Nonprofit WordPress

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A Free Manual for Nonprofits

  • About
  • Search
  • WordPress Basics
    • What is WordPress?
    • Creating Content
  • Types of Content
    • Pages
    • Posts
    • Media Items
  • Content Management Basics
    • Write for the Web
    • The Perils of Poor Formatting
    • Help People with Disabilities
    • Linking to External Sites
    • Linking Within Your Site
    • Adding Images
    • Adding Documents
    • Adding Videos
  • Content Management Mastery
    • Editor Tips and Tricks
    • Linking to Email Addresses
    • Linking Within a Page
    • Redirecting Links
  • Administering Your Site
    • The Admin Bar
    • Managing Users
    • Managing Menus
    • Backing Up the Site
    • Updating Your Software

Backing Up the Site

Automatic protections

You don’t absolutely have to make your own backups, but it’s an awfully good idea.

Maintaining your own backups gives you an added level of safety, control, and comfort.

But even if you don’t make your own backups, the following four protections are in place.

Automatic backups for system disasters

Most web hosts maintain daily backups of your site and will restore them in case of a system disaster. System disasters are things like a hacker destroying your site, or the web host’s computers crashing and needing to be replaced.

But… a system disaster doesn’t include a well-meaning volunteer messing up your site.

Automatic backups restored upon request

Many web hosts will, upon request, restore a backup for you, even if it wasn’t a system disaster. Sometimes this is free, and sometimes there’s a cost.

But… not every host offers this, and even those that do might only have last night’s backup available, which doesn’t help if your site got messed up two weeks ago.

WordPress revision tracking

WordPress has a built-in revision tracking feature that keeps a history of changes to your content. This lets you view earlier versions of a given page and, if necessary, restore them right from the editor page. This might not be enabled for every content type, but usually it’s available.

You can find the revision tracking panel right below the editor box. It looks like this:
page editor - revision metabox

If you don’t see this box, it might just be hidden. Click the Screen Options button at the top right of the editor page:
page editor - screen options button

Then look for a checkbox that says Revisions:
page editor - screen options panel

But… not every theme and content type supports this, and even those that do have a limit to the number of revisions they remember. So if someone makes and publishes a bunch of small edits, the earlier version you want to see might no longer be available.

Trash

WordPress maintains a trash bin for deleted content. You can see this at the top of the list of pages, posts, and other content types:
page listing - trash

You can visit the Trash listing and recover your deleted content.

But… usually when we want to recover something, it’s because it was edited in some way, not deleted. And if the trash has been emptied—which can happen either manually or automatically (after 30 days by default)—you’re out of luck.

Making backups: overview

Any WordPress site has two components:

  • The WordPress database. This includes things like the text of your pages and posts, your list of users, your menu definitions, and your general website settings.
  • The files stored on your web server. This includes things like the documents and images you’ve uploaded, your WordPress theme, and any plugins you’ve installed.

Your WordPress database (which is mainly text-based information) is usually much, much smaller than the files on your web server. A typical backup approach includes frequent backups of the WordPress database, and less frequent backups of the files.

Backup Tools

WordPress provides no built-in tool to back up your entire site.

Fortunately, there are many good third-party tools to help with this. Some of these are free, but the most comprehensive options are generally paid/premium tools, such as:

  • BackupBuddy from iThemes
  • ManageWP
  • VaultPress from Automattic (the WordPress company)

Creative Commons License
Nonprofit WordPress by Andrew Giesler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://nonprofitwordpress.info.