A good backup solution is the ultimate fail-safe against website problems.

Whether it’s a hack, malware, or just a plugin update gone wrong, having the proper backups in place can save you from a world of headaches.

A good backup is your best friend.

When something goes wrong with your website, having a backup that you can quickly deploy will solve your problem in most cases. Of course, you’ll want to keep plenty of backups so you can go back far enough to deploy a copy of your website from before the problem existed.

The downside is you’ll lose any content or updates you’ve done between the backup you deploy and today, but that’s often a much easier pill to swallow then losing everything.

Backup solutions can be found for free, and cloud storage space is cheap these days. For a few cents a day you can have peace of mind knowing the worst thing that can happen to your website is you have to revert it to an older version.

Automated backup solutions for WordPress.

As your first line of defense, your hosting company should be doing at least some form of backups on your websites. If they aren’t you might want to consider another host.

Sadly, while these server-side backups are common (and you’re likely already paying for it one way or another) they aren’t known to be the most reliable. That’s why it’s good to have those backups plus another off-site solution.

There are plenty of options inside the WordPress ecosystem, including: UpdraftPlus, ValtPress, BackupBuddy, WP Time Capsule, and many more.

Most backup plugins come with a standard set of features for free that allow you to store your backups in your own storage solution (like Google Drive or Dropbox).

Paid or premium plans to some of these backup solutions will also include the storage space as part of their offer.

Don’t forget to test your backups!

Seeing a long list of all your backups can provide you with a false sense of security. Those backups aren’t much help if they don’t work!

It’s important to regularly test your backups to ensure they can be deployed without any issue. It’s not uncommon to find problems restoring backups from some of the free solutions.

To test you can try deploying a backup to a staging site or ‘dummy’ install on your server.

Set a regular appointment with yourself to go through and manually check your backups to make sure they are working correctly.