Nobody thinks about backups until the moment they desperately need one. A bad plugin update breaks the entire site. A hosting migration goes wrong. Someone accidentally deletes an important file. A hacking attempt corrupts your database. In any of these situations, a recent backup is the difference between a minor inconvenience and a genuine disaster.
Despite how important they are, backups are one of those tasks that's incredibly easy to keep postponing — right up until the day you desperately wish you hadn't.
What Actually Needs to Be Backed Up
A complete website backup generally needs to cover two distinct things.
Your website files. This includes all the actual code, images, uploaded media, and configuration files that make up your website.
Your database. This includes your actual content — blog posts, page content, user accounts, settings, and anything else stored dynamically rather than sitting as a fixed file.
Backing up only one of these two isn't enough. If you back up your files but not your database, you'd be able to restore your website's code, but you'd lose all of your actual content and settings. If you back up your database but not your files, you'd have your content, but not the actual website structure needed to properly display it.
How Often Should You Back Up?
How frequently you need backups largely depends on how often your website actually changes.
If you're publishing new content regularly, like blog posts several times a week, daily backups are worth strongly considering, so you never risk losing more than a day's worth of work if something goes wrong.
If your website changes relatively infrequently, weekly backups might be perfectly sufficient. The key underlying principle is simple: you should never be more than one bad moment away from losing a meaningful, painful amount of work.
Where to Store Your Backups
It's important that backups aren't stored only on the same server as your live website. If that server experiences a serious problem, having your only backup copy sitting right there alongside the broken website doesn't help you very much.
Good backup storage options include your hosting provider's built-in remote backup service if one is offered, cloud storage services like Google Drive or Dropbox, or a separate backup service specifically designed for website backups.
Many hosting providers now offer automated backup solutions as part of their plans, sometimes storing backups off-server automatically. It's worth checking exactly what your specific hosting plan includes, rather than assuming.
Automatic vs Manual Backups
Manual backups — where you personally remember to create one — are far better than no backups at all, but they rely entirely on human memory and consistency, which inevitably fails at some point, usually at the worst possible time.
Automatic backups, on the other hand, run on a set schedule without requiring anyone to remember to trigger them. Wherever possible, automatic backups are strongly preferable, precisely because they remove the risk of simply forgetting.
How Many Backup Copies Should You Keep?
It's generally wise to keep more than just the single most recent backup. A common, sensible approach is to keep several recent daily backups, a handful of weekly backups covering the past month or so, and perhaps a few older monthly backups for longer-term coverage.
This matters because sometimes a problem isn't immediately obvious. If your website has quietly had an issue for several days before you finally notice it, your most recent backup might actually already contain that same problem, and you'd want the ability to restore from an even earlier point in time.
Testing Your Backups
This step is easy to overlook, but it matters more than people realize. A backup that hasn't actually been tested is really just an assumption that everything is fine — not a guarantee.
Periodically, it's worth actually testing whether a backup restores correctly, either in a separate test environment or by carefully checking the backup file's contents. Discovering that your backup system quietly stopped working properly is a far better realization to have during a calm, routine check than during an actual emergency.
What to Do Before Making Risky Changes
Beyond your regular ongoing backup schedule, it's a genuinely good habit to create a fresh manual backup immediately before doing anything higher-risk — updating your website's core software, installing a new plugin or tool, or making any significant structural change.
That way, if something goes wrong during the change itself, you have a very recent, reliable backup to fall back on immediately.
The Bottom Line
Backups are one of those unglamorous tasks that are extremely easy to postpone, right up until you desperately need one and it's too late. A solid backup routine covers both your website files and your database, stores copies somewhere separate from your live server, ideally runs automatically rather than relying on memory, and keeps enough historical copies to fall back on if a problem isn't caught right away.
Setting this up properly once, and then letting it run consistently in the background, is one of the simplest ways to genuinely protect your business from a bad day turning into a genuine catastrophe.