This post is really about your WordPress website and IF it’s backed up, but I want to start with something a little personal first.
I ride a mountain bike into the wilderness daily. I also ride a very powerful motorcycle that craves curvy back country roads. While I try not to ride alone – it happens. Know what also happens? Accidents. Which is why I always wear a helmet. I always carry an emergency whistle in my backpack. If you happen to find me unconscious on the trail – I always wear a Road Id Bracelet. (I’d rather go Ice.Dot but I have a Samsung Galaxy S4).
In the unfortunate case that nobody finds me, I have a button on my desktop that my wife can click and pinpoint my phone’s last GPS query. We tested it out last night while I was riding up Mt. Diablo (alone) and it worked perfectly.
I may not be a ‘Prepper’ but I take my personal accidental preparedness pretty seriously.
I place all of the responsibility to be prepared on me and me alone.
Is that something you would agree with? I place a high value on me an in doing so I need to take appropriate care in getting back safely. Am I right?
Enough about me. This post isn’t focused on you or me personally, it’s about being prepared with your website.
I had a client quite a few years ago that I built a site for. It’s a business site. It drives him traffic and provides him with new business. I say that because that makes his site somewhat valuable at least to him. Long story, short he suddenly lost his hosting company and wanted to move to another host.
You can start a new host in minutes, install WordPress in another few, and then what? If your old hosting account is gone you better have a backup. Guess who didn’t have a backup? Him. When he realized this guess who went looking for to have a backup? Yup, it was me! (and of course I didn’t)
BACKING UP IS EASY
Built right into every WordPress site is the ability to Export. It’s in your Dashboard under Tools.
You’ll be greeted with the following message:
When you click the button below WordPress will create an XML file for you to save to your computer. This format, which we call WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. Once you’ve saved the download file, you can use the Import function in another WordPress installation to import the content from this site.
Your next question should be – is that everything?
Sadly, the answer is NO. Maybe that’s why WordPress doesn’t call it ‘Backup”. Use the ‘Export’ feature and that should be enough to save your content but there’s quite a lot of other items it misses.
Like how about your theme?
How about all the modifications to your theme?
How about all the settings to your theme?
How about all the custom CSS and PHP?
What about your plugins?
And then here’s the other thing… Did you remember to do this on a regular basis in the first place? Not just once, but regularly? I sure don’t. Once you download that xml file where did you put it? Is it somewhere safe? Is it on your hard drive? What if that fails?
We’re not being a Debbie Downer here – we’re talking about being prepared for something you hope never happens to something you have a real value in preserving.
For my Clients I include a small additional option at the end of my proposals…
Backup:
A weekly database backup and update of SQL database, plugins, files, themes, scripts, posts, settings, widgets, plugins, and everything else in the WordPress database and directories to an outside server (Amazon S3) is available at $10 a month prepaid in annual increments ($120 annual) outside of this proposal.
Some clients jump on this option – others don’t.
I can’t place in you a value in your website that you don’t see yourself.
Here’s what you don’t know.
I also offer this backup service to people I didn’t build their site for the same amount. (really!)
There’s a few important items to note.
- This backup happens automatically. You don’t need to remember to do anything.
- This backup covers EVERYTHING.
- This backup doesn’t go to my hard drive (or yours) – it goes to an Amazon S3 Server. These are the same servers that DropBox, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, SmugMug and many others use to store files.
- If the unthinkable happens and your site does come to an early demise and you have to rebuild, you have a backup of EVERYTHING and within a few minutes we can rebuild your site just like new.
NOTE: A few years after I started AreWeConnected.com I had a small issue with my server and lost everything. I believe I lost over 400 posts. I also lost the comments, the theme, the images – everything. I didn’t have a backup, didn’t have an export, didn’t have a hope or a prayer. I had to rebuild from the ground up. In a related note, this was my first post after the crash ” Facebook Profile or Page? ” it was an article about losing everything over on Facebook (or Flickr).
Other Note: My old client? He actually didn’t lose his site after all. In his instance it was just a ‘glitch’. I told him how to fix the ‘glitch’, he did, and his site came back up.
Remember this thing you agreed with up at the top?
I place all of the responsibility to be prepared on me and me alone.
Now transfer that same thought to you and your website. What are you going to do?
CALL TO ACTION:
1. If you have even the smallest value in your site – right now go to Dashboard > Tools > Export and download a copy of your content. At least you’ll have that.
2. If you value your site more and want a service that never forgets here’s your form:
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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