Imagine a situation: You have woken up in the morning and done with your coffee and breakfast. Now you head to your computer to check your website as you have a meeting scheduled on the agenda. Your site displays your capabilities to offer to your potential customers. But after landing on the home page, you don’t find your mission statement there. Instead you act as a vendor of viruses and malware or something just unwanted overnight. Shocked! Yes, my friend your site is hacked. At this time, an immediate solution would be to have a website backup that will get your site up and running in time for your meeting.
You should be aware that there are various things which can keep your website safe such as selecting a top-notch web host to using strong passwords. But the most important step is to perform website backups at fast and frequent intervals.
Remember a recent backup of your site can help you in several situations. In case your crucial data gets lost or your website gets hacked but you have the backup ready with you, it can solve your problems. Additionally, it many times just takes a few minutes for getting the backup file ready.
In this article, we’ll check the 10 significant reasons to back up your website right away. Let’s get to work!
1. Secures Against Human Error
To err is human and so, mistakes happen from all at time to time. Maybe you delete an important file on your website or change something that breaks the functionality of your site. You can fix these errors in several ways but some are as easy as just restoring a previous backup.
In terms of broader perspective, imagine that a major part of your website stops working. You have two options:
1. Check for the problem and find a way to solve it.
2. Make sure your website’s most recent backup is restored.
You can implement the first method either quickly or it may take a lot of time based on the problem’s status. But using the second method can give you quick results and get your site up in no time. You just need a recent complete backup of your site so that you don’t lose your valuable data.
Basically, it indicates that backups can save you in several situations where you or your colleague makes any mistake on your site. For maximum safety, it is better to create those backups frequently, also, on a daily basis.
2. Keeps Away Problems During Updates
Keeping your site updated is very important to ensure smooth functionality. Similarly, it’s very common to update your site regularly to check if something unexpected is happening. But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make changes on your website. Instead, you should perform them safely.
Preferably, having an automatic backup system set up for your site is always good. This means if you update any key components, a recent restore point is always available for you. You can do the smart work of making a manual backup prior to start fiddling with your website.
You may require a few minutes or longer for getting that backup ready. But, you’ll be happy for investing the time if anything goes wrong while the update goes on.
3. Avoids Loss of Data
Think that you own a blog comprising of hundreds of posts, and mistakenly one of your team member deletes one (or more) of them. In earlier days, we’ve heard of people deleting entire libraries of content as they didn’t have the knowledge of what they were doing or they gave some users too many privileges.
Primarily maintaining a backup system is important for ensuring your data safety and even in the situations mentioned above. It means having a complete backup of your site in place is essential which is also, necessary for your personal data.
Data loss can occur even if there’s no involvement of a human error. It means having backups with you is essential though you as well as your team know what you are doing.
Still you are worried about loss of crucial data; you can take a step further. You can take multiple backups but avoid storing them in the same location. So, you can upload your latest backups to the cloud and keep a copy on your server for safety.
4. Eases Compatibility Issues After New Installations
In case, you use WordPress or other CMS, then you might be using several add-ons such as plugins and themes. Both of these are quite handy. But each time a new add-on is installed, a new element gets added which won’t work properly with the rest of the site’s ecosystem.
This doesn’t mean you should avoid using plugins and themes. Instead, you just need to be careful while installing them. Prior to installing one, check for its reviews and ratings, and if that is updated by the developers frequently or not.
It is also important to backup your website prior to activating a new theme or WordPress plugin for safety purpose. Still if there is a compatibility issue, you just need to get a previous backup. Then you can install the alternative tool.
5. Cleans Malware Infections
Do you think that malware affects your personal computers only? Then you are wrong. There are several websites that get infected with some type of malware and several other websites are vulnerable to it.
Though you are cautious about website security, attackers too have developed highly-sophisticated skills. Also, even the smaller or less-popular websites are attacked. For example, WordPress users always face the threats from bots finding for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
To troubleshoot a malware can be hard as you can’t detect when your site is completely clean. If you aren’t able to identify and patch the security ‘hole’, your site will get infected and it will remain vulnerable. Keeping your website backup ready to go is better for faster cleanup of your website.
