Most small business owners think about website backups in exactly the same way they think about smoke alarms: essential in theory, easy to ignore in practice, and deeply regretted only when something goes wrong. A hacking attempt, a failed plugin update, an accidental deletion, a hosting provider going out of business — any of these can take a website offline or wipe its content entirely. For a small business, losing a website is not just an inconvenience. It means losing enquiries, losing the trust of potential customers who find nothing at your address, and facing the cost and time of rebuilding from scratch.
A website backup is the thing that makes all of that recoverable. However bad the problem, a recent and well-organised backup means you can restore a working version of your site — usually within minutes, not days.
What Does a Website Backup Actually Contain?
It is worth understanding what a backup actually includes, because an incomplete one can leave you with a nasty surprise. A complete backup has two parts:
- The files. All the code, images, themes, and other assets that make up your website. On a WordPress site, this includes the WordPress core files, your theme files, and any plugins you have installed. On a hand-coded static website, it is simply the HTML, CSS, and image files.
- The database. If your website uses a database — which WordPress and most e-commerce platforms do — the database stores your pages, posts, settings, customer records, and orders. Without a database backup, you can restore the site framework but you will lose all your content.
A backup that captures the files but not the database is an incomplete backup — you recover the shell of your website but lose everything that was in it. Whatever solution you choose, make sure it captures both.
How Often Should You Back Up Your Website?
The honest answer is: it depends on how much you would be willing to lose. A brochure website that changes occasionally — a new phone number, an updated service description — might be well served by a weekly backup. A blog updated daily, or a shop processing orders by the hour, needs protection that matches that pace.
The most useful question to ask yourself is not "how often should I back up?" but "how much work am I prepared to redo?" If recreating a week of updates would be manageable, weekly is probably fine. If losing even a day of orders would cause real difficulty, daily backups are the minimum worth considering.
Where Should Backups Be Stored?
There is one rule about backup storage that matters more than any other: the backup must live somewhere entirely separate from your live website. A backup on the same server is not a backup — it is a second copy that will vanish in the same fire that takes the first. If your hosting provider suffers an outage, a server failure, or a targeted attack, both your site and your backup disappear together.
Good options for separate storage are worth knowing about:
- Cloud storage. Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3 are common choices. They are inexpensive, reliable, and completely separate from your web hosting.
- Your own computer. Downloading a copy of your backup to your own device gives you an offline copy that no hacker or server failure can touch.
- A separate hosting account. Some businesses keep a second, inactive hosting account just for backups — completely separate from the provider running their live site.
The principle used by anyone who takes data seriously is sometimes called the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with at least one stored off-site. For a small business website, a practical version of this looks like: your live site, an automatic backup kept by your hosting provider, and one copy downloaded to your own computer or saved to cloud storage. It sounds like more effort than it is; once the systems are set up, they run without you.
How Do You Back Up a WordPress Website?
WordPress is a particularly important case because it stores both files and a database, and both change whenever you publish content, install a plugin, or process an order. That means any backup system needs to capture everything that moves. The most practical approaches for most small businesses are these two:
- A backup plugin. Plugins like UpdraftPlus, Jetpack Backup, or All-in-One WP Migration can run automatic backups on a schedule and send them to Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud service. UpdraftPlus has a free tier that is sufficient for most small business sites.
- Your hosting plan. Many managed WordPress hosting providers — including WP Engine, Kinsta, and SiteGround — include automatic daily backups as part of their hosting. This is often the simplest option if you are already on a host that offers it.
What About Website Builders Like Wix and Squarespace?
If your website lives on Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, the backup picture is quite different. These platforms manage the underlying infrastructure themselves and maintain their own backups — so if their servers have a problem, they can restore your site. Wix and Squarespace both offer version history features that let you roll back to a previous state of your site if you accidentally make a change you want to undo.
The important limitation is that you cannot easily export a complete independent copy of your site to store on your own terms. You are, in that sense, dependent on the platform. If the platform changes its terms or discontinues a feature, your options are limited. This is worth knowing before you choose a platform, not after.
What About Static Websites on GitHub Pages?
Websites hosted on GitHub Pages — including those built by GitFoundry — occupy a different category altogether. They are stored in a Git repository, which means the entire history of every change ever made to the site is preserved by design. Every version of every file exists and can be recovered. The repository itself can be cloned to any computer in seconds. In practice, a well-maintained GitHub Pages site is often more resilient than a WordPress site with a good backup plugin, because the code history and the backup are the same thing — built-in, permanent, and free.
How Long Does It Take to Restore From a Backup?
This is the question that reveals whether a backup system is actually working. For a simple brochure website, restoration can take under ten minutes with the right tools in place. Larger sites — those with extensive image libraries or substantial databases — take longer. The speed is less important than one other thing: testing the process before you need it. Many businesses discover their backups are incomplete, out of date, or corrupt only when they are already in a crisis. Running a test restore on a staging environment once or twice a year is the difference between a backup system and a false sense of security.