- Imagine this.
You're the successful owner of an eCommerce store
when suddenly, your site starts redirecting to a scam page.
People can enter to win a free $1,000 Walmart gift card,
all they have to do is enter their social security number.
Unfortunately for you, you forgot to set up
automatic backups leaving you left to clean up the mess
and figure out how to reset your website.
If this sounds unlikely, it's not.
This happens to many WordPress websites
and it's one of the many reasons why you need backups.
So what is a backup?
It's an independent copy of your WordPress site
with files in the database
so you can upload it to any web hosting account
just as if it was live on your domain.
Okay, so now that we know what a backup is,
why bother with the hassle of WordPress backups?
Well, first of all,
it protects you when making edits to your site.
Listen, I've been using WordPress for years
and sometimes when you go to edit pages or add new plugins,
things don't go well and your site just explodes.
It starts giving you error messages
or something doesn't load right.
And if you have a backup
from before you started editing the page or the site,
you can just roll back to that backup
and try again using a different method.
The second reason you need backups for WordPress
is in the event that your site gets compromised.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
My site's not gonna get compromised,
but hold on a second.
Sometimes that happens with WordPress sites.
And if that ever were to occur to your site,
having a backup means that you can restore your site
to before the incident occurred,
then you can do some investigating,
figure out why the site was hacked
and put measures in place
to protect it with minimal downtime.
If you don't have a backup and your site gets compromised,
well, have fun piecing it back together manually.
And if you think of site compromise
is an edge case scenario,
that's not the case with WordPress.
Your WordPress site is a target,
and no, it's not because the hackers are interested
in your bakery or blog or landscaping business.
Trust me, your business is not that interesting to hackers,
but your WordPress site is.
See, hackers are looking to exploit WordPress sites
using common vulnerabilities
so they can use your web hosting for malicious things,
such as redirecting it to a scam page.
Once I had a client whose site got compromised
and their website started redirecting
to one of those Windows Tech Support scam pages.
They called me in a panic and rightfully so,
and I was left to investigate
how their site got compromised,
why it was redirecting to the scam page
and how I was going to fix it.
And the worst part was I had no backup.
Yes, that's right.
I had to piece the site back together one by one,
reverse engineering what changes the hacker made
to get that redirect in place.
I had to manually fix it
all because I didn't have a backup.
And that's when in that moment,
I said I'm never having a website
without automatic daily backups again.
I implemented it for the client's site
and I implemented it for all of my websites going forward.
This part of the video is for those of you
who have been procrastinating
backing up your WordPress site
because you haven't been burned yet.
Trust me, you don't wanna wait till it's too late.
There are so many great solutions
to back up your WordPress website
that you'll hear about in this video,
so please back up your WordPress site, okay?
Okay, awesome.
So it's evident that WordPress backups are important
for every website, but there's one important qualifier
that you need when setting up backups for your website.
They need to be automated.
There are many solutions to back up WordPress,
but this is not that helpful
when you have to remember to do it regularly.
One of the simplest ways to back up WordPress
would be to use a free plugin to download a local copy.
But again, you have to remember when to do this.
And if you forget, you're not gonna be in a good situation.
The great news is there are tons of WordPress plugins
that can back up your site automatically.
This is the ideal solution
because you don't have to remember to back up your site.
It's done in automatic intervals
and if you ever have an incident,
you can just pull the backup from the server and restore it.
Plugins like UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy,
BlogVault and Jetpack all provide these solutions.
There's one problem with these plugins, though.
Automatic backups all require the paid versions
and they're all really expensive.
UpdraftPlus is $70 a year.
BackupBuddies starts at $99 a year,
and BlogVault starts at $89 a year.
These solutions may sound like a good deal,
but they're actually not providing
a backup storage solution.
While they do offer automatic backups,
you have to provide a place for them to send those files.