6. Safeguards From Hackers
Sometimes it might happen that attackers directly get an access to your site to spoil it or steal the vital information. In case your account with administrative privileges gets breached, for example, your credentials might get changed by the attackers to throw you out of your site.
The possibility of such a situation is very less, if you implement the right security precautions. Always enable the Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) on your site. If your website gets hacked, you can follow the below three ways:
1. Check if you can access your account through your email.
2. Ask for assistance from your website hosting provider.
3. Restore a backup from your hosting panel.
The first option might fail to work as attackers will also change the email associated with the account immediately. If you have taken the services from a reputable web host, the company will help you — but that can take time.
Therefore, restoring a backup can help you regain control of your site at the earliest. After that you can change your credentials to ensure that attackers are locked out once more.
Related: 6 Ways To Prevent Hackers From Touching Your Ecommerce Website
7. Simplifies the Website Migration Process
If all is perfect, you won’t need to switch web hosts. But this is where many of you make a mistake of choosing a right web host. This is where the game ends up and often gives rise to messy separations.
It means you may need to migrate from one web host to another. In this process you need to move all your site’s files from one server to another. There’s good news for you that if you’ve considered our advice, you already have multiple complete backup copies of your website ready to go.
There are several ways you can use backups for your website migration. Files can be copied manually, dedicated tools can be used, or your new provider can be asked to do it for you. In any case, keeping your backup ready helps you to switch web hosts at any moment you need to, ultimately giving you a lot of freedom. Plus, many hosting providers move website free reducing the overall operational cost of migration.
8. Creates a Testing Version of Your Website Easily
For making a significant change to your site, you can use a testing environment. By doing this, you can keep your live website safe if something goes wrong during or after the update.
For this, you’ll need to opt for staging site. You can create a staging environment for your site in several ways and all those are pretty straightforward. Additionally, when a recent backup of your site is available, you can be ready to set up a staging copy in minutes.
9. Ensures No Interruption Revenue Stream
If your website is related to ecommerce business then it should be always accessible. Even if it doesn’t work for a single minute, it might cost you loss of thousands. Here’s an example of Amazon – their website faced a little downtime during its Prime Day event and it cost them between $72–99 million loss. That’s outrageous, right?
If your website is just a small business, you won’t be working with these big numbers. But, that means you also shouldn’t lose out on any potential earnings due to problems your website faces. May it be an hour’s or a day’s loss of income, but it can lead to significant blow to any business.
To resolve unexpected problems from base might require lot of time. Alternatively, if you can restore a backup, you’ll get your website up again and earn money quickly. Later, you can invest your time in finding out what went wrong in the first place and keep it from happening again.
10. Promotes Strong Security Practices
If we would have charged you a dollar for every time recommendation from us for the website backup, we would have become millionaires until now. But if you were charged for ignoring the advice, we would have broken too.
It’s a fact that backups are flexible similar to a sliced bread. Also, you have several options for taking the backup of your website, so, you can’t give excuses for not doing it. Generally, to take the data backup is the base of a good digital security.
The first step is to create a backup immediately, each time the site is updated. This will keep your site safe every time.
Ways to Perform a Website Backup
As mentioned above, you can take the backup of your website in different ways. Some web hosts take the responsibility of this for you and others allow you to create backups when required from your control panel. For manual backup process, you can copy your files by using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or setting up a backup plugin.
You can follow any technique until you have multiple backups and you create them frequently. For highest security, we recommend to save several duplicate backups in different locations. This is because even if you lose one, you’ll have a backup of your backup. This is the best way to keep your website secure.
If you have hosted your website at MilesWeb servers, then you’re at right and safe destination! We offer automatic website cloud backup feature at an affordable cost. We also enable you to restore your backups as quickly as possible, if you face any of the situations described in this post.
Related: 10 Benefits Of Data Storage In A Cloud
Keep Yourself Prepared
“Take a backup” is one of the most common advices when it comes to digital security. If you take the back up of your site regularly, you can quickly restore the backup if anything goes wrong. For example, a backup can save you from a lot of things, if you want to perform troubleshooting or recover lost data.
