WordPress Lesson 4: Business Continuity and Backing Up Your Wordpress Database

If you did a super quick install of your WordPress site and started publishing out of the gates, you may not fully understand what is going on behind the scenes every time you write a new post, add a plugin or SEO your pages. Rather, it resides on your server in a PHP database that, for good reason, is not easily accessible via the WP Dashboard. This database is made up of tables that dynamically link to one another as the information is called when someone clicks on a page of your WP website or blog.

Lost yet? Don’t worry. You don’t need more than a rudimentary understanding of how WordPress works in order to be a true backup artist. And that is what you must be if you are going to be a responsible website owner. Because believe me, one day–probably sooner than you think–you’re going to get real confident in your WordPressing skills and blow the whole thing up. Trust me, this moment will come. And when it does, wouldn’t it be nice to know your WP site is tidily preserved in a backup file on your hard drive?

The alternative, when the apocalyptic event happens, is to scream obscenities at your computer, your cat or anyone else who happens to be within a 10 mile radius of you. You’ll feel better for a moment, and then you’ll realize you have few options but to calm yourself down and rebuild a schwack of stuff from scratch. Happy Day.

In the meantime, your loyal league of subscribers are left wondering what the heck happened to their beloved blog. Not great for the old image.

So learn how to back up your WordPress database and do it often. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to back up my database in about one minute, and that’s without any one-click plugins. I just go right into phpMyAdmin and back up from there. (On my server, phpMyAdmin is in the cpanel under MySQL Databases and at then at the bottom of the following screen.)

While I was designing my WP site–and thus making significant changes to the design and content every day–I backed up my WP database nightly. For detailed information on backing up your WordPress database, check out this page of the Codex. It’s not exciting, but knowing how to do this kind of thing confidently will help protect the continuity of your blog and in some cases, your business.