How-to · Beginner · 30 minutes of setup
How to Back Up WordPress
Hold backups that exist, restore cleanly, and survive the day you need them — a practical, jargon-free walkthrough with the classic mistake flagged before you make it.
Straight answer first
The job: hold backups that exist, restore cleanly, and survive the day you need them. Time to allow: 30 minutes of setup. Skill needed: beginner.
Below you get the exact steps, the classic snag, and a tip from the support desk. Where our platform handles a step for you, the guide says so rather than making you do the robot's work.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Beginner
Skill needed
5
Stages to finish
Free
Help included
Tested
On our own kit
You do not need to be technical for this. The walkthrough is written for first-timers, tested on our own platform, and honest about which parts are genuinely fiddly and which are merely unfamiliar.
One promise before you start: nothing in this guide is irreversible. Where a step could bite, we say so and give you the undo.
The shape of the work
From start to finish, you will remember it comes in two halves, check what the platform gives you, keep another copy somewhere else, match the schedule to how it changes and test a restore each quarter.
No stage needs code or a terminal unless the guide says so outright, and where it does, the exact commands are printed. The full step-by-step sits below; the sections around it give the context that makes it stick.
Where this goes wrong, and how not to
Keeping the backups on the same hosting account they are meant to protect. It is the single point of failure in its purest form: whatever takes down the site takes its lifeline out in the same stroke.
It is worth learning because it is not some rare edge case — it is the single most common reason this task turns into a support ticket. Knowing it up front turns the whole job from risky into routine.
The shortcut, straight from the support desk
Take a manual snapshot with a name you will recognise before every big change — updates, redesigns, plugin experiments. Being able to say 'put it back to two o'clock' turns a disaster into a story you tell later.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
What runs by itself here
Several steps in this guide exist only because hosting historically made you do them. On our plans SSL issues itself, backups run daily without being asked, and one-click installers replace the manual setup entirely. What is left is the part that is genuinely yours.
And when a step misbehaves anyway, support answers at any hour with the actual fix, not a knowledge-base link and a shrug. Half our best guides began life as a pattern in the ticket queue.
A good platform makes every guide shorter
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Real people answer the counter at any hour, including the awkward questions other hosts wave off as out of scope.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Help on the counter
Stuck on step three at midnight? Support answers at any hour, mid-guide included.
Scoped honestly
Hold backups that exist, restore cleanly, and survive the day you need them is a beginner-level task — this guide budgets 30 minutes of setup and says which steps the platform absorbs.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Remember it comes in two halves
A WordPress site is files — themes, plugins, uploads — plus a database holding the content and settings. A backup carrying only one half of that restores into a mess nobody can use.
- 2
Check what the platform gives you
Our hosting takes automatic daily backups you can restore from the panel. Look up the schedule and retention on your plan so you know exactly what floor you are standing on before adding anything.
- 3
Keep another copy somewhere else
A backup plugin pushing a weekly copy to Drive, Dropbox or S3 covers the scenarios where the hosting itself is the problem. Different failure domains are the entire reason for a second copy.
- 4
Match the schedule to how it changes
Daily for a site that changes often; closer to hourly for a shop where a lost hour is lost orders. Backup frequency is really a question about how much work you can afford to redo.
- 5
Test a restore each quarter
Restore into a staging copy and click round it. Actually completing a restore is the only evidence a backup system deserves the name, and it takes twenty minutes four times a year.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- PHP versions picked per site from the panel
- WordPress Toolkit, with updates applied for you
- Nothing added at setup — no joining fee, ever
- A 99.9% uptime commitment, watched by monitoring day and night
- SSH, Git and Composer on the plans built for developers
- A domain free for year one when you order annually
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- Webmail in the browser plus IMAP, POP and SMTP for your own client
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Are the automatic backups from the host enough by themselves?
For most sites they are a strong starting point: automatic, held away from your files, restorable from the panel. Add a copy of your own once the site is worth more than the few minutes it takes. Redundancy is cheap at this layer.
How far back should the backups reach?
Long enough to outlast the problems that creep. A hack noticed in week three needs a copy from week two. Daily for a month plus a handful of monthly copies is a sensible policy for a normal business site.
How do I pay, and does it bill again on its own?
Orders go through a secure checkout by credit or debit card, and the renewal is taken at the same price you first paid. Every invoice sits in the client area for you to read, and switching auto-renewal off is a toggle in your account rather than a phone call.
Can one plan hold more than a single website?
From the Pro tier upward, yes — several sites, each with its own domain, mailboxes and certificate, all under one account. If those extra sites belong to clients rather than to you, reseller hosting is the better fit: it gives each one proper separation.
Does hosting come with mailboxes?
It does — mailboxes on your own domain ship with every hosting plan, with webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP access and spam filtering fitted as standard. There is also standalone email hosting for domains whose website lives somewhere else entirely.
What if the site outgrows the plan I bought?
You move up in place. Plan changes are made from the client area with no migration and no downtime, and the range runs from small shared accounts through VPS to whole dedicated servers. Growing becomes a line change on your account rather than a hunt for a new host.
What does round-the-clock support actually stretch to?
People at the counter at every hour, and a scope that takes in the practical work: mailbox setup, DNS records, WordPress trouble, restores. Not 'the server responds, ticket closed'. Ask us something hard before you order — the reply is a fair sample of what you would get afterwards.
Read next
How to Add SSL to WordPress
Serve every page over https with the padlock staying shut on all of them — beginner level, about 20 minutes.
WordPress SEO First Steps
Get the groundwork right so a new site can be found in the first place — beginner level, about an hour.
Reseller Hosting
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