How to Backup WordPress Site: Step-by-Step Guide (Manual Method and by Plugins Method)

Wondering how one can backup your WordPress website? Have you ever misplaced your WordPress site? Or have you just lost your site and don’t have a WordPress backup to save you? Maybe you fell victim to a malicious hacker. Or your website simply broke after installing a faulty plugin, theme, or add-on. Perhaps your hosting failed—the server went down. It’s scary, right? No, not the server failure; losing your website. And you can go crazy if you don’t know what to do to restore your beloved WordPress site to its former glory.

Well, guess what: You don’t need to sweat one bit with a reliable backup solution in place. All you need is to hit the restore button, and voilà—you’re back up and running. See what I did there? In this post, you’ll learn that backing up your WordPress site is extraordinarily simple. We’ll walk you through the steps for how to create a full backup of your WordPress-based business. Then you can rest easy knowing you have a plan B ready. Grab a pen and some paper, and get ready to master WordPress backups like a pro. Ready? Great, let’s get the ball rolling on WordPress site backups.

What Is a WordPress Backup?

A backup is simply a copy of your website that you can reinstall (restore) if something goes wrong. It’s a failsafe, precautionary measure that saves you a lot of undue stress. Think of it as an insurance policy that protects all the effort, money, and time you’ve invested in your WordPress site.

What Does a WordPress Backup Include?

A full WordPress backup encompasses two crucial components: your website’s files and your MySQL database.

Website Files: This component comprises all the necessary elements that give structure and functionality to your WordPress site. It includes:

• Theme and Plugin Files: These are the core elements of your site’s design and functionality. Themes control the visual appearance, layout, and styling, while plugins add features and functionality.
• Media Files: This includes images, videos, audio files, and other media you’ve uploaded to your site.
• Scripts and Stylesheets: These are scripts (JavaScript) and stylesheets (CSS) that control interactivity and presentation.
• Other Assets: Any additional files that contribute to your website’s operation, such as fonts or custom scripts.

MySQL Database: The database is where all the dynamic content of your WordPress site is stored. It includes:

• Blog Posts: The actual textual content of your articles, along with metadata like author, publication date, and categories.
• Comments: All user-generated comments on your posts.
• Settings and Options: The configurations and settings you define in your WordPress admin area, including site title, site description, and more.

Combining these two components gives you a complete representation of your WordPress website. When you perform a backup, you’re essentially creating a snapshot of both the files that control your site’s design and functionality, and the database that holds your content and settings. This backup is crucial for safeguarding your site against potential data loss, errors, or security breaches. It allows you to restore your website to a previous state if anything goes wrong or if you need to move your site to a new server.

Why Do I Need to Backup My WordPress Site?

A majority of low-cost web hosts will talk about providing backups, but all they do is backup your MySQL database—if they backup anything at all. They don’t backup your files, which means you can’t recover changes you make to your theme, for example, if it becomes corrupted. It’s also quite the hassle requesting a copy of your website from their backups, so it’s simply best to backup your site on your own, just to make sure everything is safe.

The complete backup we’re helping you build here will handle your files as well as your database. This means if you lose your website, you simply need to reinstall the backup and your work is done. With that out of the way, let’s create full backups of your WordPress site.

Method 1: Backup WordPress Through Your Hosting

Your first choice is to simply select a hosting company that completes full, daily backups of your WordPress site. For example, WP Engine Managed WordPress hosting offers automated daily backups of all your core WordPress files, themes, plugins, and your database (including all your media). Plus you can initiate your own backups at any point (like before a major WordPress update, or when changing themes). If you want to take your hosting provider’s managed backups to the next level, log in occasionally and download your own zip file copy to keep on your own hard drive. You can never be too safe.

Having a backup is essential for any WordPress site. Why? Just because it’s hard work creating a website, and there are times when your site may crash as a result of a hack, a human error, while moving a WP site to root, or a malfunctioning plugin, among other issues. A backup can help you recover your site and get back to business in no time. Now, automated backup solutions are the simplest. Manual backups appear to be a few simple steps, but in reality, it takes a lot of time to learn and to carry out the process. However, if you want to give manual WordPress backups a try, we’ve detailed the process for you.

