Does WordPress Automatically Backup My Content

Last updated on August 1st, 2018 at 06:19 pm

If you’ve started your blog congratulations, the easy part is over. Now it’s time to focus on building your audience and tribe. If you’re brand new to WordPress, you might be wondering “does WordPress automatically backup my content?”

In this post, I am going to share my first experience with backups. Hopefully, this will help you understand the importance of having regular backups for your blog.

Does WordPress Automatically Backup My Content?

Most new bloggers don’t think about backups until it’s too late. Why?

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Well, I think it’s kind of like having car insurance. We know it’s the law and we pay those monthly statements every month. Yet most of us take it for granted that we’re insured.

Every morning we get in our cars and drive from point A to point B. Not thinking or having a care in the world about our car insurance.

That is until you need to file a claim because you just got rear ended or got involved in some type of accident.

The point is, we don’t think about our car insurance until it’s too late.

Just like our blog, we don’t think about having a backup until it’s too late. Read this if you need to know more about backing up your blog.

Let Me Tell You A Story

Several years ago when I first got started with WordPress. I was so happy I had set up my very first blog (I no longer own that blog).

I had no clue about backups. To be honest, I really didn’t have a clue about anything when it came to blogging or WordPress.

I just woke up every morning and played around with my blog. No, I usually wasn’t working and doing something important to help me grow my blog.

Instead, I was usually messing around with my plugins and trying make my site look better by tweaking little things on my theme.

Related: How to Choose A WordPress Theme

One day, I installed a plugin. I don’t remember what it was. All I remember is that as soon as I hit activate on the dashboard, my blog went down.

I freaked out. I had no clue what had happened. At that point in my WordPress career, I hadn’t even looked under the hood at the different files.

If you would’ve asked me back then, I wouldn’t even have known that the plugins are found inside of the wp_content folder.

All I knew was that I had screwed up my blog.

So you know what I did? I went and deleted my blog because I didn’t know any better. I figured I may as well start over instead of trying to figure things out.

Plus I knew that I didn’t have a backup, I couldn’t even tell you how to make a backup at that point.

I deleted all 10 posts and started from scratch. Thank goodness I only had 10 posts.

Related: What Is The Best Way to Backup WordPress Automatically?

Why Am I Telling You This?

Because I don’t want you to experience this with your blog. You might be thinking that nothing like that will ever happen to you.

The truth is that we never know when something will happen to our blogs.

So if you’ve been wondering “does WordPress automatically backup my content.” The short answer is NO.

That’s your responsibility and you should not take it lightly.

Today, if I had to start over with this blog, I’d cry. I have over 100 published blog posts and 23 scheduled and ready to be posted. We all know how long it takes to learn how to grow a blog, the last thing we would want is to start over because we didn’t have a backup.

It doesn’t matter if you have 10 published blog posts or 100, you need to take the time to backup your blog. The great thing is that it’s not hard and once it’s done you can rest assured you’ll always have a backup.

Doesn’t My Hosting Account Have A Backup?

Most reliable hosting accounts like SiteGround will have a backup of your blog. It’s nice to know that you’re hosting account has your back.

However, I don’t want to rely 100% on my hosting account if something happens to my blog.

Of course, you may feel comfortable relying on your hosting account. I thought I’d check with SiteGround to see how they do their daily backups. Here is the response they gave me via live chat.

As you can see, support said that there isn’t a strict hour when backups happen. This means that if you make changes on a daily basis like I do, you may lose those changes.

As you can see at the time of this writing the latest backup of my site is from 10/05/17.

Today, as I write this, I’ve already made several changes to my blog.

If I relied on just SiteGround’s backups, I wouldn’t have the most current backup if I had to restore my site to their backup files.

Maybe you’ve made changes to your blog in between their backup schedules? Me, I’d rather use something like BlogVault to take care of my backups.

Related posts on how to keep your blog backed up:

Backup Buddy Tutorial Restore Your Website in Five Minutes

The Best Way to Backup WordPress Automatically

Now Don’t Get Me Wrong

I am not knocking SiteGrounds backup service. In fact, I am happy that they keep a backup of my blog. It’s nice to know that they have my back.

However, I feel more comfortable knowing that I am not just relying on SiteGround. I have my own backup plan. This means that I have 2 backups of my blog.

How awesome is that!

Does It Cost Money to Backup My Blog?

I know that you don’t want to spend any money on backing up your blog. If you’re new, chances are you might not be making any money yet.

If you’re trying to grow a profitable blog, then you’re running a business. It’s going to cost some money to run a self-hosted blog.

The great thing is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money. There’s a great free backup plugin called Updraft Plus that I currently use for my clients.

It’s a great plugin to start creating automatic backups of your blog. At one point, I was using the plugin for this blog.

Eventually, I decided to upgrade to BlogVault because I liked it a lot better.

So to answer your question, no you don’t have to pay to back up your blog. If you do make a backup using the Updraft Plus plugin, just make sure that you know how to restore your blog if anything was to happen.

How Often Should I Backup My Blog?

Everyone’s opinion will differ on how often you should back up your blog. It really all depends on how often you’re making changes to your blog.

Are you updating your blog on a daily basis? Maybe you’re like me and posting new content 2x per week?

I make it a point to back up my blog on a daily basis. Sometimes I’ll back up my blog more than once per day. It really just depends on what I’m doing with my blog.

If I need to make any updates to the core or plugins, I’ll run a backup before making those changes. (just in case something happens during the update)

The great thing about BlogVault is that I can make backups anytime I want. I just have to wait 30 minutes in between each backup.

Final Take Away

You work hard on your blog. You might not be making any money right now.

Eventually, all that hard work that you’re putting in on your blog is going to start paying off.

Do you really want to risk all the hard work that you’re putting in now by not backing it up? I know I don’t.

If you haven’t set up an automatic backup plan with your blog, I suggest that today you set some time aside and create one.

Don’t make the mistake of waiting until it’s too late.

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Have you ever had something happen to your blog and realized that you didn’t have a backup? If so what did you do? I’d love to hear your story of how you handled it.