033 – How To Back Up Your WordPress Website

Today’s show topic is about backing up our WordPress websites and how to restore your site if something goes horribly wrong.

Backup

Source Files
– First back up your theme file
– Using an FTP client login to your website
– Navigate to wp-content/themes/
– You will then see all of your theme files
– Depending on FTP client, drag these files to hard drive
– Once on your hard drive, you can zip it up, rename with the date

Or you can download the entire wp-content folder
– Then you will get:
– themes
– plugins
– uploaded files
– This download will take much longer and take up more hard drive space

Or you can download everything but the plugins, because you can re download them in a catastrophic situation
– Just make sure you put all the plugins you are using in a document so you know which ones to redownload

Now to back up your MySQL database
– Login into your cPanel (this is probably different for different hosting companies)
– Navigate to phpAdmin
– From the main login screen, select “Databases”
– Select your WordPress database
– Click ‘Export’ tab on the top set of tabs
– Select all WordPress tables from database (wp_ files) and make sure radio button says SQL
– In the Structure area select the top four choices
– In the Data section check the data box
– Choose ‘Save as file’ with no compression and select Go
– This will save a snapshot of your database on your hard drive
– Rename it with the date and zip the folder on your hard drive.

Plugins to Use
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/backup

Restore

Source Files
– Upload contents into wp-contents folder (themes, plugins, uploads)

Database
– Login to phpMyAdmin.
– Click databases, and select the database that you will be importing your data into.
– You will then see either a list of tables already inside that database or a screen that says no tables exist. This depends on your setup.
– Across the top of the screen will be a row of tabs. Click the Import tab.
– On the next screen will be a Location of Text File box, and next to that a button named Browse.
– Click Browse. Locate the backup file stored on your computer.
– Make sure the SQL radio button is checked.
– Click the Go button.

If you get any errors when uploading database, check support website