*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

Losing your website files can be extremely difficult because, guess what, your website is one of your most important assets you can have online. And not being able to have that online when you need it to be is stressful, and it can cost you in reputational damage. It can cost you a lot of time and money, having it down and not being able to restore it. So one of the best ways you can protect your website is by backing up. And I wanna share with you 4 amazing tips here. I hope they’re amazing. That’s going to help you with, making sure that following some of the best practices and, doing things that’s going to essentially help you keep your website safe and backed up and, be able to quickly restore it when you need to so that you’re not really getting that much downtime. So, welcome back to another episodes of Episode of Future Steps Creative.

Marlon McPherson00:00:53 – 00:01:59

My name is Marlon Macpherson. If you’re new here, I do content like this to help you build and grow your business around your knowledge and expertise especially with your website and your online content. So if that’s you, you’re in the right place. So I’m gonna jump in with tip number 1, and that is to make Show you back up before any major changes are done to your website. So if you are going to install some software, if you’re gonna put some, plugins on there or add some code to the website or even if you’re going to do design changes or any settings changes, It’s always a good idea to back up just before. That way, if things go wrong, and they will at some point, you have A working copy that you can go back to that was just before you started making those changes to the website, and that’s going to save you a lot of aggravation right there. Tip number 2 with backing up your website is to have redundancy with your backups. What does that mean? What I mean is to make sure you have a copy Not just stored on the hosting where your website is but also somewhere else off-site.

Marlon McPherson00:02:00 – 00:02:56

So in the event that something was to go wrong with the copy that you have on your hosting or say the hosting, goes wrong in some other way, shape, or form and you can’t access that, you Still have a copy of your website that you can always pull from somewhere else. And the easiest way to do this is to download a local copy to your computer. Can store that on a hard drive somewhere, an SSD, or whatever kind of storage you use. But my Favorite way is to send this copy to a remote storage online. So this could be a cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, whichever one you use, just make sure you send it across there. And most of these plugins that you can use on WordPress Will allow you to connect with some remote storage and automatically send it across to them. The sec I’m on to the 3rd one now. The 3rd tip I’ve got for you is to automate your backups.

Marlon McPherson00:02:56 – 00:03:47

Now of course, you will think that you remember to do your backups every single time, but at some point you’ll forget. And then you when you least, expect it something goes wrong and you didn’t back up. So Always have some automation going on. Pretty much all the plugins that are available, all the good ones anyway, have a scheduling system that you can allow to back up your website automatically for you. Now how often you do this is going to be or how often you set the schedule is going to be dependent on your website and What activities are taking place on your website, you know. So if you have a static website that it doesn’t require a lot of changes, it’s not really It hasn’t got anything dynamic going on. You can get away with backing up maybe once a week automatically. If you have an e commerce site or something that’s dealing with a lot changes.

Marlon McPherson00:03:47 – 00:04:33

You’re posting to the site a lot. You wanna make sure you’re backing up on a more regular schedule. This could be daily, or multiple times a day even depending depending on, your needs. So set a schedule and just forget it you know that something’s happening. Of course, you wanna still do your manual backups on top of that just to make sure that you have things going as they should. The next one I have for you in terms of backing up your website is to make sure that you test your backups so you know how to restore the website easily if something was to go wrong. The last thing you want is for the site to go down or you, have something major happen and you don’t know how to restore the files. You don’t know what the correct process is or you don’t even know if the files are going to work because you haven’t tested it.

Marlon McPherson00:04:33 – 00:05:20

So, depending on what plug in you use or what process you use, method or whatever it is, you have a different process to restore the site. So, if you’re doing plugins on your WordPress website, for example, I use Draft Plus for the most part on pretty much all my sites. You basically need to upload The backup into the plug in and it will restore it for you. For most small sites, this is absolutely fine. It will handle it automatically for you. From time to time, you might run into an error and you may need to run the backup more than once or you might need to troubleshoot some stuff. But If you have a larger site, you might actually need to do some manual work. Well, this is something that is complicated and what I recommend that you do is to Enlist the help of a professional.

Marlon McPherson00:05:21 – 00:06:09

So this could be your hosting company. They usually will provide this, restoration service for you at a cost, or somebody else that knows what they’re doing and can help you with it as well. So either way, set up a testing site and try and restore your website to that site and see if it works. And if you run into issues, make sure you check the manual, check the documentation, and reach out to their support whoever runs the plugins or whoever is in charge of the process that you’re using to make sure that understand what to do if a real life situation happens and you need to restore your website. So let me know what you’re doing in the comments below. If you’re backing up your on a regular basis. What methods are you using? Are you following any one of these tips? I’d love to hear from you. If you’re listening to this as a audio podcast.

Marlon McPherson00:06:09 – 00:06:37

Just go ahead and reach out to me via my website as well. And speaking of my website, I do have a checklist that I give The way called a profitable website checklist that’s going to help you get the most out of your website for your business or brand by making sure that things are implemented in the right way. Reach out. You can get that for free over on marlon macpherson.com/ checklist. So go ahead and grab your copy right now. Until next time, I will catch you in the next one. Take care.