It's a simple question but a very important one: Are you backing up your website? If the answer is yes, good for you and keep it up. But if the answer is no, then my second question is why not?

Why Is Backing Up Your Website Important?

There are many reasons why this is not merely important but critical, most important of which is money.

If you lose your website, or your website compromised in some way it's going to cost you money. It will take time and effort to recover your website or fix the affected areas if it wasn't completely lost. Either way that equates to someones time which means money. And if your website is an eCommerce website it's doubly important as one of your revenue generating streams has now been compromised or even shut. It's like closing your shop doors in bricks and mortar terminology.

How A Website Can Be Compromised

Without getting too technical, here are a few scenarios:

•  Your website can be hacked - this happens more often than one might expect. I've seen it most often when there is a weakness in the website files or plugins and the website is compromised in some way.
• Weak passwords on website log in details e.g. your WordPress admin login. Resulting in the website being compromised.
• Weak log in details on your website control panel. In my experience this happens less often but can and does.
• This is not specifically related to the topic at hand. but very often email accounts are compromised due to weak passwords or spyware.

 Backing Up Your Website Is The Solution

Well, not backing up alone, let me explain. Always keep your website core files like WordPress up to date, your plugins and theme files too. And use strong passwords for all entry points. I still see people using passwords like "password" and "p@ssword" and "password123". And a favourite is the website name or their name e.g. "john123" etc. Really people?! When it comes to security, prevention is ALWAYS better than cure!

Choose a web host that offers a simple backup solution and even a premium solution like daily backups or there are some that even offer daily "snapshop" backups. Snapshot backups do what they say, a copy if made of your entire website every day and kept safe in case you ever need to recover your website for any reason. With Red Hippo website hosting, we keep snapshot backups for 30 days. And this is on a rolling basis. This means that we can recover your website up to 30 days prior from any point, with the click of a button.

Not many web hosting companies offer snapshot backups. At the very least your web host should provide an easy simple way for you to make backups of your website files including your website database. And then make sure you do those backups at a frequency appropriate to the level of activity of your website. So if you are adding content daily, then daily backups should be considered, if only weekly, then weekly is appropriate and so on.

If your web hosting company doesn't offer either of the above then consider changing web hosts. In the meantime backup your site manually, and backing up your website using FTP is a good way to do that.

If you're in the market for premium web hosting, please checkout Red Hippo's web hosting.