Hackers! They are everywhere. Almost everyday there are stories in the news about one service or another getting hacked. We hear about store chains, hosting companies and even credit card processing services. What rarely makes the news are the hundreds of individuals who lose their websites each day.
Each day individual accounts are broken into and their websites are taken over. The people who do this replace what was there with different information. Sometimes it is about a cause they are trying to get the word out about. Sometimes it is porn. And other times they just redirect the entire site to somewhere else. They even add code to the site that places malware, spyware or viruses on the computers of anyone who goes to the site…your site.
Yes it can happen to you…
It can happen to any site on the internet. No site is 100% safe.
However one of the worst parts is what happens once the changes have been discovered. You can get rid of the bad coding. You can change the domain name back to point where it should. So you can stop the damage, sometimes pretty easily.
What is usually harder is getting back what you had there before the changes were made. Getting your site back the way you had it. The more you use your site the harder getting it back the way it was can be. Pages, photos, blog posts, purchase buttons, the theme, links, and everything else has to be recreated, sometimes completely from scratch depending the the amount of damage done.
However there is a way to get it all back within minutes. There are plugins that can be installed on your website that will backup the entire thing. If you don’t have one already, you need to have one installed and set up.
We get calls and emails almost every week from someone who has lost their site and is having to start all over. The first thing we ask them is “Do you have a backup?” Nine times out of ten the answer is no.
Do you have a backup of your website? Are you protecting your website? Do you have a plugin installed and set up that is able to automatically run regular backups of your site?
The plugin I recommend is Backup Creator. It is a WordPress plugin and can be set up to run automatically on a set schedule. One of the things I like the most about this plugin is it backs up everything. Literally everything. Other plugins will backup the content of your site. You can manually backup the photos, the theme and the plugins. But there are not many ways to backup the entire site and everything about it. And most of those options do not happen automatically.
By having a backup of your site you can take the backup and run the steps and have your site back up and running within minutes of discovering an issue. You can be back in business with very little change. The only things you lose are any changes since your last backup.
I have all of our sites set to automatically backup each week. Anytime I make any changes to the theme or am planning on running any upgrades to WordPress or plugins, I manually run a backup (just in case there is an issue).
If something were to happen to any of my sites the most I would lose is a week’s worth of blog posts. Maybe a page or two that had been created in the last week. But losing those things is better than losing 3 years worth of posts, pages, purchase buttons, photos and videos.
So backup, backup, backup and protect your websites from all of the things that can happen each day on the internet.