Month: February 2022

Backing up your website isn’t something to overlook. Having a backup of your WordPress site can help in many situations. When you set up your website, it’s likely you automatically set up backups. There is some documentation on backups and storage on ET&S’ main Knowledgebase.

Backups do take up some amount of storage (remember new accounts get 1 GB of space – to read more about storage see the section titled Quotas) so if automatic backups are turned on, you’ll want to go in and delete old ones from time to time. See the link above for more information.

An example where a backup can be helpful is if you run into an error that breaks your site or an update affects its functionality, you’ll be able to roll back the saved version.

To use backups in WordPress click on My Apps and then My Backups

Click on the arrow to restore a previous backup. Remember – this will be a copy of the site saved at the point in the time noted at the date information on the backup!

The downwards arrow will also allow you to download a copy of the backup.

To delete a backup click the x. Remember we do recommend keeping at least 1 backup of your site around.

This will bring you to a page and just be sure to click the Delete button.

Creating a Manual Backup

To create a manual backup go to your My Applications page. Click on the arrow.

When you’re brought to the next screen make sure to click on Backup. You do get a choice of using your web hosting account or Google Drive for your backup. Note in order to use Google Drive you would have to sync with your Google Drive account.

Turn Off Automatic Backups

If you would like to turn off automatic backups, follow the article on our ET&S Knowledgebase.

Update periodically

Part of being a responsible website administrator is keeping your website up to date. In order to keep your website secure and functional, it’s important that your periodically run updates. It’s a good idea to set yourself reminders maybe in your digital calendar or to-do list to make sure to do this, perhaps at the beginning of each month. You will have plugins, themes, and WordPress itself updated. If you notice something hasn’t had an update in a long amount of time (typically 6 months+), it’s generally good to consider a new theme/plugin/resource at that point.

Backup before you update

Look at the backups on your site, and before you update consider creating a new backup in CPanel.

If You’re Using WordPress – Update WordPress first and then plugins/theme

First update the core of WordPress and then your plugins and theme.