How a good Wordpress Backup Site Helpful?

What Is A Staging Site?

A staging site is a test platform or an experiment ground where one can check their recent updates before making those changes in the live website. Basically you create a substitute site of your main website to test new codes or plugins and naming them as staging site.

Before making any update in your live site, you should always go for a staging site and see whether those changes are required or if they are generating any errors. Most of the times a new code or a plugin creates a lot of errors and system issues which often results in crashing of your website. The correct way of implementing a new change in your website is going through staging sites.

A staging environment can be created by making subdomains and subdirectories of your main site. These subdomains and directories will be reflected as another site where you can copy the data of your live site and use it as a testing ground. And when you are able to generate satisfying results, update the same changes to your live site.

If you don’t use a staging platform for testing and make changes directly. There is a huge risk of you getting infected by some malware or ransomware and end up losing your entire business or website shutdown. Whenever direct changes are made your website becomes unavailable for few minutes according to size of code. So you cannot make frequent changes to your live sites.

And if your customers are hitting your URL and can’t find your site just because you were continuously changing an image which made the website unavailable for more than 20-30 mins or so. Your customer will switch to another site. These things will surely affect your customers and rankings in organic results. If you have recently downloaded a plugin or updated an old one, install and check it in staging site before. Since you are using a staging site you exponentially decrease the risk of damaging your sites.

staging

To create subdomains and subdirectories, go to your cpanel and under the Domains tab you will find an icon labelled as subdomain. When you click on the subdomain icon, a window will appear asking you that subdomain’s name and its document root after filling up those fields, click done. To visit your subdomain, ping its URL on your browser, a blank page will be displayed. Now create a database and FTP account for your subdomain and copy all the files to it.

To copy files and folders from your main site to the staging site. Go to the files tab in your cpanel and browse to the folder where all your themes, plugins are stored. Right click them and click copy, which will display a dialog box asking you the destination. Copy the entire file structure of your live site to the staging environment. In this way you have created a staging site of your main website.

Conclusion:

WordPress staging is a great tool which not only saves your website from getting collapse but also gives you an insight about how your sites will behave after the updating a plugin or a new code. You are not risking anything while using a staging environment, even you can make it better without losing your data or users.

Ensuring your WordPress Security.

Making your site immune to viruses, malware, Trojan horses or hackers is not an easy thing. Therefore WordPress Security is a major issue for all those who are dealing with WP on a daily basis for business or blogging. For ensuring safety of your site you must know what is making it vulnerable.

WP sites are often targeted since WordPress is generally used for blogging. Hence making it an ocean of content. There are various site on the internet, each coded differently for making themselves immune to any external interference but this is also true for the hackers and malware as they also develop different techniques to break into your website..

With the ever changing technology, you can add an iron wall to protect your data but the same iron formula can also be used by some malicious party to break your wall. So there is no such thing as 100% security, everything and anything which is present on the internet shares equal chances of getting hacked or a security breach.

When you can pinpoint the places which can become a potential source of security breach, you might be able to avoid it. These sources could be:

· A malicious code, which is transferred to you or is downloaded by you unknowingly, has the potential to disrupt your entire system.

· Phishing sites, those sites which are disguised as some well-known site to steal your identity and confidential information.

· Malware or viruses, these are the code specifically designed to harm your system and data.

· An insecure websites which provide access to private data without using any user credentials.

When you have a common or predictive username and password, your account can be hacked through brute force or dictionary attacks and so on.

There are numerous ways a person or a program can infiltrate your system, a single security hole is enough. Then how are you going to save your data? Even if you know nothing of data security, we have some key measures which can help you a lot.

WordPress Security.

First thing keep your WordPress and all its plugins & themes updated, since WP itself is working on its security issues and brings it up as an update. So make sure to update your software. Take backups daily, this will help you to restore your data when you met with any problem.

