Backup ‒ Nobody likes to take it but ends up taking it anyway.
Why?
Because data is power and no one likes being powerless. For your eCommerce store, backup is like an extra lifeline you get while playing a video game.
You have the power to resurrect your website in case it goes down. And trust me, it’s more common than you think. 90% of companies experience some form of downtime, which may result in loss of data, security, productivity, and revenue.
In Unitrends 2019 survey, overall 84% of organizations reported using the cloud to store data.
Being on the internet doesn’t make you impervious to fraud, theft, human error, etc. On the contrary, it makes you more vulnerable. You can lose all your business in a matter of seconds.
In this article, I will tell you how to backup your WooCommerce store and the most affordable and time-saving methods of backup.
But, before I tell you ‘how’ to backup your WooCommerce store, I will explain ‘why’ you should backup your WooCommerce store.
Because “When the why is clear, the how is easy.”
Why You Should Backup Your WooCommerce Store
As I explained earlier, backup is equivalent to a lifeline for your WooCommerce store. You can literally revive your store and minimize your losses.
Time is money and downtime is loss.
Datto reports that “An hour of downtime costs $8,000 for a small company, $74,000 for a medium company, and $700,000 for a large enterprise.”
This stat shows the average cost per hour of enterprise server downtime worldwide in 2019.
As you can see, for 11% of the enterprises, the average cost per hour of downtime went beyond 5 million dollars.
There are several reasons why your WooCommerce store can suffer downtime and I will be talking about all of them.
1. Traffic Rush
Almost every eCommerce store experiences this issue. A swift rise in traffic can be good but only if your store has the capacity to handle that load.
It happens in festive seasons, when you give big discounts and offers on your products. Also, when you launch an excellent product at an affordable price, your traffic is likely to skyrocket.
If the traffic soars beyond your limits, then your website is going to crash and that is not pretty.
First, you are gonna lose a lot of potential and loyal customers. Second, you are gonna lose deals (money) and at last, you may even lose valuable customer data.
Bottom line: A crash depletes your cash.
2. Hackers
This threat is so rampant in the digital world that I could write a book about it. But I will try to explain it in simple words.
Malware attacks are used by hackers to hijack or take over your eCommerce website and demand money to release their hold. Such an attack can keep your site down for a while and that much time is enough to drive your loyal customers away from you.
Avoid storing sensitive customer information on your website like credit and debit card details, account login passwords, etc. Set up a two-factor authentication for users. Use a secure and trusted hosting provider to host your eCommerce website.
You can use online vulnerability tests to see which parts of your eCommerce website are at risk of attacks by hackers.
3. Human Error
One of the top reasons for unplanned downtime is human error. People make mistakes and in eCommerce businesses, mistakes can cost you thousands of dollars.
Errors or mistakes can result from misconfiguration of operational equipment, right-sizing workloads, neglecting website updates, and not following the basic security measures required for eCommerce websites.
All these errors can result in hours of unplanned downtime. The only solution is to hire capable individuals for website management and automate most of the processes.
4. Cloud Outage
Ecommerce websites rely upon cloud computing for business growth. The use of cloud computing provides security, reliability, and much-needed speed to eCommerce websites. But, all these factors can be negatively impacted in the case of a cloud outage.
Cloud outages occur when cloud services are inaccessible due to natural disasters, hardware failures, planned downtime, server issues, and so on. Most cloud service providers restore their services in minutes but sometimes it can take hours.
But as I explained above, even a few minutes of downtime can result in huge financial loss. Moreover, customer dissatisfaction can lower the trustworthiness of your website.
5. Hosting Issues
Many eCommerce store owners make the mistake of opting for a cheaper hosting service when they are starting out but even after they start making profits, they hardly care to switch to a better one.
And that always proves to be fatal to their business. Cheaper hosting services have limitations and they usually compromise with security to decrease the cost which makes you vulnerable to hacking attempts.
Forgetting to renew the hosting agreement is also a reason for website downtime. So, remember to pay your dues on time.
6. DDoS Attacks
“A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.”
Hackers use bot systems to drive high amounts of traffic to any site they want to overwhelm. A sudden spike in traffic sounds inviting but in this case, your website would crash with an unprecedented amount of unwanted traffic.
So, these were the top reasons for eCommerce website downtime and in all these cases, a backup would come in handy to restore your site to normal.
The ‘why’ is clear to you. Now, it’s time to know the ‘how’.
How to Backup Your WooCommerce Store
There are various ways to backup your WooCommerce store and I am gonna tell you the best ones in practice.
But before we go forward, I would like to reinforce the importance of learning methods of backup for WooCommerce stores.
Take a look at the market share of leading e-commerce software platforms and technologies worldwide as of April 2020*
Doubtlessly, WooCommerce is the leading eCommerce platform. Hence, you should learn how to backup your WooCommerce store. And, also learn the methods of restoring Woocommerce.
Manual Backups
Let’s take the bitter pill first. Manual backup is a tough road for most people but it works.
There are two steps to manual backups.
1. Backup of Web Files
Download and install Filezilla which is an FTP tool. You can use the FTP tool of your choice.
Step 1: Login into your site with Filezilla.
Step 2: After successful login, the remote site panel will display your site directory.
Step 3: Access public_html or your website name folder. For example – (websitename.com). After that, right-click on any of those folders or files and choose download, to download it to your local system.