Preparing for a Manual WordPress Backup

Your WordPress site consists of two fundamental parts: Files and Database. Now, both parts need to be backed up. You have different options available to access your website’s data and take a copy of it. Let’s look at what you need to keep handy before we start the manual backup.

For files – Your website’s files reside on the web host’s server. You can access them in two ways:

1. Through cPanel – This is accessible through your hosting account. You must keep your host account username and password handy.
2. Through FTP – We can connect to your files using software called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) like FileZilla. To connect via FTP, you need the following credentials, which are usually available in your hosting account:

If you don’t have this information, you can contact your host or learn how to use FTP.

For database – This is accessible only through phpMyAdmin. Often, phpMyAdmin comes pre-installed in the cPanel of your hosting account. You only need your host account credentials here. If you don’t have access to cPanel, you can download phpMyAdmin directly.

Once you have these things in place, you’re ready to start the manual WordPress backup. We recommend creating a folder on your computer to store your backup, like so:

We take backups so that we can restore them in case something goes wrong with our websites, like a page deleted accidentally and much more. It’s good to keep things organized and know where your backup is stored. In times of an emergency, you won’t have to hunt it down.

How to Take a Manual Backup of WordPress

Now that you have everything ready, we can take you through the step-by-step process to manually backup WordPress sites.

1. Manual Backup of Your WordPress Files

As mentioned above, there are two ways of backing up your files: via cPanel or FTP. Let’s look at each in detail.

A. Backup Your WordPress Files Using cPanel

We picked cPanel first because it’s the easiest. cPanel is accessible from your web host account and you don’t need to download any external software to do a manual backup using cPanel. Now the steps may vary slightly, but generally, all hosts follow similar navigation.

Step 1 Login to your web host account. Navigate to your ‘product’ and select it. For example, yourwebsitename.com. As mentioned earlier, a few of these steps may vary between hosts. On the GoDaddy dashboard, you’d see an option called ‘cPanel Admin’. But if you’re using Bluehost, it might be under ‘Advanced’. If you can’t find cPanel, check the help section of your host to find the exact steps. Note: Many managed WordPress hosting providers like Flywheel don’t provide access to cPanel. In those cases, you would need to use the FTP method.

Step 2 Once inside cPanel, you’ll see ‘File Manager’. You’ve arrived at the location of your files. Now, we just need to pick them up and drop them off in your local system.

Step 3 On the left panel, you should see numerous folders. Find one that says “public_html”. Expand the folder by clicking on the + symbol. If you have multiple sites, you’ll need to select the folder that bears your website’s name. In the example below, the name of our website is ‘Demo’, so we’ve clicked on public_html > Demo. Now, this folder should contain three folders named wp-admin, wp-content, and wp-includes along with a bunch of files.

Step 4 On the right panel, you can ‘select all’, right click and download the files. We do not recommend this as it takes longer to download and may overload your server. A better way to do this is to select the public_html folder (or your website’s folder). Right click and select ‘Compress’ like so:

It gives you a couple options to compress. We’ve chosen zip archive.

This makes the process quicker and lighter, and it reduces storage space required. Once the zip file is ready, select it and download.

We recommend moving the downloaded zip file to the folder we created: WordPress Website Backup > Files.

B. Backup WordPress Files Using FTP

The reason why this is our second choice is because:

1. You need your FTP credentials.
2. You have to install third-party software.
3. Your manual backup becomes dependent on the connection between FTP and the server. This can increase the time taken to perform a manual backup.

But FTP is just as easy and is an alternative for those who don’t have cPanel access. That said, let’s proceed with the steps:

Step 1 Open FileZilla or the FTP client of your choice. You will see your ‘local site’ on the left panel with the folders that exist on your computer and the remote site on the right. It will be grayed out because we haven’t connected to it yet. Enter your credentials and connect to the server.

Step 2 Once the server connection is successful, you will see the directory populate on the remote site (right panel) like so:

Navigate to the public_html or the folder of your website xyz.com.

Step 3 You can select a folder, right click and download it to your local system. Alternatively, if you want to select specific files, you can also drag and drop files from the right panel to the left panel into the folder we created.

Once done, you’ve successfully created a manual backup of your files. We recommend you encrypt the data and store it in a zip file. Recommended read: backup WordPress theme using FTP.