Change your password at regular intervals and do use alphanumeric characters while making one. Check all your file permissions and do not give unnecessary access to anyone. Make use of encryption algorithms to send and receive data, and a two way authentication is must while using FTP

Install a good backup plugin or antivirus for your system and bring up the firewall. Firewall is very helpful against various security breaches. Do not download files and media from any unknown sources, there is a great possibility that they provide you infected files.

Conclusion:

One cannot ensure their WordPress security by simply downloading and installing few backup and security plugins. Security breach can happen with the slightest mistake on your part. You cannot ensure a 100% security of your site but small things can help you to make your data safe and secure.

What is a WordPress Multisite Network?

Multisite is an add-on feature of WordPress, by which one can create multiple sites with the same user credentials & one-time WordPress installation. You don’t even have to download and install plugins and themes for every site that you create. Since the database is shared so one can run the entire network with same plugins and themes.

Well you can have different WP sites on a standalone environment but managing them might be bit troublesome. WordPress multisite feature allows you to create multiple sites and their management very easy. Although the database is shared, there is an option for separate media & files uploading and database tables for each site.

Are you the one who should be using the multisite network? WordPress Multisite network is generally used by business firms having large or small web network of different departments and branches. Since all your website will be sharing the same domain name, making it easier to identify the firm or the company a particular site belongs to.

There are many advantages of using multisite, like you do not need to install WordPress and its dependent plugins or themes every single time. Everything works in one time installation, but you can have different plugins for different sites. You don’t need to create different user credentials for different site, your entire network is accessible through the same username and password.

You can also assign a number of sites to different administrators, which will help you to share workload of maintaining the whole network. While assigning the websites to your colleagues you can restrict their access by configuring their permissions over the network.

As multisite are created by adding sub directories and sub folders to your domain, you can very well use them for creating websites which can be used for question & answer or FAQs, customer support and much more.

WordPress Multisite

Every coin has two faces, with so much advantages, there are some drawbacks of multisite. When you are dealing with large network, managing a huge traffic is problematic. Since the entire network is created by a single domain and shares the same database. There is a great possibility that system failure or if your site is down by any reason, will affect the entire network. And this is also true that if your site hacked or infected, then every site within your network will be infected. Which is a huge drawback, you cannot risk the security of the entire network.

Conclusion:

The multisite lets you create and manage a network of your own, without investing much. It is a one-time installation of your WP, Plugins and themes yet you can install as many plugins and themes you want. Multisite lets you to share resources and database and also it gives you the liberty to create separate database for individual websites. You also have the right to create and delete users who are accessing the websites and restrict them to use the database.

WHAT DOES AN INCREMENTAL BACKUP MEANS?

Incremental backup can be defined as the process of taking backups whenever a change or update is noticed. It compares the previously saved data and then make the new backup. This backup requires to have previous backed up data, it can be a full system backup or a fragment of previous backup.

Unlike the incremental backup, full system backup makes copy of the entire database and its dependent files & folders. Making a full back up every day will fill up all your storage space, creating the redundant copies of the same thing. Taking full backups takes a lot of time and leaves your site unresponsive for some time. This will affect your website’s efficiency, resulting unhappy users.

This will let you save your storage spaces and avoid redundancy. All this without disturbing the basic functionality of your website. Thus backing up your data incrementally will not only save your data but also your resources and users.

Taking backups regularly is a good thing but doing it incrementally is smart. Since the entire backup is made incrementally or you can say it is in small fragments. Which raises the question, how will you restore the whole data, if everything is fragmented? The backup is created in such a way that your site can be recreated as it was before. Overall restoration is possible and is easy. You can also restore a small portion of your site which you think is damaged or you can go for full restoration. And you can do this without concerning about the size of your website or wasting much time.

incremental backup

What if the backup you stored is attacked? With incrementally backing up your data you might feel that your data is safe but just to add some more security, one should save their backed up data in multiple locations. Storing copies of backup in different places will give you a sense of relief. How? Even if 8 out of 10 copies of your backups are deleted or infected in any way, you still have 2 copies of your backups left to work with. Just to be on the safe side always opt for a backup plugin which is providing you this services of making multiple copies of your data.

