After putting in so much effort in setting up and growing your health coach website, the last thing you want is for something to go wrong (for example – getting hacked), and you lose everything.
Whenever I set up a new site – my own and also for my health coach clients – the first steps always include installing and setting up a tool to regularly back up the site.
In this post, I’m going to show you how you can back up your WordPress site for free and do it quickly (it’s easy – I promise!)
Ready?
How To Easily Back Up Your WordPress Site For Free
The first thing you need to do is to log in to your WordPress administration area. Be sure you’re logging in as a user who has administrative privileges.
Once you’re logged in, look at the navigation menu on your left. We’re going to click on the “Plugin” option. This will give you a list of all the plugins installed on your website. You may have just a couple. You may have a lot. Every WordPress site is different.
We’re going to add a new plugin, so at the top click the add new button.
This will show you all the available plugins on the WordPress repository.
We’re going to do a search, in the top right hand corner is a search box.
Type in backups and hit enter.
You will get a lot of results. The only one you are interested in is the UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin. It should be the first result.
You want to install this plugin, so you’re going to hit the install now button.
This will download it to your WordPress site. Once it is downloaded, you will be shown a blue “Activate” button. Go ahead and click the Activate button and this will turn on that plugin on your WordPress site.
Once that is completed, you’ll be taken back to your plugins page and you will now see you have the UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore plugin listed.
From here, you’re going to click on the settings button just under the UpdraftPlus plugin title.
You may also get to the settings page by the left menu under “Settings” and then “UpdraftPlus Backups”.
Now, to do a single backup, all you have to do is click the backup now blue button.
You will be shown a pop up, which gives you a couple options. The first option says to include the database in the backup. You almost always want this checked. The database includes all your content, your posts, your pages, your comments, your categories, or tags, all that kind of stuff.
The next option is to include any files in the backup. Again, this is another one you’ll probably check. This one include your plugin files, your theme files, your Media Library, such as images you use in your blog posts, all that kind of stuff.
Next, all you have to do is click the backup now button.
The amount of time it takes depends on the size of your site.
It may go through pretty quickly and it may take a little while to do a backup. This one went through pretty quick.
To view backups that have been completed, all you have to do is click on this existing backup tab and you will now see the backup that you just completed. Under backup data, you will have five different options.
The database, plugins, themes, uploads, which is your media library, and others. These are all the backup files and database that the plugin backed up. To download these, you just click on the one you want to download.
For instance, the database, and once it is ready for download, all you have to do is click the download to your computer button and it will download the backup to your computer, and once that is successfully downloaded, you can delete it from your web hosts to save space.
Now, something else you can do with UpdraftPlus is you can set it up to automatically trigger a backup, so you don’t have to do it manually.
This is one of the things I love about UpdraftPlus – once I set it up, I know that my sites are being backed up regularly, without me having to do anything.
To set up regular back ups, click on the settings tab.
This is where you can set up a a schedule for the files to backup.
So where it says “Files backup schedule”, it currently says manual.
Click on that drop down box and choose how often you want the files to be backed up. You need to assess the needs of your website and your blog.
For this example, I will choose weekly.
Next, you need to also choose how often you’d want to backup the database. Again, this is all your content, your recent posts, your pages, your comments.
Again, it says manual right now, I’m going to change that to daily. Again, based on the needs of your personal website needs, you can change this to what other option is right for you.
Now the next option is where you want this backup to go.
You have an option to save it to a third party site such as Dropbox or Google Drive. You can have it go to Amazon S3 and of course you can also have it emailed to you.
In this example I’m going to choose email.
The back up will automatically go to the admin account, so whoever’s the administrator of the website, it will go to that email account.
Now click on “Save Changes”.
Well done! You now have scheduled back ups of your WordPress website!
