Tales From The Web Design Team: Why You Need To Back Up Your Website
Regular backups of your website are a great safeguard against both human-led and technically sourced issues.
While we’re fully on board with our clients’ giving admin access to their teams, this access can often cause problems with site functionality in ways you might not expect, especially when these admins have less familiarity with how those backend spaces work.
Things happen. But little changes can make a big impact.
We’ve had clients make changes that somehow fully delete the navigation bar across the entirety of their site.
Again, these mistakes aren’t intentional. But when errors like this do occur, it’s difficult to identify the action that caused them. So the safer thing to do there is to just go to that night’s backup.
On the websites that we manage with WP Engine, they are backed up every night.
With this system, the worst case scenario is that you’re just losing whatever changes were attempted that day.
And so in this particular case, we backed up to the last day and and then the website was up and functioning, giving us breathing room to then ask the client, “What were you trying to do? How can we help you accomplish your goal?”
All the while, their website is up and running, doing what it needed to do for their business while we investigated how things got broken, so we could help them avoid this sort of problem in the future.
Are 24-Hour Website Backups Common The Industry Standard?
According to our Web team, daily website backups aren’t very common.
Our understanding is that, for many hosting plans, daily backups are typically a separate add-on. Or they’re something that you have to specifically request from your agency, due to the storage space needed to back your website up every day.
Of course, it can vary widely based on how your website is managed and hosted.
At Formada, it’s a standard feature of our Website Management service. Your website is backed up at the server level, giving you a cleaner way to restore your website when needed.
Our website backups are structured so that each daily backup is available for 30 days before they start dropping off. Essentially, at any given moment, we have about 30 copies of your website. All of the data associated with each version of the site is stored on our hosting servers.
Maybe you didn’t realize that something was broken for a few days, and you need to go a few days back, rather than just that day. With this service, you can select the exact iteration of the site you need, stand it up, and continue with business as usual.
And that last point is vital, because your website is central to your business, and for some, a broken website can mean lost revenue.
One Incorrect Plugin Can Take Your Entire Site Down!
There was a time where a client’s team member installed a plugin that was incompatible with the rest of the website’s tools. You’d think that simply removing that plugin would fix things, but no. Uninstalling it didn’t fix it.
It had made enough changes that it had impacted the data tables on the website, enough so that there wasn’t a way for us to clean things up in WordPress.
Any action would just result in fatal errors on the site. There was essentially no way to fix it.
We were actually locked out of being able to log into the back end of the site.
And at that point, having a server-level backup was really the only option in making the website salvageable. This incompatible tool was influencing the code in other parts of the site, and if there are tools that don’t play well together, then they can cause each other to break — and of course they did!
This business’s website is critical to its daily revenue. Critical!
And when you are locked out of the website’s admin manager, you’re either going to need an extremely code-minded person to make those code-based changes using FTP, which could take who knows how long, depending on their level or experience, or you could do what we did, which was go to the hosting-level server and restore it to a previous version before that tool had been installed.
It wasn’t a plugin that you would think would impact core functionality. It was just to extend certain design options, but it ended up taking down the entire site.
If we weren’t able to get it back up quickly, they would have lost thousands and thousands of dollars in revenue.
And of course, these issues aren’t just related to admins making accidental mistakes.
Back Up Your Website To Protect Yourself And Your Business
Sometimes plugins can break. Sometimes hackers can attempt to gain access to your site. Or your site might be subject to a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack.
Luckily, we’ve never had a website get hacked, but things happen, and regular website backups will protect you. They can even protect you from your agency if your relationship was to go sour.
We’ve had clients who were blocked from having access to their website that they thought they owned!
If your website agreement doesn’t allow you to have an offline backup for your records, then you might not be able to walk away cleanly from that relationship.
You might find yourself having to start from scratch with a new site.
At Formada, your website belongs to you. We want to help you protect it, so it can do what it should to help grow your business.
To learn more about our Website Management services, contact us today!