A website is the most important thing for any business owner as it helps them showcase their services and products to a global audience. As an agency owner, your portfolio includes all the websites and services you have delivered to clients worldwide.
However, you also need to protect those portfolios. Why? Day by day, we are getting news of websites getting hacked and data being sacrificed. According to a study by Astra, more than 30,000 websites are getting hacked every day. Hence, protecting all the portfolios is essential.
However, securing a WordPress agency is somewhat different than securing most other types of businesses. Your products are WordPress sites. Your services not only include building websites, and installing themes and plugins, but also uploading media files, writing scripts, and designing site layouts.
As an agency owner, it’s your responsibility to protect all the websites. Failing to do so will impact your agency’s reputation.
Now, the question is, how to backup WordPress website for free. Don’t worry; we have got you covered.
Here, we will first explain why you should take a backup of the portfolio. Then, we will walk you through 5 different ways to take a backup of WordPress sites.
Why You Should Backup Your Portfolio of WordPress Sites?
As a WordPress agency, you will serve startups, small to big businesses, entrepreneurs, and others. Hence, you will have a portfolio of a vast number of websites.
Just imagine a situation where your website data is infected, compromised, or just vanished. You don’t want this situation to happen even in your scariest nightmare.
There are two common events when your WordPress website portfolio site needs a backup. Firstly, if your site faces any cybersecurity threats or attacks. Secondly, if your plugin, theme, or server fails. If any of these happen, there is a high possibility of data getting lost.
Apart from these, your data might even get compromised due to simple human error. Hence, backup is not just an option but a necessity.
The most simple yet effective way to handle this is through WordPress website backup. These backups include various files, folders, and databases, which comprise plugins, themes, third-party integrations, media, and more.
By having a backup, your site will experience downtime until it can be restored to the previous version.
5 Effective Ways to Take WordPress Website Backups
As an WordPress development agency, here are some of the most effective ways you can take backup of your entire portfolio of WordPress sites.
1. Backup WordPress Website Using a Plugin
The most effective way to backup WordPress sites is using a plugin. Many plugins are available in the market, such as MainWP, BlogVault, Jetpack VaultPress, UpdraftPlus, and more.
Out of which, we suggest UpdraftPlus as we have been using it for years. It is the world’s highest-ranking and most popular scheduled backup and migration plugin. The plugin lets you take WordPress website backups directly to the most popular cloud storage services – DropBox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and more.
The benefit of this approach is that it works consistently across a vast range of WordPress deployments. It’s great for agencies with portfolios containing multiple sites with dozens of plugins and themes.
There is also a premium version of the UpdraftPlus plugin that allows you to automatically backs up your site before WordPress, plugin, or theme updates. This is a suitable option as you don’t need to remember to perform backups regularly.
2. Manual Backup Using FTP
Another approach to manually backing up portfolio sites is through FTP software like FileZilla. With this approach, you can enter your hosting service, download all your files, and save them somewhere. You could download your websites to a local device or keep your files on a secure cloud storage service.
The main benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to rely on any of the third-party plugins or services and have complete control over your website. This would ensure you have access to all of your files, but it comes with significant downsides.
The major downside of this method is that manual backups through FTP take a lot of time to complete. Restoring from manually downloaded backups also takes a great deal of time. You cannot simply recover all of your websites from a local storage disk at once – you will have to painstakingly restore each website individually. As a result, this method is not recommended.
3. Manual Backup Using cPanel
Another effective method for manually backing up a portfolio of WordPress sites is through cPanel. The process of backing up using cPanel varies from provider to provider. However, one of the significant benefits of using cPanel is that you have control over your backup.
In most hosting solutions, you have two options inside the cPanel to backup your WordPress sites. First, the Backup option inside the Files lets you take a comprehensive backup of the site, including all the files and emails. Ensure that the backup destination is kept as the Home directory. In this option, you will receive an email as soon as your backup is completed.
Another option inside the cPanel is the Backup Wizard. Unlike the previous option, here, you have the option to take a partial or full backup. Based on your requirements, you can take a backup accordingly.
With this option, whenever your site encounters errors or security issues, you can backup it using cPanel and restore it to the previous version.
4. Backup Using WP Hosting
Many WP-focused hosting services offer built-in disaster recovery and backup solutions to their users. If your agency relies on a host that provides unlimited WordPress support, there is a good chance that it also offers backup and restoration services.
For example, hosting services like WP Engine and hosting management platforms like GridPane allow users to revert their websites to a cloud-hosted backup with a single click. This approach is great because it uses your hosting storage space for backups rather than forcing you to find and pay for an additional hosting service.
5. Online Remote Backups
Platforms like BlogVault and MainWP also include backups as a valuable feature. This option is popular with agencies because it allows them to add all of their websites to a single service and they manage them from that interface.
The useful thing about services like BlogVault is that there is no need to configure other parts of your WordPress development agency processes to accommodate backups. You can do everything as you would normally do, and let the backup service do its job in the background. There is no need to purchase or configure cloud storage space, making it a truly set-and-forget operation.
Which Backup Method is Best?
With five different ways to backup your WordPress website, it’s no surprise every agency has their own preferred method. At UnlimitedWP, we use UpDraft Plus because it allows us to quickly save and restore backups without being an obstacle. We also use BlogVault’s WP Remote service to take backups of 100 sites we manage with our WP Care Plans. However, many WP Hosting and remote online backup options are just as effective.
In general, we can recommend the following use cases for choosing the right backup method for a WordPress agency:
- If you use a WordPress-oriented host that offers backups, that should be your first choice. You’re already paying for hosting, and backups are part of the feature set that you’re paying for. Making the most of the features they provide you simply makes sense.
- If your host does not provide automatic backups, then you can use online remote backup management platforms. These are easy to implement, but not everyone uses them, and some agencies may not like having their backups separated from the rest of their work.
- If you want to keep all of your WordPress website backups on WordPress, then plugins are your best bet. This means installing the plugin on every website you want to backup, but it also gives you a great deal of control over technical backup configurations for individual websites.
