Backup WordPress Without a Plugin or FTP

I thought doing backup WordPress site entirely was difficult. Because we have to go to our database, but I have done so many times as I moved this blog to many hosts before, and it was not so difficult as in the first time.

I hope you won’t need to restore your website. But besides backing up the whole site, knowing how to restore is also very important.

Why do you have to know how to backup a WordPress Site?

For many years of blogging so far, there are many reasons why you need to do the complete backup of your WP site. Moving server, being hacked, etc. So I think it’s really useful to be able to make a backup of your cool site. And then restore it back when you need to.

I can imagine how terrible it is. After working on our blog for a long time, and spend time or money on it, and suddenly, when a disaster occurs, we can’t do anything about it. Of course, we all don’t want this bad thing to happen.

You may need a local WordPress version of your site

I always try everything on my local WordPress website. If I installed WordPress locally and do what I want by trying stuff.

If you want to install it on your PC or Mac, my two videos will guide you how. For mac users, visit this page, and for Windows users check this post.

Besides doing the manual backup, I am also using a useful backup plugin you can find it here.

The plugin is called WP-DB-Backup. This plugin is useful since you don’t need to backup your database manually. I mean it can be scheduled.

My tips are automatically and regularly backup the database with the plugin, and send it to my email, and doing exporting database from PHP manually at least once a month, together with backing up your whole website files.

What are things to manually backup?

These are the most important files you need to backup, definitely:

• Is my site loading fast? I use this shared hosting
• Try my theme >

1. Database. This is where your posts or pages stored, comments, and many plugins or theme settings.

2. Images inside uploads folder inside wp-content folder.

3. Premium themes or plugins and configurations if there are any.

4. Important files, as wp-config.php, .htaccess, or any folders like download folders, affiliate links folders, and some other verification files if there are any.

How do I backup my WordPress Site?

Export WordPress Database using phpMyAdmin

I personally would backup the whole files in your root, so you’ll have everything back up.

The reason is, I have many verification files from Yahoo, Google, and other folders like downloads besides .htaccess files, so I would just back up everything.

Let’s get started. I recommend you to do this whole process at least once a month, and if you post more frequently, like once a day, you should do it more often too.

Steps to backup WordPress

1. Export your database manually from phpMyAdmin. Follow this tutorial first.
Once it is downloaded in your computer I will save it in a folder, let’s say, my site is web6.org so the folder will be named and structured as below. (just an example)

web6.org
db
theyear
the month
the database saved here.

2. Go back to cPanel Home, navigate to File – File Manager, and check the checkbox that says “Show hidden files” because we also want to download .htaccess file. I personally have my .htaccess full of codes for example, to prevent hotlinking images, the redirect, etc.

3. Once you see your WordPress files, you can click on “Select All” icon, and then click “Compress” icon. This will generate .zip file of your whole site which is downloadable.

Actually, you can also transfer the files via FTP, but in my opinion, it takes a lot slower, and we are not 100% sure if the files are all downloaded properly.

4. Name the file anything you like, but I would name it as my site description and the date when I download it.

You should yourfilename.zip in your host, if you don’t, you can click on Reload button on the top.

5. Download the .zip file to your computer, once you’re done, delete it from your server. It is very important since you don’t want people downloading your site files.

To delete, select the file name, and click on “Delete” icon.

Also depends on how big your site is, the download process may need forever, but we need to do this if we want to backup our site ourselves.

I hope this helps.