How to take WordPress backup manually via Cpanel

In this post, I will guide you on how to take backup of a wordpress website. So, taking the backup of your website is an extremely essential process. Because sometimes, some Trojans or viruses might find their way into your website, or sometimes there might be some plugin conflict , or in case if you are making some changes onto your website and if it leads to some unintended changes, it might crash your website. In fact, whenever you are making any change to your website’s backend, make sure you have a backup.

It is very important to have a backup of your website in such scenarios so that you can always restore your website up if anything goes wrong.

I would recommend, do take the backup of your website and store it in a safe place such as dropbox or google drive. So that you can always access it back whenever you need to restore your website.

There are multiple ways through which you can take backup of your website

1. Manually via Cpanel
2. Automatically via cpanel
3. Automatically using a premium plugin such as Updraft, backup buddy etc
4. Use a managed web host for automatic backups

Let’s understand how do we take the backup via CPanel

Please see below step by step video of how to take backup of your wordpress site via cpanel:

 

Whenever you have to take backup, you will be taking backup of two parts of website

1. The WordPress files
2. Database

How to download WordPress files?

First of all, login to your cpanel of your website, Once you have logged in, go to the file manager. To download the WordPress files, you can select the particular folder location for which you need to take the backup. Here I am taking the backup of my subdomain demowebsite that is under the website bitgog.net (I have just used this domain to show you a demo of how to do it).

For example, if you are doing it on a root domain, you can select the root folder. In the example that we are using in the video above, since I am using a sub-folder on the domain, I download the sub-folder by clicking on compress and I select zip archive option.

How to take backup of database of your website?

In case you want to check, which database is being used by your website. Once you have logged into your cPanel, go to the file manager, and then select the file wp-config.php, since you are already in file manager, you can open this file by right clicking on it and then clicking edit. This file has the details of your database name.

Then you need to click on phpmyadmin, once you do that, you will be able to see a list of databases. Now, you can select the particular database that is mentioned in wp-config.php file.

When you click the database, you will be able to see all the tables that are within that database. You can click on export all of these by clicking go. Doing this will export all the tables in that particular database in sql format.

So, now you have the backup of both your wordpress files as well as the database. You can store this database at a secure location so that you can access it later when you need to restore your website.

If you are manually taking the backup, you will need to take the backups at regular intervals.

How to take backup automatically via cpanel?

If you are on a shared hosting account, you might not have this facility. If you are on a VPS or a dedicated server, the hosting provider can do this for you. They might charge you extra for it as well. For example, I am using a dedicated server of inmotion hosting, and they have set up automatic backups for my account. Usually they have this cron job that gets executed every week, fortnightly or monthly. You can ask them to set up automatic backup at a frequency that would depend upon size of your website and space in your hosting account.

How to take backup automatically via paid plugins ?

If you do not want the hassle of taking a backup manually every now and then, you can use premium plugins that can do the job for you automatically at regular intervals. You can use paid plugins such as Updraft, Backup buddy, they are reputed plugins.

Use a managed web host

You can use a reputed managed web host such as WpEngine or Kinsta hosting, they keep taking backups of your website on a daily basis, in fact, if you are making any important changes to your website, you can easily take a backup through the click of a button in the dashboard provided by these managed hosts.

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