Don’t forget to back up your site!

Ask yourself “When did I last back up my site – and what would I do if I went to access this and all my information was lost?” .

Your online shop is every bit as important as a physical store to your business.  You would not have a store and not have insurance on it, so think of your backups as a good insurance policy!

It can be a pain remembering to backup your data in a timely fashion but even a once-monthly or once-weekly backup could get you out of a tight spot.

Think of the worst case scenario: something serious like your database is corrupted or your server crashes and you are unable to make changes to the site, view your orders or customer accounts.

The amount of time you may have to spend restoring your site to where it was before the catastrophe could massively impact you! You could lose out on orders and create unhappy customers, or deter people from ordering in future. Prevention really is better than cure.

You shouldn’t rely on hosting-level backups, either. Teclan’s hosting servers are backed up regularly but these files can usually only be used in the event of a hardware failure to restore the complete server to the state it was previously. This could include hundreds of other websites, email accounts and security settings so it is unlikely your webhost will be able to restore just your particular site. In short, never rely on anyone else to take care of backups for you!

If something bad did happen, who would help? How much could this cost? Think about the time and work you have put into creating your store as it is now and ask yourself: how long it would take to do this all over again? Could it even be replicated from scratch?

Make it a regular task  to backup the key areas of your site whenever possible, say at the end of each week, and make sure your backups don’t stay on the same computer as your website. So for example with a Sellerdeck site keep a backup snapshot on a different PC or a USB drive. With a WordPress site back up the theme, plugins and database to your local computer or a cloud server somewhere else. With WordPress there are even plugins like Vaultpress you can use to schedule and store the backups for you!

It might seem like a chore, but it’s nothing compared to the work involved in retrieving a lost website.