For a WordPress website, a complete backup has two parts. The first is the files: WordPress itself, the theme, plugins and all uploaded images and PDFs. The second is the database, which holds your text, pages, settings and things like form submissions. If either part is missing, the website can't be fully restored.
For a business, the website is a working tool. A faulty update, a stolen password or a piece of text deleted by accident can knock it out. Without a backup, that means rebuilding the website, hunting down content and losing days. With a backup, the previous version is often back in no time.
A tried-and-tested rule of thumb is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one of them in a different location. For a website, that could mean the live version, a backup with your host and another copy in external storage.
What to look out for:
- Regular and automatic: backups that someone has to remember get forgotten.
- Keep several versions: if an attack is only noticed weeks later, only an older backup will help.
- Before every major update, take a fresh backup.
- Test the restore: a backup is only as good as the restore. Check that it actually works.
- Not just the website: emails, accounts and files on the company laptop need their own backups too.
Regular backups are included in every STACKD maintenance package, starting with the Basic package at CHF 30 per month.
A fiduciary firm in Lucerne installs a plugin update on a Friday evening. Afterwards, the website shows nothing but a white page with an error message. The host makes a backup every night, and an extra backup was taken before the update. On Saturday morning, the website is rolled back to its pre-update state in a few clicks. By Monday, everything is running as usual. The faulty plugin is then checked calmly on a test copy before the update goes live a second time.