How Often Should You Back Up Your WordPress Site? Print

The question everyone asks too late

Almost nobody thinks about backup frequency until the day they desperately need a backup they do not have. So thinking about it now, before that day, is one of the smartest things you can do for your site. The honest answer to "how often" is not a single number, it depends on how often your site changes and how much you could bear to lose, and this article helps you land on the right rhythm for your site specifically.

The principle: match your backups to your changes

A backup captures your site at a moment in time. If disaster strikes, you restore to that moment, and anything that happened after it is lost. So the real question is: how much recent work are you willing to lose? Your backup frequency should match how often your site changes, because that is what decides how much a restore would cost you.

• A busy online store takes orders continuously, and every order is data you cannot afford to lose. A store needs frequent, ideally daily or even continuous, backups, because a day-old backup means a day of lost orders.
• An active blog or news site publishing several times a week wants at least daily or every-few-days backups, so a restore never loses more than a post or two.
• A brochure site that rarely changes, the who-we-are, what-we-do business site, changes so seldom that a weekly or even monthly backup is fine, plus a manual backup taken right before any update or edit.

The test is simple: imagine restoring to your most recent backup and losing everything since. If that thought is comfortable, your frequency is right. If it makes you wince, back up more often.

The non-negotiable one: back up before every change

Whatever your regular rhythm, there is one backup that is not optional and does not depend on frequency at all: always take a backup immediately before any significant change. Before updating WordPress, before installing or updating a plugin, before a redesign, before anything you are not completely sure about. This single habit, covered in our articles on updating WordPress safely and backups, prevents the majority of backup regrets, because the changes most likely to break a site are exactly the moments you have a fresh backup in hand.

Automatic beats manual, because you'll forget

The best backup schedule is the one that actually happens, and manual backups depend on you remembering, which, honestly, you eventually will not. This is the strongest argument for automated backups: they happen on schedule whether you remember or not.

• An automated backup service such as CodeGuard takes daily backups on its own, stores them safely off your server, and lets you restore with a click, our backups article covers it. For a store or an active site, this is the sensible choice precisely because it does not rely on your memory.
• A backup plugin can schedule automatic backups from within WordPress, provided you configure it to store copies somewhere other than your own hosting account, a backup sitting on the same server it is meant to protect is worth little.
• Manual cPanel backups are fine for the before-a-change habit and for rarely-changing sites, as long as you download them off the server and do not rely on remembering to make them regularly.

Where your backups live matters as much as how often

A backup stored only on the same server as your site protects you from your own mistakes and from software going wrong, but not from a problem with the server itself. Good backups are kept somewhere separate from the site, which is why automated services store them off-server by default. When you choose how to back up, ask not just how often, but where the copy actually lives.

Good to know

There is no universal right answer, only the right answer for your site, so match your frequency to how much you would hate to lose, automate it so it does not depend on your memory, always take one before any change, and keep the copies somewhere separate from the site. Get those four things right and backups stop being a worry. And if you would rather not manage any of it, an automated service or our own WordPress services handle the whole matter, which for a site that earns you money is usually money well spent. The one backup strategy that never works is the one you keep meaning to set up, so whatever you choose, set it up now rather than after the day you needed it.