A website backup is easy to ignore until your organization’s website suddenly stops working.
Regular backups are one of the simplest ways to protect your site from data loss, security issues, and those delightful little “why is the website broken?” moments nobody asked for.
Without backups, one bad update or security issue can turn into hours of stress. In the worst cases, your team may need to rebuild lost content by hand.
Backups will not stop every problem. That’s what updates, monitoring, secure hosting, and smart maintenance help with. But, they do give you a way to recover when your website decides to make things interesting.
In this guide, we’ll explain what website backups include, how websites are backed up, how to back up your WordPress website, and how to restore a website from a backup.
What Is a Website Backup?
A website backup is a saved copy of the files, database, media, settings, and code that make your website work.
Depending on the website platform you use, a full backup may include:
- Website files, such as themes, templates, images, documents, and code
- Your database, including pages, posts, user data, form entries, settings, and content
- Plugins, modules, extensions, or custom functionality
- Configuration files
- Uploads and media libraries
- A website backup archive that stores a snapshot of your website at a specific point in time
For WordPress, a complete WordPress backup should include both your site files and your database. If you only back up one part, you may not have enough to restore the full site.
Think of it like saving your work before making a major change. Except the “work” is your public-facing website, content, forms, user pathways, and years of website history.
Why Website Backups Matter for Data Security
Backups aren’t usually the exciting part of website maintenance.
But, they’re one of the most practical.
A good backup system helps protect your organization from data loss, downtime, security incidents, and expensive rebuilds. It also gives your team a clear path to recover important components of your website when something breaks.
1. Backups Protect You From Data Loss
Websites can lose data for many reasons.
A team member may delete the wrong page. Plugin updates may break part of the site. Malware may damage files. A hosting issue may take the site offline. Or, a database may become corrupted.
These problems happen more often than most teams think.
If you ignore regular website backups, your recovery process will get slower and more stressful. Causing your team to recreate content, rebuild pages, or bring in emergency technical support, who can’t always guarantee that everything can be recovered.
2. Backups Help Reduce Downtime
Downtime creates real problems.
For a nonprofit, downtime can interrupt donations, volunteer signups, or access to important resources.
For a university or public sector organization, downtime can make critical information harder to find.
For a professional services firm, downtime can shake people’s trust when they’re trying to evaluate your expertise.
Regular website backups help reduce downtime by giving your technical team a working version of the site to restore. The faster you can recover, the faster your website can get back to doing its job.
3. Backups Support Your Website Security Plan
A backup doesn’t replace website security.
You’ll still need secure hosting, software updates, monitoring, strong passwords, access controls, and regular maintenance.
But website security and backups work best together. Security tools help prevent problems. Backups help you recover when something still goes wrong.
A practical website security plan should include:
- Regular website backups
- Secure offsite storage
- Malware scanning and monitoring
- CMS, plugin, and module updates
- User access reviews
- Restore testing
- Clear recovery documentation
The goal isn’t to assume your site will never break, but to make sure your team knows what to do when it does.
Best Practices for Implementing Backups
A backup only helps if it’s recent, secure, and easy to restore.
That means your backup plan needs to cover more than “we saved a copy somewhere once.” You need a simple process your team can trust when something goes wrong.
Set a Backup Schedule
Start by deciding how often your website should be backed up.
If your site changes often, daily backups usually make sense. This is especially important if your website collects form submissions, donations, orders, registrations, or member activity.
If your site only changes occasionally, weekly backups may be enough.
The safest option is to automate the process. Automated backups run on a schedule, so your team doesn’t need to remember to create them manually.
Plus, you can set the server to automatically delete old backups as well.
Because let’s be honest: “someone should probably do that” isn’t a great security plan.
Data Encryption and Security
Your backups may include sensitive information, so they need to be protected, too.
Store backups in a secure location. For many organizations, that means using cloud storage or a trusted website backup service. It’s also smart to keep an extra copy of your backups away from your live website server. If your server goes down or gets compromised, you don’t want your backup to go with it.
Use encryption when your backups include sensitive data. Encryption scrambles the data so people can’t read it without the right access.
Also, limit who can access backups. Not everyone who can edit the website needs access to the recovery files. Backups should be limited to your developers and trusted server admins only.
Regularly Test Your Backups
Creating backups is only half the job. You also need to make sure they work.
A test restore means using a backup to rebuild a copy of your website, usually in a safe testing environment. This helps confirm that your files, database, media, settings, and content can actually be restored.
Test restores are useful because they catch problems before an emergency happens. Maybe a backup is missing the database. Maybe a file didn’t save properly. Or, maybe the restore process takes longer than expected.
It’s much better to find that out on a normal Tuesday than during a website crisis.