2. Backup Database via phpMyAdmin

The next thing to do is to backup WordPress database via phpMyAdmin. Here, we’ll show you how to navigate phpMyAdmin using cPanel of your hosting account.

Step 1 Login to your web host account. Navigate to your ‘product’ and select it. Eg: xyz.com. On the next page, you should see an option called ‘cPanel Admin’.

Step 2 Under ‘Databases’, you’ll see phpMyAdmin.

Upon clicking it, you’ll enter the area where you can see your WordPress databases. From the tabs on the top, select ‘Databases’.

Step 3 Select your database from the left panel, and it will expand on the right panel to show you the contents. Note: If you don’t know which one is your database, download your wp_config.php file using File Manager or FTP. It will contain your database information.

Once you’ve chosen the correct database, simply select all the tables on the right panel and export it.

You’ll be given the option to choose which format you need. We prefer MySQL databases, so unless you’re tech-savvy and need a different option, leave it at its default choice ‘SQL’.

Once downloaded, you will have a .sql file. You can move it to the database backup folder we created to store it. Congratulations, you’ve successfully taken a complete backup of your website! Pat yourself on the back—it’s a commendable feat! But we aren’t done just yet. After you’ve taken a backup successfully, we recommend you perform the following list of actions.

Things to Do After a Manual Backup

Encryption – A backup contains all your website’s data. Therefore, if hackers get their hands on it, they pretty much have all the information they need. That’s why encryption is so vital. Once data is encrypted, even if it falls into the wrong hands, there’s nothing they can do with it. Use encryption software available that allows you to do this.

Test restore – Any backup is only as good as its restore capability. If you call on your backup to use it to restore your site, and it doesn’t work, then the entire process was in vain. Therefore, you need to test restoring it. Don’t wait for something to go wrong with your site to find out whether it works or not. You can create a staging site (a test environment) and then test out the backup. This will ensure your live site is never affected. To create a staging site, you can check with your hosting provider to see if they have the option, or you would need to use a best WordPress staging plugin. Since you’ve taken a manual backup, to test restore, you might find this WordPress restore guide useful.

Make multiple copies – Finally, once you know you have a functional backup, make a few copies and store it elsewhere. This is just good practice because you don’t want to depend on one backup copy. You can go through download WordPress database information for copies. Storage includes cloud storage options such as Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more. It also includes devices like pen drives and hard drives. You can check our guides on how to backup WordPress to Dropbox and Google Drive backups. If one gets damaged or lost, you always have several more usable copies.

That brings us to the end of the process of manual backups. We hope you are now savvy with taking a WordPress backup on your own. This step-by-step guide might make manual backups sound like a piece of cake. But the reality is that things don’t always roll out smoothly.

The Challenges Faced with WordPress Manual Backups

Manual WordPress backups can come with their fair share of challenges. Here are the issues you might encounter:

Challenge	Description
Time-Consuming	The speed at which you can copy the files and database during a manual backup depends on your internet connection, your device’s performance, and the connection to your host’s server. This process can often be frustrating, especially for larger websites with substantial amounts of data.
Server Disconnections	While the backup process usually runs smoothly, there are instances when the connection between your computer and the server can get disrupted. This can lead to interrupted backup attempts and error messages.
Website Slowdown	Manually copying files and database tables is resource-intensive. As a result, each time you perform a manual backup, it can strain your server’s resources and potentially slow down your website’s performance for both you and your visitors.
Risk Factors	Creating a proper backup manually requires precision and attention to detail. If not done correctly, the backup might not work as intended. Worse still, an error in the process can potentially corrupt your website or lead to data loss. This risk is especially concerning if you’re not familiar with the technicalities of the backup process.
Time-Intensive	While manual backups can be done without any monetary cost, they often demand a significant amount of your time and effort. If you need to perform backups regularly, this could become a cumbersome and inefficient use of your valuable time.

Considering these challenges, many WordPress users opt for automated backup solutions or plugins. These tools offer a more reliable and convenient way to create backups without the drawbacks associated with manual backups. Automated backups can be scheduled to occur at specific intervals, minimizing the risk of data loss and saving you the hassle of performing backups manually.

