Question:

How do you do backups for your website? Is there a plug-in that makes it automatic and easy or do you need to do it manually?

Also, what are some steps that you can take to help ensure that you don’t have or at least limit instances of malware infecting your site? And where do you access information to see what’s going on…is it from the WP dashboard or the cPanel?

Answer:

Awesome Questions Denise. Thanks for asking.

I’m going to include a link to a blog post I wrote last year on this topic, but also add a couple of updates too.

http://www.loraleehutton.com/im-scared-to-update-my/

I’ve been using this combination for at the past 4 years and it works great!

WP Backup to Dropbox Plugin automatically stores all files, but it’s not really an easy method for restoring.

About once a month use the WP Clone plugin to make a complete copy and paste version of my site. And, if I’m doing any serious updates I’ll create a clone too – because it’s so very easy to paste the link & get my website back up and running in no time if I’ve made a mistake.

And I have a weekly backup of my entire hostgator account that’s set up automatically. If I’m overlimit on my file size (currently 20GB) then hostgator sends me an email and I go in and do it manually… Really easy! Just click on create backup & then ask them to send me an email when it’s done.

I also double check to make sure everything is running smoothly

There are some malware plugins I’ve seen other people use, but I’ve been trying to reduce the number of plugins I have installed, so just do regular scans at www.sucuri.net and make sure I have everything on my site up to date as quickly as possible (the reminders to update themes, plugins and WP software will show in the top menu of your WP dashboard)

Until 2016 I used Manage WP – but now JetPack takes care of the same things for me

One way I manage my sites, to make sure they’re up to date is with the free version of Manage WP (this is my referral link).  I’m pretty good with my 2 main sites, but I often forget to update the others. So having a reminder email from Manage WP to click through and update them all at once has been a real time /sanity saver.

Did I miss anything? Or bring up more questions? Love this topic, by the way. (Something I was equally passionate about in my Accounting biz, after seeing so many people lose their hard work because they didn’t backup).  There are lots of things I can still happily learn about it though, so if you see something, please post it here?