If you’re maintaining your own WordPress website it’s always wise to make a backup of your site before making any major changes to it. Most of the time you won’t need your backup, but on the rare occasion when something does go wrong whilst updating or changing something you’ll be glad you have it.

There are three main ways to backup your WordPress website.

1. Manually. Using FTP and MySql database tools.
2. Hosting. Some hosting companies have backup tools built in to their control panels.
3. Plugin. Use a backup plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

In this article we’ll use the Plugin option to backup our website.

Using a Plugin to backup your WordPress website.

There are plenty of different backup Plugins available for WordPress, but I’m going to recommend UpdraftPlus. This is probably the most popular free solution and is in use on more than two million websites.

Installing UpdraftPlus.

Login to your WordPress site and go to Plugins > Add New.

In the search box type/paste UpdraftPlus

Click on the Install Now button, and once installed click on the blue Activate button.

Create your first backup.

You should now get a tour pop-up appear, click the blue button Press here to start! You can also reach this screen by navigating to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups.

If the tour popup is still active click the X End tour – we won’t need it further.

If you want to store the backups remotely (in a different place to the website hosting) click on the Settings tab, and select a remote storage option. Without doing this your backups will only be stored in the /wp-content/updraft/ folder – but this is fine for quick backups.

From the Backup / Restore tab click the Backup Now button to get started.

A popup will appear, click the Backup Now button.

You’ll now see a progress bar, once the backup completes you’ll see a new entry in the ‘Existing Backups’ section.

Restoring a backup.

If you’re not already on the Backup / Restore screen then navigate to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups.

Under Existing Backups choose a Backup from the list and click the blue Restore button.

A popup window will appear where you can select what to restore from the backup, select what parts of your website you’d like to restore and click the Restore button.

A message will appear confirming your action, click the Restore button again.

Your site should now be restored.