Method 2: Backup WordPress Automatically with Plugins

WordPress backup plugins add the component of ease to creating reliable backups for your WordPress website. All you need to do is install your favorite WordPress backup plugin, configure a few settings, and you’re good to go.

WPvivid Pro Backup & Migrate

If you are searching for a comprehensive backup, migrate, staging, and restore plugin with cloud storage integration (and really, why wouldn’t you?), then look no further than WPvivid. This WordPress backup plugin contains powerful features to take and schedule backups, send backups to a cloud storage of your choosing (Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, SFTP, and more), easily migrate your entire site or select files. WPvivid starts at $199 (one-time payment) for access to all the plugin’s great features. But they do offer a 14-day free trial, as well as a lite version on WordPress.org if you wish to give it a try before you buy.

Visit WPvivid View Demo

Jetpack Backup

Jetpack Backup is the best real-time backup solution for WordPress websites. It can help you take automated daily backups as well as real-time backups of your entire site. Backups can be restored in one click from your desktop or a mobile device.

If you choose the real-time backups plan, you’ll be able to restore your site from any backup point. This is especially useful for e-commerce websites. Other features Jetpack Backup offers include a 30-day backup archive and log of site changes. Jetpack Backup starts at $8 per month billed yearly.

Visit Jetpack

BackupBuddy Premium WordPress Plugin

The second premium WordPress backup plugin on our list today is BackupBuddy by iThemes. You can use the plugin to create full database and file backups, and/or move your site to another server easily. You can backup your site to your hard disk and a variety of external storage services including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, email, FTP, Dropbox, and BackupBuddy Stash among others. Schedule WordPress backups with BackupBuddy when you’re on the go and enjoy a backup service like no other. Pricing starts at $80 per year for a single site license. Although iThemes does also offer a lifetime Gold package at a one-time payment of $297. This includes unlimited use of the plugin, making it an excellent fit for agencies.

Visit BackupBuddy View Demo

Duplicator Free WordPress Plugin

With over 1 million active installs, Duplicator is more than your typical backup plugin. Primarily, Duplicator lets you clone or migrate your site to another location easily. This fundamental feature makes it a robust backup solution. Even though it won’t let you schedule backups, it automatically dumps your database to an SQL file and saves it to a ZIP archive alongside your WordPress files.

Then it creates a special PHP file that allows you to reinstall the backup easily. Simply upload the ZIP archive and the PHP file to your server, and the rest is easy work. Want more? Check out Duplicator Pro which offers more features including scheduled backups, cloud storage linking, email notifications, professional support, and more.

Visit Duplicator View Demo

BackWPup Free WordPress Plugin

BackWPup is a popular WordPress backup plugin that lets you create full backups of your WordPress site. And this plugin connects to external storage areas such as Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP, RackSpace Cloud, and many more. You can schedule full backups, meaning your complete WordPress site, files and all, will be safe at all times. Additionally, you can check, restore, and optimize your database, and if you need more juice, you can opt for the professional version.

Visit BackWPup View Demo

UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration Free WordPress Plugin

One of the highest-ranked WordPress backup plugins, UpdraftPlus brings fun and ease to backing up your WordPress site. With numerous sweet features including backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP, Dropbox, email, and other storage options, fast restore, scheduling, site duplicator, capability to split large sites into multiple archives, and much more, you can’t go wrong with UpdraftPlus. And the developers also offer a professional version that packs quite a punch if you’re looking for more features.

Visit UpdraftPlus View Demo

What About the Backups My Hosting Company Makes? Aren’t Those Good Enough?

Are you really sure that your hosting company makes regular backups of your website(s)? How often do they make them? How can they be restored? How long does a restoration take? Can you restore one site without restoring all sites in your account? More importantly: do you want to leave the security of your site solely in the hands of your hosting company?

Your hosting may or may not provide regular backups for your site. Even if they do, here’s why you shouldn’t rely on them:

1. Hosting company backups aren’t specifically designed for WordPress. This means they might not actually help when you need them.
2. The backups are not often scheduled, and they may not be frequent enough to be useful in case of a disaster.
3. You may not be able to restore a single site from hosting company backups without restoring all sites in your account.
4. You won’t be notified if the backups fail, so you’ll never know if they’ll actually be there if/when you need them.
5. You’ll be at the mercy of your hosting company if you ever need to restore from backup. They probably won’t be as responsive as you think they should be.

