Website backup – how often is too often? You have probably spent a huge amount of time and effort, getting your website to attract, and then convert vistors to pick up the telephone, make an appointment, or buy something in your shopping cart. Have you ever consider what might happen if your website was not working – for an hour, or a day, or a week? When was the last time you made a full website backup? When was the last time you restored your site from that backup?

Nowadays there are very few excuses to not taking regular website backups and securing your site against malicious individuals.

Backup

A secure backup procedure is best made to more than one destination. The default backup often makes a copy of a site to o the server on which the site is being hosted, and if the server fails or is attacked, you may lose your site AND your backup. That’s not a great outcome. A far better procedure is to make a copy there and also send a copy to another destination, where fiels can be stored “in the cloud”, cheaply and safely. The more places you store your backups, the safer you will be, should disaster strike.

Services can include Amazon S3, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and many other services too. The main thing is that you do set up a regular backup schedule, with perhaps daily backups for the database, and weekly backups for the whole site, and copies of all these backups being sent to perhaps two or even three destinations that are not on your own server.

Don’t forget to test these backups from time to time, to ensure theintegrity of your backup prcedures and that you  know how to restore the site too should it be needed.

Securing your site

Just as making a backup of your site is important, so too is locking the front and back doors to your site. Have good strong Usernames and Passwords (please change them from “Admin” and don’t use “123” for your password!). There are WordPress pugins that will shut down access to your site’s administration erea after three failed attempts, and will send an email to the administrator every time someone logs in.

There are also ways to boost security inside your site. If you want help, please contact me.

All websites should have a bullet-proof backup strategy – contact me to discuss your needs.