Most of us can remember the days when it was all too easy to lose important work files. It was a time when computers just turned off and there was no pop-up box telling you to save the changes to your Word doc. Hours of important text and perfectly sized images are lost.
Now imagine if it’s months of hard work, client details and operational files that no longer appear on your website. What would the impact of that have on your business?
Backing up your website is a crucial part of web maintenance and an important way of ensuring your website (and business) is always fully operational.
Trust us, if you’re not regularly backing up your website, you really should be.
5 Reasons Why You Should Back Up Your Website
#1 Avoid Losing Important Data
You might not think it, but it happens all the time. Someone who has access to your CMS goes in and manages to delete a blog, your media library, core pages or even entire sections of your website. It was probably 16.30 on a Friday afternoon and an easy human error to make.
Luckily, if you have a recent backup, you can simply restore your website and any data that was missing. If you don’t, well, then it’s a costly and time-consuming mistake to have made.
#2 Protect Your Website Against Hackers
Hacking attempts happen more often than you think and is something all website owners need to be aware of.
One day you may wake up, go to your website and have a WordPress critical error message rather than your perfectly designed home page.
Whilst this can feel scary and, quite frankly, invasive, it’s usually not an issue if your website is backed up with regular WordPress maintenance. Your digital agency experts will be able to restore your website and get it up and running again.
#3 Avoid Website Update Issues
Keeping your website updated is a vital part of web maintenance. Plugins need to be renewed to help with user experience, site speed and safety.
Unfortunately, however, different update versions often have their own set of problems and might not work the first time you install them.
As long as you have a backup of your website, your digital agency will be able to restore the previous version and find a different way to do those all-important updates.
#4 Protect Your Business Revenue Stream
In 2013, Amazon’s website went down for an hour. Just an hour, but that cost the company $5.7 million. You might not be working with those kinds of figures but if your website is down for even a couple of hours, it could cost you. Potential customers won’t find you and won’t be able to buy your products.
In these moments, it’s essential to work out why your website is down. It’s also important to have a full backup so you can get your website working in no time. By working with an experienced digital agency, you’ll get both. They’ll be able to give you the load down on what happened to your site and have a recent backup they can use to restore the website. There will be minimal downtime and minimal losses to your revenue.
#5 Helps With Migrating Web Hosts
There are many reasons why you might need to change web hosts. Your site might be experiencing more downtime than usual, your loading speed is slow or your website might have grown so much that your current one can’t deal with all the traffic you’re receiving.
A web maintenance expert will deal with the migration for you (it can get a little complicated) but the first step is always a full backup.
When migrating to a new web server, you’ll need to transfer your entire database and website files. Naturally, things can go wrong and data may be lost.
If you have a full backup of your website, however, this won’t be a problem. Your digital agency can simply restore your website and migrate the files again.
So Now You Know Why, But How Can You Backup Your Website?
There are lots of different ways to backup your website. You can do full backups, incremental backups and differential backups. Which one you choose depends on how much data has changed on your website since you last backed it up.
You might use an offsite backup such as a cloud solution, hardware options or software. Many companies decide to go for a mixture to ensure they’re covered even if one backup fails.
Of course, you can manage backups yourself but your backup must be done correctly in case you need it at any given moment.
Partnering with a digital agency that can manage your WordPress maintenance ensures backups are correctly done each time. It means you have peace of mind and are reassured that someone else is in control of the safety of your site and can restore a backup whenever needed.
Why Use Elevate to Backup Your Website?
At Elevate Websites, we have years of experience offering website maintenance in Melbourne. Our team of experts carry out thorough web maintenance to ensure your website is running smoothly. They also constantly perform those all-important backups in case of emergency.
We care about your business and understand the importance of a fully functioning website for both brand awareness and revenue. You might not be Amazon, but we don’t want you missing out either.
We always back up files to remote locations so that if anything happens to the server, your website and data will still be safe. This means that we can quickly restore your site to full capacity whilst our experts look into the reason it went down in the first place.
If you’d like to partner with a digital agency that you can trust, contact our team of web maintenance experts today.
We’ll be happy to discuss the best package for you and your business so that you can feel reassured knowing that your website will be back up and running and data won’t be lost during those inevitable emergencies.
Calem Koek is a web designer and owner of leading Melbourne-based digital marketing agency Elevate Websites. He has been helping businesses in Melbourne and across Australia scale their business online through quality website design and world class SEO services.