Article
Website Backups: What to Back Up, How Often and Where to Keep Them
Websites break. Updates go wrong, plugins conflict, servers fail, hackers deface pages and people delete the wrong thing. When that happens, a working backup turns a disaster into a minor inconvenience. Without one, a business can lose years of content and orders.
Many hosting plans claim to include backups, but owners rarely check what is backed up, where or how to restore it. This guide gives you a simple, reliable plan.
What Needs Backing Up
- Website files: code, themes, plugins and uploaded media such as images and PDFs.
- Database: content, orders, customers and settings for dynamic sites like WordPress, WooCommerce or custom apps.
- Configuration: server settings, environment configuration, DNS records and cron jobs.
- Email: if hosted with your website, check whether it is included separately.
For dynamic sites, the database changes most often and matters most. A file backup without the matching database is often useless.
Keep secrets such as passwords and API keys out of public backups and store them securely.
Do not forget items stored outside the main site, such as files in cloud storage buckets, scheduled task settings and integrations with payment or delivery providers. A complete recovery may need all of them.
How Often to Back Up
Backup frequency should match how often your data changes and how much you can afford to lose:
- Brochure sites that rarely change: weekly backups, plus one before any update.
- Blogs and content sites: daily backups.
- Ecommerce and booking sites: daily at minimum, often more frequent database backups.
- Custom web apps: depends on usage; many need continuous or hourly database backups.
Always make a fresh backup before updates, plugin installs or major changes. Our post on dependency updates without fear explains a safe update routine.
Schedule backups at quiet times, such as early morning, to reduce impact on performance. For busy ecommerce sites, check that backups do not lock the database during peak hours.
Where to Store Backups
A backup stored on the same server as the website is not enough. If the server fails or is compromised, you lose both. Follow a simple rule: keep at least one copy off-site, with a different provider or in separate cloud storage.
Keep several versions, not just the latest. If a problem went unnoticed for a week, yesterday's backup may already contain it. A retention schedule such as daily backups for two weeks and monthly backups for a year works for many small businesses.
Tip: make sure the business, not only the developer, has access to the backup storage. Ownership of backups matters as much as ownership of the domain.
Encrypt backups that contain customer data, and control who can access them. A backup of your customer database is just as sensitive as the live database itself, and leaked backups have caused real data breaches.
Test Restores Regularly
A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. Every few months, restore a backup to a staging environment and confirm the site works, including pages, images, logins and recent orders.
Document the restore steps clearly so someone other than the original developer can do it under pressure. Our guide on environment parity explains why staging environments should match production as closely as possible.
Measure how long a restore actually takes. If your shop would be offline for a full day during a restore, you may need faster backup options or a different hosting setup. Knowing this in advance lets you plan honestly.
Questions to Ask Your Host or Developer
- What exactly is included in backups: files, database, email?
- How often are backups taken and how long are they kept?
- Where are they stored, and is there an off-site copy?
- How long does a restore take, and is there a fee?
- When was the last test restore?
Write the answers into your site documentation. If any answer is unclear, treat that as a risk to fix. Backups are cheap compared with rebuilding a site from scratch or explaining lost orders to customers. Include backups in your maintenance plan.
Assign one named person to check backup reports every month.
FAQ
Are hosting backups enough?
They help, but keep your own off-site copy as well, since host backups may be limited or stored on the same infrastructure.
How much does backup storage cost?
For most small sites, off-site backup storage is inexpensive compared with the cost of data loss.
Can backups contain malware?
Yes, if the site was already infected. Keeping several older versions lets you restore a clean copy.
Reliable website backups cover files, databases and configuration, run on a schedule that matches your data, live off-site in several versions and are tested regularly. Ask your host and developer the right questions today, before you need the answers.