Nobody loses a site by accident: the fix takes one click

It doesn't happen often — and that's the problem

An update that goes wrong. A change made a little too quickly. An incident at the host. A theme switched on a Sunday evening.

These things are rare. Rare enough that nobody worries about them beforehand, and quite frequent enough to happen to someone one day. What makes the difference between "an unpleasant evening" and "weeks of work lost" is neither luck nor technical skill: it's a thirty-second reflex.

The cause: your site isn't where you think it is

When you think about your site, you think about what you see: the pages, the photos, the layout.

In reality, almost all of your site lives in its database. Your text, your articles, your settings, your customer accounts, your orders, the parameters of every one of your extensions: it's all filed in there.

The database is a large, very well organised filing cabinet that WordPress consults constantly — and that you never see. You don't come across it in your folders, it appears nowhere on your desktop, no window opens onto it. That's exactly why its existence gets forgotten, until the day you'd need it.

Your images and files are elsewhere: in the folders of your hosting. So a complete backup covers both — the cabinet and the files. But if you could only protect one, it would be the cabinet: a photo can be re-uploaded, a catalogue of 400 products cannot be retyped.

The fix: the only reflex that counts

Here's the rule, and it isn't the one you usually hear.

Everywhere people repeat "back up often". That's poor advice, because it's vague and nobody ever follows it. The useful rule is this one:

Back up before touching anything.

Before an update to WordPress, to a theme or to an extension. Before installing something new. Before changing a setting you don't fully understand. Before any change made at the end of the day, when you're tired.

It's clear-cut, it's easy to remember, and it protects you at the exact moment the risk exists — because a site almost never breaks on its own: it breaks while someone is working on it.

How to do it today, without buying anything

1. Look in your hosting account area. The great majority of hosts offer a one-button backup, sometimes a daily automatic backup already included in your plan. Many people pay for this feature without knowing they have it. Take five minutes to check what you already have.

2. Know where the file goes — and get a copy of it. A backup stored only on the site's server doesn't protect you from a problem on that server. Download a copy from time to time onto your computer or into your online storage.

3. Try it once, calmly. This is the advice nobody gives, and it's the most important: a backup is only worth what it restores. Ask your host how a restore works — or test it on a staging site if you have one. The worst moment to discover the backup was empty is the day you need it.

4. Date it and label it. A file named backup-before-theme-update-20-july will tell you something in six months. backup(3) will tell you nothing.

If you want this done without thinking about it

AIFORYA Backups is a free extension that backs up your database in one click or automatically: export in chunks so as not to strain the server, GZIP compression, adjustable retention period, and download of the file.

It runs 100% on your own server, with no API key and no outside service. Compatible with WordPress 6.0 and above, PHP 8.0 and above.