Most business owners know they should back up their website. Fewer know how often. The honest answer is that it depends on how quickly your site changes. A brochure site that you edit twice a year has very different needs from an online store taking orders all day. This guide explains the thinking in plain language, so you can pick a schedule that fits.
What a backup actually contains
A website has two halves, and a proper backup saves both. The first half is the files: your theme, plugins, images, PDFs and settings files. The second half is the database: your pages and posts, customer accounts, orders, form entries and comments.
The two change at different speeds. Files change mainly when you or your developer update something. The database changes every time a visitor places an order or submits a form. If you only save the files, you can lose your latest orders. If you only save the database, you lose your design and uploads. WordPress documents these as separate parts of a complete backup, and both are needed to rebuild a site. See our maintenance glossary if any term here is new.
Match the schedule to how often things change
A simple rule works well. Ask yourself: how much work could I stand to redo? If losing a day of changes is painful, back up daily. If losing an hour hurts, back up more often.
- Rarely changing site: a weekly backup is often enough, plus an extra one before any change you make.
- Active business site or blog: a daily backup is a sensible default.
- Online store or membership site: daily at the very least, and more often during busy periods.
Daily versus hourly for online stores
For a store, the database is the valuable part. Each order is money and a customer relationship. If your site fails at the end of the day and your last backup was the night before, you could lose a full day of orders, and you may have to chase those customers by hand.
That is why busy stores often save the database several times a day, or use a system that records changes as they happen. The files can still be saved daily, because they change much less. If your store takes only a few orders a week, daily is usually fine. If it takes orders every hour, ask your host or your maintenance provider about hourly database backups.
Keep more than one copy, and keep them for a while
Retention means how long you keep old backups. It matters because problems are not always noticed right away. A hacked file or a broken plugin might sit unseen for days. If you only keep last night's backup, you may be saving the problem itself.
Keep a rolling set of copies, so you can go back to a point before things went wrong. A common pattern is several recent daily copies plus a few older weekly ones. The exact number is your choice, and it depends on storage space and how long you usually take to spot trouble.
Store a copy off the server
A backup that lives on the same server as your website is better than nothing, but it shares the same risks. If the server fails, is hacked or is closed by the host, the site and its backup can vanish together. Keep at least one copy somewhere separate, such as a different cloud storage account. The UK National Cyber Security Centre gives clear advice for small organisations on backing up, including storing a copy online or on a device that is not left connected to the computer it protects.
Also protect the backup itself. It contains customer data, so use a strong password and limit who can reach it.
Take a fresh copy before every update
Scheduled backups are your safety net, but updates are the moment you are most likely to need it. Before you update WordPress, a plugin, a theme or your store software, take a fresh backup first. It takes a few minutes and means a bad update can be undone quickly. This is part of how we handle updates; you can read about it in our WordPress update routine, and we list this step in our website backup checklist.
Test that you can restore
A backup is only useful if it can be restored. Files can be incomplete, the database can be missing, and the copy might not open at all. You find this out at the worst possible time unless you test.
Try a restore on a separate test copy of the site every so often, and check that pages load, images show and orders or forms are present. Our guide on how to tell if your website backups work walks through the checks step by step.
If you would rather not manage any of this yourself, backups are included in every WebXSentry plan, alongside updates, security and monitoring. Plans are Essential at $99, Business at $199 and Priority at $399 a month, with 2, 6 or 12 hands-on hours. They run month to month with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Our engineers work Monday to Saturday on India time, and a person replies by your next business morning. See pricing for details.
What to do next: check what your host or plugin currently saves, and how often. Write down whether it covers both files and database, where the copies live, and when you last tested a restore. If any answer is unclear, that is your first fix.
