CodeGuard WordPress Backup

Introduction

What are you currently doing to backup your WordPress site? Spending countless hours trying to keep track of bloated ZIP backups? Tinkering around in phpMyAdmin, crossing your fingers that your database isn’t messed up when you try to export it? Not doing anything for WordPress backup? If any of these situations sound familiar, this blog post is for you. WordPress is used by 65% of the top million most visited sites that use a CMS. In a world of user errors, broken updates, and hackers, there is no excuse for your site to not be backed up. We recommend that you let CodeGuard take care of that with our WordPress backup solution.

Backup Before You Update

Updating your WordPress site is essential in order to take advantage of new features and protect against vulnerabilities. Since there are a wide variety of plugins and themes, when you update one, there is a chance that some of your other plugins won’t play nicely with it. Even just updating a theme could potentially bring your entire site down. In fact, “theme compatibility is one of the common reasons why sites break” according to WordPress consultant Judith Kallos. Blogger Doug Eikermann details how important it is to back up your site before an update and takes you through how to manually backup your site (tedious!). The bottom line is that you need to perform a WordPress backup before any update in order to be safe.

Protect Against Hackers

From malicious scripts, to break-ins at domain registrars, WordPress sites can get compromised in a variety of ways. Yoast, creator of a popular WordPress SEO plugin, woke up one day to find his site had been hacked because he had neglected to update a theme.  Author Jeff Goins took away several lessons after his blog got hacked, one of which included backing up his blog. In Don Campbell’s post on securing your WordPress site, one of his essential steps is to backup your site. Unfortunately, there is never going to be a way to fully protect your website from getting hacked. However, in the event that your website does get hacked, having a full backup of your site can help restore what you have lost and let you focus on what is really important: your killer content.

As you can see, there really no good reason for your WordPress site to not be backed up. In this blog post, we are going to walk you through exactly how to complete a full WordPress backup that includes your website and database with the CodeGuard application. 

Easy to Setup. Easier to Use.

We have made a video walkthrough as well so that you can see for yourself just how easy WordPress backup with CodeGuard is.

What You Will Need

Your FTP server information
Your MySQL server information
Access to cPanel (optional for whitelisting)
CodeGuard account

Website Backup

Once you login to the CodeGuard site, you will see the “Add Website” button. Choose this option and you will be directed to the initial backup page where you can enter your FTP credentials. You also have the option to choose between FTP or SFTP. As an added security measure, you always want to use SFTP unless your hosting company does not allow it.

Now that you’ve added your FTP server and CodeGuard has successfully connected to it, it is time to choose which files you want to backup. One of the great things about CodeGuard is that you can choose any file that you have access to through FTP. For some, you will want to backup all of these files. However, if you just want to backup your WordPress specific files, you want to choose your WordPress folder which is stored under the public_html folder by default. Once you have chosen your files, choose “Capture Code”.

That’s it! Now your website is scheduled for backup and you can track the progress with the CodeGuard Backup Tracker. Depending on how many files you are backing up, this can take a little bit of time. You will be sent an email as soon as it is done. After the initial backup, CodeGuard will continue to backup your website daily and let you know if any files have changed.

Database Backup

Now that your website is backed up, you will want to complete the full WordPress backup by backing up your database. After logging in again, scroll down to the “Add Database” link on your main page. Choose this option and you will be taken to the database page where you need to enter your MySQL information. However, before you let CodeGuard connect to your MySQL database, you need to make sure CodeGuard is allowed to remotely connect to your database by whitelisting the CodeGuard IP addresses.

On the right site of the “Add Database” page, there are three IP addresses that you will need to whitelist with your server or hosting provider. This is in order to provide CodeGuard with remote MySQL access. If you have cPanel installed on your server, the process is as simple as logging into cPanel, choosing the “Remote MySQL” panel, and placing the CodeGuard IPs in the allowed hosts section.

Now enter your MySQL credentials. You have the option to either connect to MySQL directly or to tunnel over SSH. Once again, this is a security preference and some hosting providers will not allow you to tunnel over SSH. Finish by choosing “Add Database” and you will be taken to your main site page. Depending on how large your database is, this might take a little time. You will be sent an email as soon as the database backup finishes. Now your full WordPress backup is complete!

WordPress Backup Summary

CodeGuard provides you with the necessary tools in order to make sure your WordPress sites and databases are backed up and secure. After this initial backup, you can be confident knowing that your data will continue to be backed up daily and you will receive emails if any of your files change. We hope you choose CodeGuard for all of your future WordPress backup needs!

-Alex