What’s most likely to scare people away from using WordPress is the fear that they will lose their website if it is hacked, they make a mistake or something breaks. This is why it’s important to have a contingency plan.
You can minimise the danger of your site being hacked by keeping your plugins up to date. The WordFence plugin has a number of security features which include emails to tell you when an update is required. When you log into your WordPress dashboard you’ll be prompted to carry out the update, which is easy to do.
However, it’s impossible to 100% guarantee that your website will be safe.
Many hosts keep backups so, if something did go wrong, then your host may be able to simply replace your site with a copy taken before the problem occurred, and this would probably be your first port of call.
However, you should also be keeping your own backups in case this isn’t possible.
UpdraftPlus is one of several plugins that you could use to back up your website. There’s a free version, or you could pay for the premium version for extra features. WPBeginner have a useful tutorial – “How to Backup & Restore Your WordPress Site with UpdraftPlus”.
For a “belt and braces” approach, you could also use the All-in-One Migration plugin to create a copy of your site at a point where you are happy with it. Unlike UpdraftPlus, the free version plugin isn’t used to create regular (e.g. weekly) backups but you could run it to backup your site when you’ve made some major changes. Paid extensions are available to enable you to schedule regular backups.
If you are prepared to pay a monthly fee for extra peace of mind, then it’s worth considering BlogVault (as at the time of writing you can get 20% off BlogVault by purchasing via WPBuilds.)
It’s worth remembering that, if your site has only a few pages and no blog (or just a few blog entries) then, as a last resort, it may not be too big an undertaking to recreate it from scratch. If you have kept copies of the text and images, and a record of the colours, fonts and settings used, then the site could be rebuilt. This would be more work than simply restoring from a backup, but may not be as devastating as you might fear.
If the problem you are facing is a hacked website, and you can’t solve the problem by restoring it from a clean backup then you may need to hire someone to help you. A professional service may be able to clean up your site without having to resort to deleting and rebuilding it. If you find yourself in this situation, companies you could contact include Hack Repair, WP Fixit, WordFence site cleaning service and Sucuri.
