicked, you’ll get an option to export your database. Here, it shows you two export methods: select the “Quick” method and “SQL” format and then click on the “Go” to download it.
Bingo! you’ve successfully downloaded the backup of your WordPress files and folders along with the database. Now, you can use it whenever anything wrong happens with your WordPress installation.
Using WordPress Plugins to Automate Backup
The next method which I liked most is to take a complete backup of our website using a few plugins like “Updraft Plus“, “Duplicator” and “All-in-One Migration“. These three plugins come in handy to take a complete backup of our WordPress website along with the database and all the other files hosted on our server with WordPress.
These plugins are freely available in the WordPress repository and allow you to take manual backups, as you can automate the backup process and save it to your favorite cloud storage.
Of all the plugins I have listed above, I prefer using “Updraft” the most. To simply install this plugin from the WordPress repository, go to Plugins > Add New and then search for the “Updraft” plugin.
Once it shows the updraft plugin, click on the “Install Now” button showing next to the name. It will instantly install the plugin on your WordPress website. Once it is installed, click on “Activate Now” to activate the backup function using updraft on your website.
Now, it will redirect you to the Updraft Dashboard, where it shows the option to “Backup Now” and also shows “Existing Backups” on your server. You can easily create a new backup by clicking on the “Backup Now” button showing in blue color.
Updraft offers you a lot more options than just backing up your website. Here, I’m sharing some features showing why updraft is one of the best plugins.
The first thing which I liked most about Updraft is its neat and clean UI. Along with it, it offers a bunch of other useful features, like directly sending your backup to your favorite cloud storage and scheduling automated backups based on our convenience (as shown in the image above).
Along with it, you can control what you need to have in the backup and exclude anything you want.
Taking Backup in Manage WordPress Hosting
Taking a backup from your hosting or managed hosting panel is another preferred and easy method that you can follow. If your website is hosted on managed WordPress hosting, then it would be easier for you to take a backup with all the optimizations and settings.
As you can see in the image above, my managed hosting provider takes an automatic backup of my WordPress, and it also allows me to take backups manually and restore them easily.
Ask your web hosting provider if they provide you with an automatic nightly backup and allow you to take backup manually.
Which One Do We Prefer?
If you ask us about the best method to take a complete backup of the website, we do recommend you to take a backup using WordPress plugins like Updraft Plus, All-in-One Migration, and Duplicator, as well as taking a backup from your server/managed hosting provider.
TheWPX is hosted on a managed WordPress server, where my hosting provider takes a complete backup of this website along with all the changes made overnight. As well as for extra security, we also take a backup using the Updraft Plus plugin and save them on Google Drive for easy access.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still, have you any doubts about taking the backup of your website? Here, I’m sharing some frequently asked questions with you to help with your doubts.
Which Plugin to Use for Taking WordPress Backup?
You can use Updraft Plus, All-in-One Migration, and Duplicator plugin to take a complete backup of your WordPress website. These plugins work well to take any kind of backup on your website, along with all files, themes, plugins, databases, and drop-in files.
Updraft vs All-in-One Migration – Which One is Best?
I highly recommend using Updraft Plus – because this is something which I mostly prefer to use. I’ve chosen this plugin on the basis of various tests and the accuracy of the backup.
Also, other plugins like All-in-One Migration have shown a lot of errors during the update (It doesn’t even work a single time for me without causing any errors). So, I highly recommend you shift from this plugin to Updraft Plus.
Can I Restore the Backup of One Website to Another?
Yes, you can easily do so. But for migrating a website from one website to another, you need to purchase the premium version of Updraft Plus or manually change the domain URL in your database using a plugin named “Better Search Replace,” which is available for free on the WordPress repository.
How Much is the Hosting Charge for Backup?
It depends on the hosting you purchased. Normally, DigitalOcean charges $0.1/GB for taking a screenshot of your droplet, and if we talk about normal hosting providers and managed hosting providers, they mostly offer a free nightly backup with every plan you purchase.
Wrapping Up!
In this guide, we shared various ways through which you can take a backup of your WordPress website. I always recommend you take a backup of your website before upgrading anything on your server. It is also important to take a backup of your database first before optimizing it for better performance and speed.
From the methods we shared above you can use any of them to take a complete backup of your WordPress website, but I don’t recommend you to use the first method, which is the manual way. Instead of taking backups manually, you can use plugins like Updraft and All-in-One Migration.
You can ask me if you’ve any other queries in the comment section below, and don’t forget to share this article with your friends, family, and followers.
Happy Blogging ☺️
hahaha…..method no.1 is the best. copy all wordpress file into local hard drive and make mysql database export. I didn’t even thinking about it.
Hey @mike
I’m glad it helped you! 🙂
I am searching on google how to backup wordpress website and I find your post. Hopefully, now we can backup WordPress website easily. Thank you!