How often should I back up my website?

For most business websites, daily is the right baseline. And the exact answer depends on two things:

• How often your site changes — new content, orders, bookings, form submissions.
• How much data you can afford to lose — if losing one day's submissions or orders hurts, back up at least daily.

An ecommerce store processing orders all day should back up multiple times a day. A simple brochure site that changes twice a month might be fine with weekly files. But if you're not sure, daily is the safe, cheap default.

A backup exists for one reason: so you can recover fast when something breaks. The everyday risks are real:

• A hacked site — malware gets injected and you need a clean copy before the infection.
• A bad update — a plugin or theme update breaks your layout or a form.
• An accidental deletion — someone (or a plugin) removes the wrong thing.
• A server failure — your host's hardware dies and takes your data with it.

The backups don't stop these from happening. They decide whether a problem becomes a recoverable hiccup or a catastrophe that costs you customers.

It maps to how much the site changes and how much loss you can absorb:

• Content and service sites (regular posts, forms, enquiries) — daily is the standard. The most you lose is one day's changes.
• Ecommerce and booking sites (orders, reservations all day) — every few hours or near-real-time, so an incident doesn't wipe out too much recent activity.
• Static brochure sites that barely change — weekly can be enough, but daily is still safer and costs almost nothing.

The rule of thumb: back up at least as often as you'd be uncomfortable losing the work created between backups.

Only partly. Hosting backups are handy, but they commonly come with limits:

• Short retention — many keep only the last few days. If a hack ran quietly for three weeks, every recent backup already contains it.
• No control — a schedule you can't adjust, and often no easy way to restore yourself.
• Same server — the backup often lives on the same host as your site, so one failure can take out both.

They're a baseline, not a plan. A real backup setup keeps an offsite copy you control, with restore points going back far enough to beat a slow-discovered problem.

A complete backup has two parts, and you need both:

• Your website files — the theme, plugins, and every image and upload.
• Your database — the actual content: pages, form submissions, settings, and orders.

Backing up only the files or only the database doesn't get you back online. The realistic minimum is both, stored somewhere separate from the server your site runs on — so a server crash doesn't wipe out your only copy.

Daily backups are a standard part of our security and health service. We back your site up automatically, retain restore points so a problem discovered late still has a clean copy to come back to, and we can restore quickly when something goes sideways — a bad update, a hack, an accidental delete, a broken page. You don't have to think about it, and you don't have to figure it out mid-crisis. You email us the task, we handle it. No jargon, no surprises.