Do You Need a Website Backup Plan?

A backup is one of those things that feels unnecessary until the day it is not. By then, it is too late to set one up. The good news is that a reasonable plan is simple, and usually inexpensive.

What could actually go wrong

None of these are rare events. They happen to real business websites all the time:

• An update breaks something and the site stops working properly
• The site is hacked or infected and has to be cleaned or rebuilt
• Someone deletes the wrong page, image, or setting by accident
• The hosting company has an outage or loses data
• A login or account is lost, and no one can get back in

Without a backup, any of these can mean weeks of rebuilding and lost customers in the meantime. With one, it means restoring what was already there. Downtime is also what visitors notice first, which is why website uptime matters so much.

What a backup plan should include

A backup of the website files alone is often not enough. A complete plan covers everything you would need to get back online:

How often and where to store backups

Backups should be automatic, because anything that depends on someone remembering will eventually be forgotten. How often depends on how much changes:

• Rarely changing site: weekly, or after every update
• Site with daily orders, bookings, or forms: daily
• Before any major change: always, as a one-off extra

Just as important is where the copy lives. A backup stored on the same server as your site can disappear along with it. A good rule of thumb is to keep at least one copy in a completely separate place, and to keep several recent versions rather than only the latest one, since a problem is sometimes noticed days later.

The good news for a modern build

Sites built with proper version control keep a full history of every change made to the code, which works as a backup of the site itself. Many hosting platforms also keep previous versions that can be restored quickly. That is a strong foundation, but it mainly protects the design and code. Anything stored outside the code, such as form submissions or a separate database, still needs its own backup.

It is also a good habit to test changes on a copy first. We cover that in what is a staging site, and the same thinking applies when launching a new website.

Questions to ask whoever manages your site

• Is my site backed up automatically, and how often?
• Where are the backups stored, and are they separate from the live site?
• How many past versions are kept, and for how long?
• Has a restore ever been tested, and how long would it take?
• Do I have my own copy of my domain and hosting logins?

That last question matters more than people expect. If your web designer ever became unavailable, you would want to be able to get to everything yourself. We go deeper on that in what happens if your web designer disappears, and it helps to understand the difference between your domain, hosting, and website so you know what each account protects.

Frequently asked questions