Write Down the Backup Process
Your backup plan shouldn’t live in one person’s head. Create a simple backup policy that explains:
- What gets backed up
- How often do backups happen
- Where backups are stored
- How long are backups kept
- Who can access them
- How to restore the website
- Who is responsible when something goes wrong
Remember to keep it practical. Your backup policy doesn’t need to be a giant document that no one wants to read. The goal of a backup process should give your team clear steps when the site needs help. 1-2 pages should be sufficient.
Review it regularly, especially after major website changes, hosting changes, CMS updates, or new security concerns.
How Are Websites Backed Up?
There are several ways to back up a website. The best option depends on your platform, hosting setup, technical comfort level, and how often your site changes.
Manual Website Backups
A manual website backup usually means downloading your website files and exporting your database.
For many websites, this involves tools like:
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP)* or SFTP*, which lets you transfer website files securely
- cPanel or another hosting dashboard
- phpMyAdmin, which helps you export your database
- CMS export tools
Manual backups give you more control, but they also depend on someone remembering to do them correctly.
A manual backup system may work for small websites that don’t change often. However, they’re usually not enough on their own for business-critical websites.
Hosting Provider Backups
Many hosting providers offer backup tools in their dashboard.
Some include daily or weekly backups in their hosting plans. Others charge extra for backup services. This can add a helpful layer of protection, but you should confirm exactly what the host provides.
Ask:
- How often do backups run?
- How long do you keep each backup?
- Do backups include both files and databases?
- Can we restore specific files, or only the full site?
- Do you store backups away from the live server?
- Does your team help with restores?
Website Backup Plugins
For WordPress websites, a website backup plugin can make backups easier. A good plugin can help you:
- Schedule automatic backups
- Backup your WordPress site files and database
- Store backups in cloud platforms
- Download backup archives
- Restore your site from a saved version
A backup plugin can work well for smaller WordPress sites, but you need to set it up properly.
You should also check it regularly. Since a plugin runs quietly in the background, your team still needs to pay attention to it. If it fails and no one notices, it won’t help much when you need it.
Website Backup Services
A website backup service handles backups for you.
These services often include automatic backup schedules, secure storage, backup monitoring, and restore support.
A managed website backup service may include:
- Automated daily backups
- Website cloud backup storage
- Backup monitoring
- Alerts when backups fail
- Restore support
- Multiple backup versions
- Backup testing
This can help organizations that need more reliability, less manual work, and clearer accountability.
For complex WordPress or Drupal sites, backup services often work best as part of an ongoing website support and maintenance partnership.
Backup Before You Need It
We can all agree that regular website backups aren’t exciting. That is, until they save you from a very bad day.
They protect your content, reduce downtime, support recovery, and help your team respond faster to updates, incidents, or mistakes.
Whether you use a plugin, hosting tool, manual process, website cloud backup, or managed website backup service, your backup system should be regular, secure, tested, and documented.
When your website gets messy, a reliable backup helps make the mess manageable.
It’s safest to have a developer or website support partner handle restoring your backup, whether it be manual or automatic
Cheeky Monkey Media helps organizations keep WordPress and Drupal websites secure, stable, backed up, monitored, and easier to manage. Whether you’re looking for a clearer website security plan or support with backups and ongoing maintenance, our experienced team is here to help.
Reach out to our team to talk about how we can make your website safer, more reliable, and much less stressful to manage.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should I back up my website?
It depends on how often your website changes.
If your site collects donations, orders, form submissions, registrations, or member activity, daily backups are usually a smart starting point. If your website changes less often, weekly backups may be enough.
The real question is: how much website data can your team afford to lose? If losing a week’s worth of updates would create problems, then weekly backups are too far apart.
Where should website backups be stored?
Store backups both on the server and in a separate off-site location.
On-server backups can make it quick and easy to restore your website, while off-site backups provide protection if the server is compromised, fails, or is lost. Keeping both gives you a faster recovery process and a more reliable backup strategy.
Do website backups protect my site from hackers?
No. Backups don’t stop hackers from trying to access or damage your website. They help you recover if a security issue affects your site.
That’s why backups should work alongside updates, monitoring, secure hosting, strong passwords, user access reviews, and malware scanning. Backups are just a small part of website security, and they shouldn’t be the whole plan.
What is a website backup archive?
A website backup archive is a saved backup file or package that stores a version of your website from a specific point in time.
It may include your files, database, media, and settings. Backup archives are useful when you need to restore an older version of your website or keep records of past versions.
Who should manage website backups?
Someone should clearly own the process. That could be your internal web team, IT team, hosting provider, developer, or website support partner. The important thing is that backup ownership is clear.
Your team should know who checks the backups, who gets alerts when something fails, who can access backup files, and who handles restores when something goes wrong.
*File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard method for transferring files between your computer and a web server over a network. It's commonly used to upload, download, and manage website files, including creating or restoring website backups.
*SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) is a secure method for transferring files between your computer and a server using an encrypted connection. It's commonly used to safely upload, download, and manage website files, including backups and restores.