The Why and How to Backup WordPress Website
I have certainly had my pain when I didn't backup WordPress website files. My first incident was when I thought I could be a PHP programmer. While tweaking the template to a point I liked it I thought I could get fancy with ad sharing and rotating ads. I broke my site and could not fix it. Since wordpress designer backed up my site I had to reload the template and start over. Search Engine was the least of my issues. Later, I thought that the WordPress updates were optional and a big pain. Eventually one of those security holes got through and filled my website with links to various adult sites. Since I never backed up the database I ended up calling the website hosting company and asking for a backup. It took a few weeks to get it so all wasn't lost, but it was very stressful. You don't have to depend on your hosting company to do the work for you. You can create a backup anytime you want to. I recommend every few months or before you are going to do any experimenting. If your constantly uploading content on a weekly basis, it might be best to backup once a week. We back our sites once a week. The basic steps to backup your website is to: Use a FTP program like filezilla, login to your site like loading into your cPanel. Then copy all the files related to your site to your computer. Just replace the folders every time you repeat the copy. To Backup the WordPress database: Log into cPanel Click phpadmin Choose the database that holds your WordPress files Click the Export Tab Click Add/Drop Table Check Complete Inserts Check Save as File Box Check none for compression unless your database is huge Click the GO button It is important to backup WordPress website files so when something goes wrong you won't get so frustrated with your site that you quit. If you find these processes to be too cumbersome you can find some plugins that will manage your backups for you. However, plugins that are copying or recreating whole tables always scare me. I just picture a whole table vanishing on me. http://google.com