Why Bother with WordPress Backup?

Backups are a critical and essential aspect of managing WordPress websites and blogs. The potential risks to your online content are numerous and varied, making backups an absolute necessity. These risks include:

• Server Crashes and Failures: Servers can crash or experience hardware failures, leading to the loss of your website’s data and content.
• Malicious Hackers and Malware: Cyberattacks and malware infections can compromise your website’s security, leading to data breaches, content tampering, and potential loss of sensitive information.
• Developer Errors and Deletions: Mistakes made during development or content management can result in unintentional deletions or alterations of your site’s content.
• Corrupted or Erased Databases: Database corruption or accidental deletions can lead to significant data loss, affecting everything from blog posts to user comments.
• Defective Plugins and Themes: Poorly coded or incompatible plugins and themes can disrupt your site’s functionality or even cause data loss.
• Data Center Failures: Issues with the data center hosting your website can result in outages and data loss.
• Loss of Valuable Data: Depending on your industry, you might have customer payment data, shipping details, e-commerce configurations, and other crucial information that could be lost.
• Reputation and Brand Damage: Data breaches and content loss can tarnish your brand’s reputation, leading to loss of trust among your audience.
• Legal and Financial Consequences: Depending on the nature of your site and the data you handle, you might face legal consequences and financial penalties in the event of a data breach.

Given these risks, it’s vital to take control of your WordPress backup strategy. Relying solely on your website’s hosting company or your site’s built-in backup features may not provide adequate protection. To minimize your risk effectively:

• Choose a Reliable Backup Solution: Opt for a reputable backup plugin or service that offers automated and regular backups of both your website files and database.
• Schedule Automated Backups: Set up a schedule for automatic backups to ensure that your data is consistently safeguarded.
• Store Backups Securely: Store your backups in secure off-site locations, away from your website’s server, to prevent data loss due to server failures or hacks.
• Regularly Test Restorations: Periodically test the restoration process from your backups to ensure they are working as intended and can be relied upon in case of emergencies.
• Consider Cloud Storage: Utilize cloud storage services to store backups, ensuring redundancy and accessibility even if your primary server goes down.

By taking proactive steps to establish a comprehensive backup strategy, you can significantly reduce the potential impact of unforeseen events and protect your website’s content, data, and reputation.

What Exactly Is a Backup?

A backup serves as a preserved replica or duplicate iteration of your website along with its entire content. It functions as a safety net and preemptive action, enabling you to recover your WordPress (WP) site using a backup if any untoward incidents occur, leading to content loss. What exactly merits this backup? To encapsulate, everything! This includes, most prominently, the databases that house your WordPress content, generally residing in MySQL. This encompasses not just posts, users, comments, categories, tags, administrative preferences, and the like. Imagine, for instance, a healthcare institution—patient records would fall under this umbrella.

Similarly, if you’re an educational institution, critical components like research materials, student rosters, and grades are on the line. Now, consider the wealth of data an e-commerce solution holds! In addition to databases, individual website files necessitate backup. These constitute the structural and functional framework of your WordPress site. Instances of these include installations, themes, plugins, and code files. The importance of backing up these files is equal to safeguarding your databases. Disregarding one for the other would impede your ability to fully restore your site. A comprehensive backup streamlines recovery, irrespective of the chosen backup methodology.

The Best Backup Approach for You?

You must think about problems with backup volume and frequency. How much data do you have? High volumes of data—because of images, videos, or millions of customer payment records—require a technique that combines several types of backup. This may involve a full backup of everything periodically (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) plus incremental backups following a change to site files or databases. One technique to reduce the backup size is to backup the current month’s uploads directory and keep an offline copy of all the previous ones. Definitely, we recommend you perform a backup before installing any new WordPress theme, upgrade, or plugin in case a problem occurs.

It’s helpful to reflect on how often changes occur on your websites. This will help determine how often you’ll need to back them up. How often do you blog? What’s the frequency of other site activity? How often are you prepared to perform updates? The answer to these questions depends on the nature of the websites themselves, the frequency of website updates (content and design/functionality), and the importance of the website to your organization. The safest option is to backup each website every time you publish or update a post or page.

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