How to Protect Your WordPress Site with Backups

We’re going to talk about a very important security technique, backups. There are many different types of attacks used by hackers that can infect your site with malware or take down your site entirely. When that happens, the easiest ways to restore your site to a known operating condition or a known working state is by using a backup. If you are performing backups regularly, you are taking an important step in protecting yourself from these types of attacks.

For example, hackers might conduct a ransomware attack where they encrypt portions of your data, requiring you to pay them a fee to unlock that data for you. Instead of trusting the hackers to decrypt the data and paying them, you can just restore your data using your backup.

Sometimes you adjust a theme, install a plugin, or alter some configuration settings which cause undesired changes and render your site inoperable. Instead of panicking, you can just install your latest backup and get your site back up and running in a couple of hours.

Backups can easily be created and managed using a free WordPress plugin called Updraft. Watch this video and follow these steps to configure Updraft properly to protect your WordPress site!

How to Configure Daily Backups

Daily backups will protect you in case the website breaks or hackers compromise your site by modifying your WordPress files.

Damage can be essentially reversed by applying the backup and restoring the website to a known working state.

Ideally, this task is automated either through your hosting company or with a plugin.

Updraft

The Updraft plugin can automate this process for you with a few simple settings.

First, navigate to the settings portion of the dashboard and select UpdraftPlus Backups. Then, click the settings tab and set the Files backup schedule and the Database Backup schedule to “Daily”.

This setting will configure Updraft to create a backup of your site every day. This is recommended because if a problem occurs you can restore your backup and only lose one day’s worth of data.

You can also choose to send these backups to yourself using e-mail or a cloud based storage.

By default, Updraft will send these backups to the e-mail address of the administrator account of the WordPress site. Updraft can also be configured to send backups to cloud storage, like Google Drive, but this feature is only available with the premium version of Updraft.

The Cyberkraft WordPress Security Course

This video lesson is part of the Cyberkraft WordPress Security Course. This course is designed for WordPress website owners. It teaches you all the skills you need to secure your WordPress site with live demonstrations. You will also receive one on one support from our instructors and a security checklist to help protect your site.