If you own a business, chances are you have a website. And if you have a website, you need to regularly back it up — yet so many businesses fail to do it regularly (if at all).

Why is this important?

A website is a critical part of any business in the modern world. It's your 24/7 storefront, and it's how you stay connected with your customers. But what happens if something goes wrong with your website? What if you lose all your data or your site gets hacked? That's where website backups come in. A website backup could save your business in the event of a data loss or corruption. Here's everything you need to know about backing up your website.

Website backups are like an insurance policy for your site. They protect you in case of an emergency by giving you a copy of your site that you can restore if something goes wrong.

Backups should be done regularly, and they should be stored off-site in a safe location. That way, if something happens to your website server, you can still restore your site from the backup.

How Often Should You Backup Your Website?

The most important thing is to make sure that you're doing it regularly so that you always have a recent backup available.

How often you need to back up your website depends on how often your website content changes. If you're regularly making changes to your site, you should be backing it up at least once a week. But if your site is static and doesn't change very often, once a month might be sufficient. Of course, the best practice is to back up your site as often as possible—just to be safe.

What Should You Backup?

At a minimum, you should back up your website text and images. Your website contains several different types of files including HTML, documents, images, CSS stylesheets, and JavaScript files. Your database stores all of your website content (e.g., blog posts, product descriptions, customer information, etc.). If you're using a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, your database will also store your CMS files and you will want to have this backed up preferably too.

If you cannot back up your website?

Do a manual backup

Certain website hosts/providers do not allow for backups such as Squarespace, a platform which is what-you-see-is-what-you-get - meaning once you hit the ‘save’ button, that’s it - no going backwards or reverting the design.

• Save all images.

• Save a copy of all website copy, organised per page.

• Save a copy of your blog posts.

• Take full-page screenshots of all website pages to have a reference of their layout.

Other website backup methods

Backup Plugin

If you are on WordPress, many plugins will automate the backup process for you. All you need to do is install the plugin and configure it to suit your needs. An example is UpdraftPlus. This is a good option if you don't want to deal with manual backups, but it does require some plugin management on your part. Just be sure to read the reviews before choosing one; some plugins are better than others.

Web Host Backup

Some web hosts will perform regular backups of your site as part of their service. This is convenient, but it's important to make sure that you have access to those backups in case you need to use them.

Cloud Backup

Cloud backup services like Dropbox and Google Drive can be used to store backups of your site off-site. This is a convenient option, but it's important to make sure that your backups are encrypted before storing them in the cloud so that they can't be accessed by anyone else.

No matter which method you choose, it's important to make sure that you're backing up your website regularly so that you can restore it if something goes wrong. Website backups are like an insurance policy for your business, and they could save you a lot of time and money in the long run.