How to backup your website: a practical guide for small businesses
A website backup is a copy of your site files, database and emails stored somewhere separate from your live server. If your site breaks, gets hacked or your hosting account fails, the backup is what lets you get back online without starting from scratch.
Every small business should have a working backup system before anything goes wrong. Restoring a site without a backup can cost days of downtime, lost sales and permanent data loss. With a good backup in place, you can be back online within hours.
What to back up
A modern website is more than just the HTML pages visitors see. You need to back up three things. The site files include your theme, uploaded images, PDFs and any custom code your developer wrote. The database holds every post, page, user account, comment and plugin setting. Emails on your domain are stored on your mail server, not in a standard website backup, so check with your hosting provider whether your email accounts are included or need a separate backup.
How often to back up
The right frequency depends on how often your site changes. A blog updated once a week needs weekly database backups and monthly full file backups. An ecommerce store with daily orders should back up its database every day and its files once a week. A static brochure site that never changes can manage with a monthly full backup and still be safe.
A sensible minimum for most small businesses is a weekly automated database backup plus a monthly full site backup kept for at least 90 days. If losing a single day of content or orders would be a problem, increase the frequency to daily.
Automated vs manual backups
Manual backups mean logging into your hosting control panel, downloading files via FTP and exporting the database through phpMyAdmin. They work but they rely on you remembering to do them, which most people forget after the first month.
Automated backups are the standard. Most good hosting providers include daily or weekly automated backups as part of their package. Content management systems like WordPress have plugins that schedule backups to cloud storage, email or FTP. The best system is automated with no human step required, plus a separate manual backup before any major update such as a theme change or platform migration.
Victory Digital includes automated monitoring and backup reporting as part of its managed SEO and digital marketing packages. Speak to the team at [email protected] if you want a professional review of your current backup setup.
The 3-2-1 backup rule
The industry standard for data protection is the 3-2-1 rule. Keep three copies of your data on two different types of media with one copy stored off-site. For a website this means your live server counts as one copy, a local download on your computer or an external hard drive counts as the second copy and a cloud backup such as Google Drive, Dropbox or your hosting provider's remote backup counts as the third.
Storing all your backups on the same server as your live site is not a backup. If the server fails, both the live site and the backups are gone. At least one copy must be on a different system in a different physical location.
How to test your backups
A backup you cannot restore is not a backup. Many small businesses only discover their backup system was broken when they actually need it, which is the worst possible time.
Test your backups at least once a quarter. Restore the files and database to a staging or local environment and check that pages display correctly, forms submit, images load and any ecommerce or booking system still works. If the restore fails, fix the backup system immediately and test again.
Victory Digital's free SEO report at https://victory.digital/run-a-seo-report checks your site for technical health issues including uptime and performance, which are connected to having a reliable backup and hosting setup in place.
If you have questions about setting up a backup system for your website, contact Victory Digital at [email protected] or book a discovery call at https://victory.digital/book/discovery-call to talk through your options.
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