Previously, we talked about adding content to your site. If you missed that you can check it out again here: Adding Content

So, now that you’ve got content, you want to make sure it doesn’t get lost. There are lots of things that can bring a site down: hackers, a bad plugin or theme, or just a mistake editing a page or post. Whatever the cause you need a good backup strategy. Today is going to be short but important

Hosting Provided Backups

Hosting providers backup your sites. Not to many years ago that backup was just for them. Today they are getting better and better and more user friendly. Our favorite host, WP Engine, has a really easy to use system for backups and they automatically make a backup of your site every night and keep 30 days worth of backups that you can revert to any time you would like.

Plugin Backups

If you’re hosting somewhere else, make sure you can use the backups that are present. If there are not backups there, we used to use Jetpack as a plugin which includes backups along with a number of other features. Here’s an affilite link for Jetpack if your set on doing this on your own outside of WP Engine: https://jetpack.com/?aff=652 they frequently have sales and discounts. It is a great service and restoring a backup is almost as simple as hosting with us in WP Engine.

Backup Retention and Frequency

Keep in mind when thinking about backups, if you ever need to use one, you will lose all work that was done on the site from the time of the backup until today. For some of you, nightly backups might not be enough. You might need 6 hour, 3 hour, hourly or by the minute We can discuss that one on one if you feel you need a more frequent backup. I have worked with systems where they needed second by second backups and could experience no down time. As with anything the higher the frequency the higher the cost.

Retention is how long of a history of backups are being kept. 30 days is good for most situations but a longer retention may be required in your use case. In some industries, an entire year or more of backups is standard.

Restoring a Backup

If you ever want to go back to a backup, you just login and go to the backups screen and click to restore it to a certain backup copy. With our Freedom WordPress service all you need to do is drop us a line and we’ll do that for you. Sometimes you don’t catch the problem right away and we have to go back a few days and “see how that looks”. If it is still messed up we go back a few more days until we find a good copy of your site and get it back in place. Usually, any site with decent traffic, the problem is caught right away and 30 days of backups is a nice buffer.

Sayonara

So now we’ve got at least one page and a backup strategy. Time to get busy and start pumping out some content that gives value to the world knowing that it is safe and sound even if your website goes down.

To help organize that content, next we’re going to talk about menus.

 

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