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Easily Complete A Wordpress Backup In Less Than 5 Minutes

Backing up your Wordpress site on a regular basis is absolutely essential and something that we should all get in the habit of doing. There are many times when a backup can come in very handy – your site may get hacked, you might experience compatibility problems (with plugins, themes, upgrades, etc.) that break your site, or you may have completely random issues where your site just falls apart.

This is where having a backup is so important – it enables you to get up and running again in no time at all, and given how simple it is do there really is no excuse! It’s common for web hosts to offer free backups, but you really need to take responsibility yourself and put a rock solid system in place to minimize any potential issues. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you experience problems and then find your web host hasn’t been keeping backups – doing it yourself is quick and easy, and provides you with piece of mind.

There are a number of different approaches you can take to backup your Wordpress site – in this post I’ll cover backing up your site through your web host control panel (in particular cPanel which many of you should have access to), and also through the use of a very cool and handy plugin called WP-DB-Backup. Either approach is fine – choose the one that you’re most comfortable with.

Backing Up Your Wordpress Database Via cPanel

Wordpress makes use of a MySQL database to store all of your blog posts, pages, comments, and general settings – this is probably the main thing you want to backup – especially if you have a large site with lots of content. However, in addition to that you’ll probably want to backup your Wordpress site files for the admin panel, your themes, plugins, and all your videos and images. This may not be as important as the database backup, but it can still be worthwhile doing this.

To backup your database, the first thing you’ll need to do is to log into your web host control panel – I’m focusing on cPanel here as it tends to be the one that most people have access to. If you don’t have access to cPanel, the steps outlined here should still be similar to your own web host’s control panel.

You need to access your database through phpMyAdmin – scroll down the page and select the following option:

You then need to select your database and go to the “Export” link.

At the bottom of the page you should check the “Save as File” option and then hit the “Go” button to the right. You should then be asked to save a file via a dialog box – make sure you save this file to your hard drive and ensure that you keep it safe. It contains all of your posts, pages, comments and settings, so you don’t want to lose it! It may also be worth putting a copy somewhere secure online – just to make doubly sure that you’re covered. This provides you with a .sql file that can be used to restore your database if you should ever need to.

So, your database is now backed up, but you also need to backup your Wordpress files – you’ll probably only need the “/wp-content/” directory for this which contains all of your themes, plugins, and files that you’ve uploaded. If you know that you also have files that are required for your site which are stored outside of the /wp-content/ folder, then it may be worth backing up all of the site’s files.

This can again be achieved through cPanel – select the following option:

You should then see the following screen:

As you can see, this page enables you to do a full backup of your site (including core files and your database) – there are several options here – choose the one that bests suits what you want to do and then save the backup to your hard drive.

If you don’t have access to cPanel and your web host’s control panel makes it difficult to backup your site, you can simply use a free FTP client of your choice to copy the /wp-content/ folder (or you whole site) to your hard drive. I use FileZilla which is free and very easy to use.

WP-DB-Backup Plugin

If you don’t fancy using your control panel for doing backups, another option is to use a plugin. WP-DB-Backup is a free plugin that will do all your backing up for you from within your Wordpress admin panel – it’s a very handy plugin that is relatively quick and easy to use. It provides you with several options – for example, you can schedule backups to take place at regular intervals and then have the backup files emailed to you, or stored somewhere secure on your server.

Best of all you can do all of this through your Wordpress admin panel – once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you need to select “Tools” > “Backup” from your Wordpress menu:

As you can see, the plugin is aware of the core tables that need to backed up – you also have several options to choose from:

Choose the options that best suit where you want the backup to be sent and how often you would like to schedule backups (or you may want to do them manually yourself – just make sure that you remember to do it).

And that’s it! You now know how to backup your Wordpress blog. Make sure that you do it on a regular basis – at least weekly, but potentially daily if you update your blog on a frequent basis. If you use the WP-DB-Backup plugin it will only take up a couple of minutes of your day (if that) – and it’s certainly time well spent.