Backing up data incrementally is ideal for companies or firms having large websites or if you are working in Multisite environment with a huge network of sub sites. Backing up data incrementally is also an obvious choice because it reduces the load on server and other resources. It can easily backup your entire website, irrespective of how large your sites are. It can do the task which could have taken hours in just few minutes. It also help you to manage your storage efficiently by making small changes in the backup file at a time.

Conclusion:

The best part of incremental backups is that, you are not backing up your data, so it will not matter even if you forgot to create backups. Your backup is created, stored and is safe.

What are the best ways you can backup WordPress site?

WordPress is the best Content management system to use for your business. Whether you are any blogger, entrepreneur or wordpress developer, there is always need of a perfect data backup solution. The question is, how you are going to do it?

With the use a good data backup plugin, you can take the backup of your site’s data. It is one of the most trending ways to backup WordPress site. Only data copying isn’t all, you gotta take care of the production site and its overall functions as well. How you are going to do it?

Here I will suggest you about BlogVault, an extremely good backup plugin, that has all the features regarding your ace backup strategies. To know the best ways, you got to know about the features of this tool first. Actually when you know them, it automatically tells you about the best ways to backup wordpress site.

Features of BlogVault -

Data Backup -

backup WordPress site

As per our topic, I have decided to talk about it first. BlogVault offers very essential tools to get the overall data backup of your site. It lets you to perform automatic daily backups, you can perform actions like offsite backup, incremental backups, versioned backups and save all your data into a completely dependent server, independent of your live production site. In this way, you are able to give your creation a safe zone, as you will have all the backups done already, so no question of data loss.

2. Data Security -

Internet has been a great place for the marketers no doubt, but now it has also been a great place for hackers as well. Making a wordpress site makes up a lot of responsibilities for you. Keeping your site safe from problems like, hosting issues, malwares, hacks, incompatible themes or plugins, human errors, or problems like natural disasters, storage issues, server crashes or any other site accidents is a must now. Hence data security is really needed.

3. Data Restoration -

Why you create a data backup, obviously to use them whenever you want right! So data restoration term will be our next topic to discuss. BlogVault provides one click site restoration feature, due to which all you do not have to wait for long hours for your backup to first get ready and then get restored. It also has test restore feature, where you can check whether your backups are correct or not. Besides this there are auto restore, due to which you don’t have to download the large backups.

4. Additional features -

The additional features include a full on WordPress security support, site’s size support, granularity download and free trial also. The best part is that there is lots of work and lots of data will be stored automatically. As BlogVault is a complete package, so you ca use it for performing complex operations like migration and staging as well.

Now it’s your wish to use the features by installing this software. Well, if taken my suggestion, I will definitely recommend BlogVault for you!

Why Is It Important To Backup WordPress Pros & Cons

We all have data saved in our laptops or PCs so that we can use it further whenever needed. What if, one day, accidentally all your data saved gets deleted, what are you going to do? Apart from panicking!

Backup to the rescue!

This is the time when investing in a WordPressBackup comes handy. In this article we will talk about the various ways of backing up WordPress and also the importance, pros and cons of backing up the data through plug in.

So let’s get started.

What Is A WordPress Backup?

This is the backing up of all your data like files, database, websites, contents, plugins, images, themes, blogs, article, etc. into a drive. Or to put this up into simpler words, backing up is duplicating files or all your important data into some other device to avoid losing of important data.

There are three ways by which you can back up your WordPress data locally, mainly –

· Through a Plugin i.e. Online or Cloud storage or

· Humanly on your PC or into any hard drive like Pen drives, USBs, etc.

· Backup download via cPanel.

When This Backup Does Comes Handy?

But the question arises when does this backup comes in use. Basically when we migrate from one web host or URL or domain to a different web host or when we move our WordPress from staging to live domain.

Few features of a good WordPress Backup are –

· It prevents the saved data from any Malware or Hacks, the sensitive information saved online is always free from any malware attacks.