You could use Google Drive
or Dropbox or an Amazon S3 bucket,
but you have to pay the provider for storage
on top of paying for the paid plugin.
For the price of the plugin, they really should be providing
server storage, but they're not
and that means it's really not a good deal.
There's a backup solution that I believe is affordable
and makes sense for the majority of websites.
But before I tell you about that,
I wanna tell you about Mailjet,
the sponsor of today's video.
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Mailjet has some amazing features,
like automated email workflows
so you can engage your customers at just the right time
without having to remember to send the emails.
Mailjet also gives you a ton of statistics.
You can track email performance in real time
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Now that we've reviewed a few backup options for WordPress,
I want to take a look at my preferred option
that I'd recommend to most people.
This isn't the easiest option to set up
because it's actually reliant on your web host.
I think the best automatic backup solution for WordPress
is simply to use a web host
that includes free automatic backups.
Listen, you could go the plug-in route,
but plugins are expensive,
although you do get the control to put your backup files
wherever you want.
But if you go the web post route,
you don't have to pay for backup storage.
You have controls integrated to restore backups easily
in your web hosting panel
and it really is set it and forget it.
You're not gonna be using up extra resources
in your WordPress site
for that plugin to try and copy all the files.
Your web host just does it in the background.
It's kind of magic.
A few years ago, web host that offered
quality automatic backups
were typically just premium high-end
managed WordPress hosts.
But a lot has changed over the past few years.
Quality web hosting is becoming more affordable
and now I think it makes sense to just get good web hosting
instead of paying for a plugin.
Hosts like Flywheel, WP Engine and Cloudways
all offer amazing automatic backups
and amazing features that I think are worth the price.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say you had some cheap shared web hosting
from a site like Namecheap.
We'll use their stellar plan
which is $4.48 a month.
It doesn't include automatic backup
so you're gonna need a paid plugin.
Let's use BackupBuddy.
That's $99 a year.
So if we average out the cost of web hosting and backups,
you're paying around 1,273 a month for hosting and backups.
Instead, what if we just paid for nicer web hosting?
Let's look at Flywheel.
We could pay $15 a month for their tiny plan.
It includes automatic daily backups
and it includes a whole bunch of premium features
that you're not gonna get at Namecheap.
I think this solution is going to make sense
for the majority of websites,
but what if you have a low traffic website
and you're trying to keep costs down as much as possible?
If you absolutely need a free backup solution,
I would use the free version of UpdraftPlus.
It's actually decent.
It allows you to back up your site
to destinations like Dropbox, Google Drive,
or an Amazon S3 bucket for free.
The big catch is, if you want it to be automated,
you do have to pay for the premium version.
And as I pointed out earlier,
I think upgrading to a paid backup plugin
just doesn't make sense
when you could put the money into better web hosting
which will also include free automatic backups.
So if you absolutely need a free backup solution,
use the free version of UpdraftPlus.
And if you've already prepaid for years of web hosting
or you're unable to migrate for some reason,
you could consider upgrading
to the paid version of UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy.
But if you're able to migrate your website,
I would highly recommend checking out Flywheel.
Their tiny plan for $15 a month provides automatic backups,
a staging environment
and the web hosting is going to be much higher quality
than hosts like Namecheap or GoDaddy or Hostinger.
And if you have a lot of websites you need to host,
check out Cloudways.
You actually get an entire server instance
for one price at Cloudways,
so it's the most affordable way to host a bunch of websites
and you still get automatic daily backups,
staging environments and all of the premium features.
And if your website sees a lot of traffic,
don't neglect to capture customer emails
so you can build your email list.
I like to use Exit-Intent popups
to ensure visitors have an opportunity to enter their email
before they leave the site.
I like Mailjet to build engaging email campaigns
to send to my audience.
You can try Mailjet for free at mailjet.com/craylormade.
And if you're looking for a step-by-step guide
on how to build a WordPress website,
I actually have an entire free course
that you can watch right here.