How to Back Up Your WordPress Website the Right Way

Nobody thinks about backups until something goes wrong. A hacked site, a botched plugin update, accidental deletion of a post you spent hours writing — any of these can happen to any WordPress site, at any time, without warning. The difference between a minor inconvenience and a major disaster usually comes down to one thing: whether you had a recent backup.

Here’s how to back up your WordPress site properly, and what actually matters when you’re choosing how to do it.

What a WordPress Backup Actually Includes

A complete WordPress backup has two parts: your files and your database. The files include your theme, plugins, uploads (images, PDFs, documents), and the core WordPress software. The database holds everything else — your posts, pages, settings, user accounts, and comments. You need both to fully restore a site. A backup that only covers one of these isn’t really a complete backup.

How Often Should You Back Up?

The honest answer depends on how often your site changes. A blog that publishes once a week and rarely changes its settings might be fine with weekly backups. An e-commerce store processing orders daily needs daily backups at minimum — and ideally more frequent ones for the database, since that’s where your order records, customer accounts, and inventory live. Our guide on web hosting for e-commerce covers some of the other hosting considerations specific to online stores.

A useful rule of thumb: how much data would you be comfortable losing if your site crashed right now? Set your backup frequency so that the answer is “not much.”

Where Should Backups Be Stored?

This is the part most people get wrong. Storing backups on the same server as your live site defeats most of the purpose — if your server has a hardware failure or gets compromised, your backups go down with it. Backups should be stored somewhere separate: a cloud storage service (Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3), a remote server, or a local drive. Ideally, more than one of these.

The technical term for this is off-site backup storage, and it’s the difference between a backup that actually saves you and one that fails you when you need it most.

Plugin Options Worth Knowing

There are several well-regarded WordPress backup plugins that handle the technical side automatically once you configure them:

• UpdraftPlus is the most widely used free option. It backs up both files and database, supports multiple remote storage destinations, and has a straightforward restore process.
• BackupBuddy is a premium option with a strong track record, particularly for migrations as well as backups.
• Jetpack Backup offers real-time backups (meaning every change is backed up as it happens), which is useful for high-activity sites.

Some managed WordPress hosting plans also include automatic backups as part of the service. If yours does, check the retention period (how many days of backups are kept) and how restoration actually works — whether you can do it yourself with a click or need to contact support. Our guide on choosing the right WordPress hosting plan covers what to look for in managed backup features.

Test Your Backups

A backup you’ve never tested is a backup you can’t trust. At least occasionally — every few months, or after any major site change — do a test restore to a staging environment and confirm the site comes back the way it should. This sounds like extra work, but it’s the only way to know for certain that your backup process actually works before you need it for real. WordPress.org’s official backup documentation is a useful reference if you want to understand the underlying process in more detail.

The Bottom Line

Backups are one of those things that feel optional until they’re suddenly not. Set up automatic, off-site backups, test them occasionally, and make sure you know how to restore from them. Five minutes of setup now can save hours — or days — of recovery work later.