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Short answer: it depends on how often your site changes. Back up as often as you’d hate to redo the work. If losing a day of edits would ruin your week, that’s daily. If nothing changes for months, monthly is plenty. For an online store, daily isn’t even up for debate.
Most site owners think about backups exactly once. Right after they’ve needed one.
Why backups matter
Things break.
A plugin update goes sideways and the homepage turns white. A theme change you pushed late on a Friday looks broken by Monday. Someone gets your password and starts redirecting your visitors to a dodgy URL. You meant to delete a draft and deleted a page. Hardware fails. Even a half-decent host has bad days.
A backup is a saved copy you can put back. Restore it (push it back onto your live site) and you’ve turned a lost weekend into a five-minute job. Without one, you’re rebuilding from memory and old screenshots.
Backups and security are a pair, not a substitute. Strong passwords, updates, and a firewall lower the odds of getting hacked, which is the job of good WordPress security. The backup is what saves you on the day all of that fails anyway.
How often, by site type
How much your site changes, and how much losing that work would hurt, are the only two questions that matter.
An online store is the obvious one. Every hour there are new orders, new customers, new stock counts, fresh payment records. Last week’s backup wouldn’t just cost you content, it would cost you orders, refunds, and customers who never got an order confirmation. Busy stores tend to outgrow shared hosting around here too. A VPS plan gives you the headroom and control for properly frequent backups. For a store, daily is the floor.
What a complete backup includes
A website is two halves, and a real backup has to grab both.
Files are the bit that lives on disk: your theme, plugins, images, uploads, code. Database is where the actual content lives: posts, pages, settings, comments, user accounts, and for a shop, every order ever placed.
Lose one half and you don’t really have a backup. Files alone give you an empty shell. The database alone gives you content with nowhere to display. This trips people up in backups more than anything else. They save one part, assume that’s it, then find out the hard way that it isn’t. Whatever tool you use, check it grabs both in the same job
The 3-2-1 rule
There’s a rule from the wider backup world that’s worth borrowing. Keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy somewhere else entirely.
That last bit is the bit that matters. If your only backup is sitting on the same server as your live site, it isn’t really a backup. A server failure takes both. A hacked hosting account reaches both. The whole point is to have a copy that survives a bad day for the original.
Offsite can be cloud storage, a download on your laptop, a dedicated backup service. Doesn’t matter which. As long as one problem can’t wipe out both at once, you’re covered.
Automate it
Manual backups fail for a really boring reason. You forget.
You’ll do it religiously for a month, get busy, skip it for three. The gap always lands the week before the thing that breaks.
So take yourself out of the loop. Schedule it. Most hosting plans and backup plugins will run on a timer without you doing anything. Pick a frequency that matches the table above, switch it on, and walk away.
Test your restores
Now the bit nobody likes.
A backup you’ve never actually restored is a guess. Not a guarantee.
Backups fail quietly. The job runs every night, the logs say success, and then one day you open the archive and half the database isn’t there. Or the file is empty. Or it actually stopped working three weeks ago and no one noticed because no one was watching the logs. You only find out the day you need it. By then it’s too late.
So try it. Every few months, restore a backup somewhere safe. A staging site (a private copy of your live site) is best. A local install on your laptop also works. Check the files came back. Check the database came back. Check the images load and your recent content is there. Click around. If it restores cleanly, you actually have a backup. If it doesn’t, far better to find out today than during a crisis.
What your host backs up, and what's still on you
Most managed hosts run backups for you. TMD Hosting is a good example: daily backups, up to 30 copies kept, both files and database in the same job. Yesterday’s site is sitting there ready to grab, and so is one from three weeks back.
That covers a lot of bases. Not all of them. What you get varies between hosts, and often between plans on the same host, so it pays to know your own setup in detail. How often it actually runs. How far back the copies stretch. How you actually trigger a restore, and how long it takes. Where the copies physically sit, and whether “offsite” really means offsite. Host backups are a safety net, not your whole strategy. Keep a copy of your own as well. If you ever move host, or your account itself has a bad day, the backup you’ll be glad you kept is the one that has nothing to do with them.
Quick checklist
- Match the frequency to how often your site changes.
- Always back up files and database together.
- Keep at least one copy offsite.
- Automate the schedule.
- Test a restore every few months.
- Know what your host covers, and fill any gaps yourself.