I know that I heard about backups and backup plugins for many years before actually using them and I regretted waiting as long as I did, because in the meantime I lost websites and I lost files. If I had simply run a backup every week I would not have had to worry about lost information. I wouldn't have to worry about getting hacked, clicking a button, deleting files, deleting websites, deleting content. It all would have been safely stored in a backup somewhere.

If you are hesitating...

There are many reasons to backup your WordPress blog and make sure you always have a copy of it in case something goes wrong. Your database might crash, you might accidentally delete some of your posts or files, and you might even need to roll back to an earlier version of your WordPress blog. It's a simple fact that computers fail all the time. A hard drive might crash out and many people don't realize that your website is simply sitting on a computer somewhere that has all the same problems as...

You should have heard that it's a very good idea to keep a backup of your website in case something goes wrong with it, it's worth it to make it part of your weekly routine. To spend a few seconds clicking that backup button instead of a few years trying to get back to where you were. But you might be confused about should you run a cPanel backup of your entire website or a WordPress backup just of your single blog.

The difference is that with a cPanel backup you're backing up the...

You've finally decided that it's a good idea, in fact a great idea, to backup that WordPress blog. Now if anything goes wrong you have a copy somewhere at least you can put somewhere else. What features should you look for in a WordPress backup plugin? I've seen many plugins that overload you with features. Tell you it'll backup to S3, that it will backup to Rackspace, they add all kinds of fancy features. At the end of the day do you need all that fanciness or do you just need a backup plugin that...

You know that depending on your webhost you might not be able to actually backup your site. It's true. Many webhosts are simply not powerful enough to allow WordPress to back itself up because this involves backing up all the files, dumping the whole database and putting it all into one giant zip file. But luckily there are a few things to check about your webhost and you know in the next few minutes whether or not you are able to backup your site. If you aren't I would highly recommend you...