How to Quickly Backup Your WordPress Website

Do you wish to learn how to quickly backup your WordPress website? The importance of having backups of your site can never be overemphasized. It’s something that you will hear mentioned every now and again. Unfortunately, a lot of us choose to ignore this important task in the day-to-day running of our websites. In this article, we are going to show you how to backup your WordPress website.

Steps to backup a WordPress website

So, what do you need to do in order to backup your WordPress website? A lot of web hosts out there periodically backup their clients’ sites. However, most hosts leave the task to website owners. The following is how to manually backup your WordPress website;

Log into cPanel

To get started, you need to log into your WordPress website’s cPanel. You can usually log in by adding /Cpanel to your website’s domain. Use the username and password that you got when you signed up for your web hosting.
If you have forgotten or lost your password, get in touch with your web host. They should be able to help you out. It’s also possible to log into your cPanel from your website’s hosting panel. If you are unsure how to proceed, contact your web host.

Look for the backup application
Once you have logged into your website’s cPanel, the next thing that you will need to do is to look for the Backup application. You can carry out a search for “backup,” or you can scroll through the page to find the widget. It’s under “Files.”
You can see that in our case we also have JetBackup. There is also Backup Wizard. All these widgets will get you the same thing. For the moment, we will use the Backup widget. Click on it to proceed to the next step.

Download a full account backup

On the next page, click on “Download a Full Account Backup.” A full account backup makes a copy of everything that’s on your website. It’s the easiest solution if you wish to fully restore your website should anything untoward happen to it.
Note that you can also download partial backups. Here, you have the option to download only a MySQL Database Backup. You can also choose to only download your email forwarders. A MySQL database backup contains all your posts, and you should be able to restore your content from it.

Generate Backup

We have stated that for this example, we will be downloading a full backup of our website. Once you have clicked on the “Download a Full Account Backup,” button, you will be taken to a page where you get the option to download a backup that already exists within your files, or to generate a new backup.

Here we are assuming that we have added a lot of new content since the last backup. As such, the option that we are going to go with is to generate a new backup. This allows us to capture all the files that are currently on our website.
To get going, confirm the email address to which you wish a notification to be sent when the backup is completed. Then, you need to click on the “Generate Backup” button. Generation of the backup may take some time, depending on how big your website is. If it’s a small website, you should be done in a minute or so.

Download the backup

The backup will be saved in your website’s files. Once you have gotten the email notifying you that the generation of the backup is complete, you can refresh the backups page. You should now see your new backup in your files.
You can also follow the link in the email that you get to get to the backups page. Once there, click on the backup that you wish to download. The file will now be downloaded to your computer. Again, this may take a few minutes or a few seconds, depending on how big your website is.

Keep the backup in a safe place

Once the download is completed, you can move the backup to a safe place. It may be prudent to save it not only on your computer but also on Dropbox or on some other application. It’s not bad to have redundancy. Your website is important to you, and you want to be able to recover it should something happen.

Why backup your website?

Backing up your website is the most logical thing to do. The internet is enduring, but it can also be fragile. This is something that we have previously experienced with one of our websites. It went down and we didn’t have a recent backup.

We were then forced to go hunting around on the internet to recover all the lost files. Fortunately, there are ways through which you can recover deleted web pages from Google, Yandex, Bing, and other search engines. But that’s lot of work.

It’s not something that you should ever have to do.
You may also wish to backup your website if you plan on moving to a different web host. There are many web hosts out there, some of which are good. Others are bad. You need to be careful. It’s how we ended up losing our content in the above-mentioned scenario.

Anyway, in order to move your website, you need to have either a full or a partial backup. Those are the files that you give to the new host so they can restore your site on the new servers.