Your website consists of core files, theme files, plugin files & uploads and other WordPress related applications that you’ve uploaded to your server. Also, the website is driven through a database that has all the dynamic data saved in it. A backup is basically a mirror copy of all the files and databases that runs your WordPress website.

Thousands of websites are hacked every day. WordPress sites are easy target for attacks because of many obvious reasons like plugin vulnerabilities, weak passwords and outdated version of the framework itself. Improper code, third party plugins and even a human error can make your website vulnerable and expose to numerous threats. Most of the WordPress admins won’t even realize that they’re vulnerable and leave their websites without giving it the security measures and proper backup strategy that it requires.

Even if all common security measures, third party plugins and other API integrations are covered with proper monitoring strategy, you never know what can cause your website to get hijacked, goes offline or data gets corrupted. As a website admin, you always want to safeguard yourself with backups to restore your website. That is the reason, you need to back up your WordPress website. Backups are a lifesaver for your website.

Backups are also an essential part of any WordPress security strategy. If your website gets compromised for any reason, you don’t want to spend countless hours repairing it or start from scratch. It is also important to store your website backups at a cloud server that shall help you instantly restore your site to a previous iteration and remove the infection.

The most common misconception about WordPress website backups is that the WordPress core software automatically runs backup to your site. Technically, WordPress doesn’t take automatic backups by itself. To schedule a WordPress automatic backup, you need to install a third-party tool and/or a plugin. Automatic WordPress backup means you schedule the backups for a fixed interval of time (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), which is not there with WordPress.
What it does have, is an export feature where you can access the XML file that contains all your:

• Pages Posts Comments Custom fields
• Categories and tags

However, the XML file doesn’t give you the ability to do a full site restore because it doesn’t contain all the site backup data needed to reconstruct it from the ground up.

Many WordPress site owners still believe in this myth that, if their WordPress database is backed up, then they’ll be safe & their system can be restored if something major goes wrong.
Actually, database backup only is not enough, it’s simply
not enough. A database backup only contains the content of your site whereas to restore a website, we also need back up of file structure at root directory. That root directory contains everything from your themes to your plugins and media files. Some of its files include rules for how your website interacts with its server, new functions that you’ve added to themes and plugins, and more. In short, that directory contains all the files that make WordPress work. 

A WordPress database backup is only intended to save the written content of your site. But if your entire site goes down, you’ll need a lot more than that to get it up and running again. If your WordPress backup doesn’t include the entire site and all the files therein, it’s not good enough.

This one is not completely inaccurate, but if you think your website is safely backed up by your hosting provider, you need to cross-check the claim by restoring the backup. When it comes to the security of your website, you cannot take things only by the words. Everyone in the industry knows how important backups are. Many of us learn it the hard way. Hosting providers, being expert in the field, will always boast that they provide daily backups (like here and here). But have you ever actually tried restoring one of those backups? They generally aren’t that easy to use and – for a nontechnical user – it can be a nightmare trying to restore a website from them.

Additionally, keep in mind that if the problem is with your host’s site, you won’t be able to use the backups that they were storing for you.  The fact is that you don’t have any control over how your site host handles their backup protocols. When you need to gain access to your backup, you
really don’t want to be dependent upon them. Further, the vast majority of websites are hosted on shared hosting. This is where your website runs on a web server with many other websites and you share the server resources like memory, internet connection, CPU etc. It’s not uncommon to have dozens or hundreds of sites on a single server. Your host
being largest cloud platforms – there’s no reason why your site couldn’t be squeezed in with 1,000 others! Think of a host site backup as your absolutely last resort when it comes to backing up your WordPress site. It’s definitely not the backup version you want to count on when things go unexpectedly wrong.

When we hear about hackers, we think that since we’re not holding any highly confidential information, so no one would bother with our site. That’s just one of the myths we aim to dispel here. All too often, business owners grow complacent. Small business owners fall into the trap of thinking that hackers don’t know about them. Wrong. Hackers know you exist. Even if the amount of data you have is small,
it’s still valuable to them. The truth is that Hackers don’t care about any particular type of business or size of business; they just attack the websites for many obvious reasons which
includes spamming, using your website for spam others etc.
Hackers are fully aware that the smallest WordPress sites are more vulnerable as compared to big renowned sites. In fact, there’s a good chance that a bot might be trying, right now, to gain unauthorized access to your site. You can ask the expert to install security plugins to get an insight on the hacking attempts.

With a properly installed security plugins, you’ll quickly begin to see that:

• Hackers are trying to log in to your site using stolen or cracked usernames and passwords
• Robots are hunting for malicious code and piling up 404 errors

Actually, it’s true up to some extent, but not in a way you presume. We always believe in Smart Practices enabled by technology which can assist you in managing all backup things. If you decide that you wanted to manually create a full and complete backup of your WordPress site, you’d be in for a lot of work again and again. As a layman it can be done, but not recommended. There are many tools and plugins like BackuBuddy, Snapshot, Updraft and in fact many others which are industry proven, creates backups in just a few
clicks. You really will have your backup protocols running within a matter of a few minutes. With these tools and plugins, you’ll be able to schedule your backups based
upon your requirement and site use. Once they’re scheduled, they’ll do their task automatically until you change the settings.