· Storage issues – You can save data without facing any storage issues.

· Human Errors – If you save data manually on a drive, there are chances of duplication or omission of files, to save the efforts and mistakes, these plugins help to save data without error

· Natural disaster – Your data and files are safe even if any natural disaster comes by since it is stored in different files.

·Server Crashes – When you migrate data manually it is observed that the server crashes or by any reason doesn’t respond, keep you stranded in the middle, so to avoid that the data stored locally helps to restore your files hassle free.

What Are The Pros & Cons Of Using WordPress Backup?

WordPress Backup

So coming to the last segment, what could be the Pros and Cons of using a WordPress Backup?

As you know there are ways to back up your WordPress locally but the most reliable way is to use a plugin to store all your data online. Since it’s hassle free and saves a lot of your time. As discussed above manually saving your data into hard drives increases the risk of errors like –

· Omission or duplication of data.

· Storage sense – Since you are going to backing up your data on a daily basis, the new data will be rewritten on the older one because of storage problem, so what you can do is you can use any plugin for backup and be worry free about the storage.

· Security – As far as the security is concerned, saving data online is a threat as it is open to malwares and hacks, so it is always advised to check for security of your data saved online and to save it at multiple locations, so that if by chance any of the copy corrupts, you will still be able to access it through other devices.

· Organization of data – The downloaded data needs to be organized if it is going to be used in future, a lot of energy is wasted when trying to find the right back up file when needed. So it is better to use a plug in that organizes your data accordingly and helps you save the labor.

· Easy to use – A Backup plugin should be easy to use and hassle free, so that it could be used to restore whenever needed saving a lot of time and efforts.

So, a WordPress Backup is always a good option to opt for when you have a lot of things on your table and you don’t want to lose your data. Investing time and labor into saving this data manually or into hard drives is economical but contains a lot of risks, to avoid that invest into a good plugin which will help you with managing, organizing, storing and maintaining security of your data so that you can easily recover and maintain it, making backing up your WordPress experience easier and simpler.

WordPress Staging - How Useful Is It?

WordPress Staging - How Useful Is It?

Staging is an important feature of WordPress, this allows the users to test run their changes before publishing their site LIVE on internet.

This is a very useful process, it can be used to preview or test changes made in the website without going live on the domain. It can be used in two ways one would be directly through the WordPress and the other by a Backup and Restore plugin.

Performing this operation through WordPress site can be tedious as a lot of things are needed to be kept in mind while performing this process whereas with these plugins you can perform this very easily.

Let’s take a look at some of the features that these plugins provide.

1. Sandbox Environment

Staging

It provides sandboxenvironment to the users to try and see how that particular plugin or theme or any other change will actually look before going live on the domain. This saves time and also help the users to get an exact idea of the content that is going to be published.

2. Editing

This feature not only helps users to try their changes but also helps in editing files before actually creating a backup for it without changing the original copy. So if you want to see how those alterations will look before saving it, Staging is the thing for you.

3. Installing Updates

If there are some updates you want to make to these files but are not completely sure of it, then you can use this feature and see if that particular theme or plugin actually goes with your files or not and then install it making it error free.

Same goes with the themes, if you want to apply a particular theme to your website you can test run it here and see how it looks with your website.

4. Site Testing

Making a site on WordPress is a tenuous job a lot of things are to be kept in mind before actually publishing live. This feature helps you in building your site as you can try different themes, plugins or content and see how your site will actually look in real time.

5. Core Files

If you want to change or alter something in the core files but are uncertain if it will go with the existing files or not, you can test it by applying those changes to the files without harming the originally backed up files. As your core files are everything and losing these files will make all your hard work go to waste. To avoid such situations it’s better to test run the updates and see if that really goes with the core files or not.

Thus, being an important and useful feature it helps you to make changes into your core files without ruining the older copy and also helps in editing and running test runs of updates and plugins before going live into the domain so that the percentage of error is reduced and backup remains safe.