There are many ways you can keep your website safe in this day and age, from choosing strong passwords to choosing a good hosting provider. However, the single best step you can take to secure your website is to perform regular backups of your website’s data.
Backing up your account is almost always quick and simple, so there’s no reason not to do it! Having regular website backups can help you out in many different situations and can help you solve many problems you might come across.
In this guide, we will talk about 5 reasons why you should be performing account backups in 2019.
Protect against disaster scenarios
The last thing anyone wants to happen is a disaster scenario in the data center where your website is being held. If a natural disaster like a flood or hurricane occurs, the data center might be at risk of power outages or physical damage. Having a backup of your website data will help protect against most disaster scenarios you can think of, as you’ll always have a copy of your website to upload to a server or hosting provider.
Ideally, you will want a remote off-site backup in a geographically remote location, to ensure that your data won’t be affected if the primary location encounters problems.
Resolve Malware Infections
Many people wrongly think that malware is something that can only affect personal computers, but they would be sorely mistaken. A surprising number of websites live on the internet are infected with some kind of malware, and many more of them are very vulnerable to malware attacks. Even if you have the latest web security updates, attackers can often still find a way to infect your website with malware.
If you’re using a popular content management system like WordPress or Joomla you will be especially vulnerable to these types of attacks so it’s especially vital to back up your website. If your website ever does get infected by malware, having a clean backup of the website will help get you online much quicker than debugging the infected site would.
Protect against human error (accidents can happen)
One of the more obvious reasons to back your website up frequently is the factor of human error. Everyone is human and everyone makes mistakes from time to time, it’s only natural. In the world of web hosting though, one mistake can prove costly for your website!
While there are methods of troubleshooting and fixing any mistakes, its’ often much easier to just restore a working backup of your website and get your website back online faster.
Reverse issues during updates
Updates are incredibly important in keeping your website functioning smoothly and as secure as possible, however, it’s not uncommon that updates to software can cause unexpected issues with your website. Avoiding updates isn’t a solution though, so the best prevention against this is to always have a regular backup of your website data at hand.
This way if anything goes wrong, you’ll be able to restore a working version of your website quickly and easily. Ideally, you want an automatic backup system configured with your website to make the process easier for you.
Many web hosting providers will offer this, and software platforms like WordPress even have options to automatically create backups.
Provide Protection Against Hackers
A common occurrence in the online world is hacking – when attackers try to access your website directly to steal important information or otherwise deface your website. When someone breaches your account they may lock you out of your account for example, or inject malicious code into your website files.
While you can troubleshoot the issue and try to resolve it by changing administrator credentials or removing login privileges, the best way of protecting against hackers is to have a recent backup of your website at hand. If you do, you can quickly restore the website to the state it was before the hackers gained access.
Another good idea is to have two facter authentication (2FA) enabled for your account, which provides an extra layer of security to your website.