Step 4: To download, you can also drag the folders or files from the remote site panel to any folder in the local site panel. A double click will also work but make sure the destination folder or directory is open on the local site panel.
Step 5: After manually downloading the backup files, encrypt and store them in a zip folder.
How to Manually Restore Website files
Step 1: Enter your credentials and login to Filezilla.
Step 2: After successful login, the remote site panel will display your site directory.
Step 3: Locate public_html and then access your website folder (websitename.com). After that, drag web files from the local site panel into the remote site panel.
Step 4: Make sure to extract your web files if you stored them in a Zip folder. This process is lengthy and complicated. Be careful not to skip any of the processes mentioned above.
This manual restore would always take a long time, sometimes even days. So, you have to endure it.
2. Backup Database
You can take a manual backup of your database with phpmyadmin.
So, I will show you how to access phpmyadmin through the cPanel of your web hosting account and perform a manual backup.
Step 1: Login to your cPanel account or web host account.
Step 2: Navigate to the Database section and click on phpmyadmin.
Step 3: From those tabs on the top of the screen, click on Databases. It will display a list of available databases on the left and on the right panel, the content of the selected database.
Download the wp_config.php file from File Manager to know the name of your database.
Step 4: Select the database you want to export and from the right panel, select all the tables. Then click Export from the tabs on the top.
Step 5: On the next screen, you will have the option to choose the format for database backup. If you are not a technophile like me, then keep the format as default (SQL).
There, you have successfully taken the backup of your database. After the download, make sure to move it to a safe folder.
Now, it’s time to learn how to restore your backup databases.
Reminder: Manually restoring WooCommerce might take up serveral hours, depending on the size of backup.
How to Manually Restore Databases
Step 1: You have to login to you cPanel account.
Step 2: Click on phpmyadmin from the Database section.
Step 3: Click on Databases tab to display a list of available databases.
Step 4: Now, to restore your data, select a database from the list.
Step 5: Go to the ‘Import’ tab. On the next screen, Click on “Choose File” and select the database backup you want to load from your local server or computer.
Step 6: keep the format “SQL” and Click on the “Go”. Now, wait till the restore is complete.
Both backup and restore takes a good amount of time. Once the restore is complete, go check your site to make sure it worked.
Reminder: If you are choosing manual way to backup your WooCommerce store, make sure you have enough time in hands because this process is understandably more time consuming than the automated backups.
Backup Your WooCommerce Store With a Plugin
You can also take WooCommerce backup by using a plugin. Free plugins are good but often lack important features, so it’s better to use paid plugins.
Lucky for you, we have got the “Backup and Restore” plugin which helps you backup your WooCommerce store and It has several awesome features:
1. Backup and restore can help you backup your site files and database to the local server. Site files can be downloaded in zip format and database in SQL format.
2. The quick backup feature only takes the backup of files modified after the last update.
3. You can take the full backup of your website on Dropbox. The credentials you need are Dropbox API key, Dropbox API Secret, and Dropbox Access Token.
4. You can also upload backups on your Amazon S3 account, One Drive account, and Google drive account with correct credentials. Restoration is allowed from all of these services.
5. This plugin also notifies you about the availability of space on the server.
6. Schedule the deletion of previous backups according to the time period or according to the number of backups. It helps you save time and disk space.
It’s clear from the above-mentioned features that this WooCommerce backup plugin does all the tasks associated with taking backups.
Backup With Hosting Provider
All hosting providers have a backup policy. WooCommerce has official hosting partners that also offer backup and restore services.
In simple words, you can backup your WooCommerce store with help of your hosting provider.
Inmotion is the hosting provider for us here at MakeWebBetter. It offers several features including WooCommerce backup.
You can take a full WooCommerce backup using Inmotion cPanel. But first, you need to set up an AMP account because through AMP, you can access your website’s cPanel.
How to Perform a Full WooCommerce Backup
Step 1: Login to your cPanel through AMP account.
Step 2: Click on ‘Backup’ in the Files section.
On the backup screen, you will see several options, like Full Backup, Account Backups, etc. Remember, a full backup creates an archive of all your website files and configuration. So, you can use that backup to migrate your WooCommerce website.
Step 3: Click on download ‘Download a Full Website Backup’.
Here you will see all the options available to you for taking a full backup. You can select any of the given locations to save the backup.
Step 4: Choose Home Directory from the Backup Destinations.
Step 5: Provide your email address below if you want to receive a notification after backup completion. If not, then select “Do not send email notification of backup completion.”
Step 6: Click Generate Backup to start the backup creation process. You may have to wait because the process takes some time.
After downloading the backup, you can find it in your /home directory, begin with backup, and include the date. For example, backup-10.26.2016_15-51-32_example.tar.gz C keeps it in a secure location.
How to Backup Your Database
Step 1: Start by logging in to your cPanel.
Step 2: In the Files section, click on ‘Backup’.
Step 3: Under the “Download a MySQL Database Backup” section, click and select your database by name.
Step 4: It will be downloaded on your device as a compressed .sql.gz file.
There, you have successfully learned how to restore and backup your WooCommerce website files and databases.
Just make sure to store backups in a safe location on your computer or local server. And delete them after their use.
Final Words
In this article, I have explained a lot about WooCommerce backup and restore. And I hope it helps you. Remember, some of these methods are complex and so, I suggest you practice these on your WooCommerce website.
“Hope for The Best and Prepare For The Worst.”
And hey, check out our other blog articles if you want to learn more about best eCommerce practices.