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How to manually or automatically Backup a WordPress Website?
One of the most important maintenance tasks for WordPress websites is to create or schedule regular backups.
Believe it or not, your website is under constant threat by people who want to exploit the internet. In addition to that, your website might crash due to updates, plugin failure, incompatibility issues, etc. All these unwanted events would lead to the loss of your website data.
A fail-safe mechanism to easily retain your website to the previous fully-functional state is to have a backup.
In this article, we will show you how to backup a WordPress website easily.
Step 1) Choose a backup plugin
WordPress core doesn’t have a built-in backup system. So, it requires you to have a backup plugin installed on your website.
There are a handful of good backup plugins available, both free and paid ones. Some of the good ones are WPvivid, UpdraftPlus, All-In-One WP Migration, BackupBuddy, etc.
Among these plugins, we prefer WPvivid on our sites and recommend it to users. It’s an easy-to-use plugin that offers automatic and manual backups. It offers both free and premium versions and is suitable for all sizes of websites.
So, we are using this plugin for demonstrating the backing up process. All other plugins have a similar approach for backing up your website.
Step 2) Install the Backup Plugin ‘WPvivid’
So first, go to your website’s admin dashboard. Then, go to Plugins > Add New and search for the plugin ‘WPvivid’. After that, install and activate it.
You can go through our article on how to install a WordPress plugin if you want to learn in detail.
After activating WPvivid, you will reach the WPvivid plugin menu.
Step 3) Create Manual Backup
Now, from the WPvivid menu, make sure you are on the Backup & Restore screen. That’s where you would start the manual backup.
Now, you will have to select 2 parameters – what to backup and where to save the backup.
For complete backup, select Database + Files on the left side. And on the right side, select ‘Select Backups to Local’ for now. It will save the backup to your website’s hosting server.
After selecting both the parameters click on the Backup Now button.
With that, the backup process will start and take a while depending on your website’s size.
That’s all for manually backing up your website.
After completing, if you scroll down below, you can see the current backup details. From there, you can delete it, download it to your PC, or restore it.
Moreover, if you want to set up a different backup location, then you can connect to different services like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc. from the Remote Storage tab.
Step 4) Set up Backup Scheduling
WPvivid offers an automatic backup feature that takes care of the backup of your website by itself without your involvement regularly. All you have to do is set up the schedule.
For that, go to the Schedule tab first.
From there, you have to set the schedule settings. It includes the following –
- Backup Interval – Choose the time interval between 2 consecutive backups.
- Backup document – Choose what to save – data, database, or both.
- Backup location – Select local backup or remote storage (if you have verified any).
After selecting everything according to your preferences, click on the Save Changes button below.
After that, the automatic backup schedule will be active.
Checkout our full guide on WordPress Website Backups with WPvivid for a more thorough guide.
