How to Setup Automatic Backups for Your WordPress Site?

One of the most infuriating things with WordPress is the sheer amount of bots automatically attacking blogging sites all over the world. As soon as your website starts getting backlinks and traffic, you can be sure that some people will point their robots at your site as well. This can lead to your entire site being taken down by hackers, and sometimes they can even inject malicious scripts into your database and onto the web server, changing the core WordPress files in the process.

While there are many different security measures you can take to secure your WordPress site, there will probably always be some ways people can gain unauthorized access to your installation and server, and therefore having an automated backup system in place is a vital part of any webmastering. If you’ve been in the game of hosting websites for a number of years, most likely you’ve come across terms such as cron jobs, automated scheduling tasks and other technically sounding words. Consider reading the below tips on how to add backups automatically, so if the worst thing happens, you can easily install an old version of your site, without losing data in the process.

Related: Learn how to manually backup WordPress site.

Setup Automatic Backup for WordPress Site

In this article we are showing you how to setup automatic backups for your WordPress site with free BackWPup plugin. But there are many more out there and you can use any of the plugins for this purpose.

BackWPup – WordPress Backup Plugin

Follow the below instructions to install BackWPup plugin from your WordPress admin panel:

• Go to “Plugins” menu
• Click “Add New”
• Search for “BackWPup”
• Install and Activate the plugin

Backing up the Database

Now, in your left-side menu in the administrator panel, there is a new item called “BackWPup”.

• Click the menu link “BackWPup”
• Click “Add New Job”

Make sure you have only chosen the “Database backup” and “Check database tables” options found under “Job Tasks”.

Next, go to the tab on top called “Schedule”. On this tab you get few options on how to run the automated backups. At default this is set to only work on manual activation, which is not what we want.

Instead, press “with WordPress cron” and go to the bottom section called “Scheduler”. Here you see 4 different options. Depending on how much traffic you get and how secure you feel, you can choose whichever setting fits best with your needs.

Note: Just remember that if you have a large WordPress site, with many visitors and many posts and comments, backing up can take some time and make the website slower, so don’t set it to backing up every minute unless you really really need to.

Once you have done this, go to the bottom of the page and click on “Save Changes”. Congratulations! Now you have an automated backup of your entire WordPress database!

Backing Up Files

Now that we have the database taken care of, this next step is optional, but highly recommended if you use any custom plugins, themes or other customizations at all. By backing up your files also, you make sure that any hacker successfully injecting malicious code onto your side can be sidestepped by simply applying the backup as soon as you discover the hack. Otherwise you have to reinstall WordPress first, then all your plugins and themes and set everything up manually.

To backup your files do the following:

• Click the menu link “BackWPup”
• Click “Add New Job”
• Give the new job a name
• Choose only “File backup” and “Installed plugins list”

Go into the “Scheduling” tab and select how often to take a file backup. It can be a good idea to not schedule File backup at the same time as a Database backup, since it can take extra resources. Also note that you might not need to backup your files as often as your database, since you will most likely not change the files that often once your theme and plugins are installed and working.

Once you are done scheduling your file backup, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Save Changes”. Congratulations, you now have automated both file and database backups for your WordPress site, and you can hopefully sleep a little bit better at night!

Summary

As you can see it is very easy to setup automatic backup for your WordPress site. There are also many other backup plugins available that you can try instead of BackWPUp plugin. Many hosting companies like SiteGround also offers automatic backup at server side which you can restore with single click.