When the topic of backing up WordPress is discussed, it means backing up everything, your WordPress Database, folders, and files.

It's something that everyone needs to do but so few people do it. People think it is a waste of time and that they will never need a backup.

You need to back up your WordPress site because it's better to be safe than sorry.

You might get hacked, you might need some kind of an old file that was deleted or even to see how your WordPress site used to look.

Your hosting company could go out of business. They make have hardware problems and not be able to recover anything.

You might have heard that saying, you are better to be safe than sorry.

It might seem tedious to back up a site and to spend those few minutes clicking a button for something that you might never use in the future.

But even if you back up a site every single week, you may never need to use that backup.

It's a good thing to know that if you had to use it if the worst happened, you could always have the means to recover your blog. back.

Even though it might seem like a waste of time right now it's only a waste of time if nothing goes wrong.

If you were to lose weeks, months, or years of your WordPress blog you would have wished you spent those few minutes generating a WordPress website backup.

The next thing that might happen is that you might get hacked and if you have ever had spyware or a virus on your computer, you might know that it's a pain in the butt to try to clear that off.

But an easier thing to do, if you ever get spyware or a virus or a hacker on your WordPress blog is to just delete everything and start over.

Now if you had a backup you could just restore your old WordPress Website.

Now maybe at some point, you accidentally deleted an article, deleted a video, deleted a graphic and you wanted to get back at it.

We've all been there, we've all lost files.

If you keep a weekly backup, your chances of losing files are very, very low because you don't have to worry about where things are stored or organized.

Just go back to when you remember you had that file, restore the backup somewhere, even on a test site, and grab the file that you need.

That's why it's so important to back up your WordPress database folders and files because you're better to be safe than sorry.

You might get hacked and it's important to have that old file for historical purposes.

How Often Do You Need To Backup WordPress?

For most people backing something up is a tedious job, no matter how hard or easy it is or how long it takes.

You have to remember to log into your site, back up the entire site, and then download the file.

How often do you need to be backing up your site?

The easy answer to that is that you should be backing up your site as often as you update it.

How often do you update it? That is how often you should back up.

If you update daily, backup. If you update monthly, backup monthly.

Decide if you're going to back up either weekly or monthly and make sure that you always back up before and after an upgrade to your WordPress software or before making a major change to your website.

Go back and look at your blog posts and find out how often you update your site.

Make it part of your routine and maybe even after making any posts, back up your blog.

That way if the worst happens you at least have everything up until you're more recent blog post.

In addition to these weekly or monthly backups you're making to your blog, be sure to back up your site both before and after an upgrade to WordPress itself.

It doesn't happen often but now and then, when you upgrade your WordPress software a few little things go wrong, and if your blog is completely trashed at least you have that backup.

For example, changing the theme, changing the navigation, changing the content around, it can't hurt to make one simple backup before anything is touched.

It is possible to break your WordPress blog. You could have changed too many things and it's now broken.

Now you need to get back to that earlier stage when everything was working. You want and need a working website for people to view.

Before and after you upgrade and when you make a major change you back up your site.

In addition, make it part of your weekly or monthly routine and back up your blog more frequently if you update your blog more frequently.

Keep in mind that many of the better hosting companies perform backups and some have 30 days worth of backups that they can restore for you.

You should have your own backups in case something happened to the hosting company or the backup they had did not have what you needed.