How to backup and restore a WordPress site (No plugin needed)

How To Restore A WordPress Site From Backup

WordPress is a popular content management system used by many individuals and organizations to publish and edit web pages. To maintain your website you need to take certain steps to backup and restore it in the event of a disaster. If you’re not using WordPress hosting to host your WordPress site, then backing up can be time-consuming and difficult to do – but very much worth the effort.

What is a backup?

A backup is a recovered file on your computer in case your website gets hacked or gets shut down. Typically, these backups will be stored in a separate location from your website files and will be used to restore your website in the event of a disaster.

Why do you need to backup your WordPress site?

You may need to back up your site for many reasons, including:

In case you or a teammate make a mistake and delete files by mistake
If your site gets hacked
To test and ensure that your site functions properly
To make sure that you don’t lose any data.
You want to move your site to another hosting service.
Bad theme or plugin updates that might break your site

The backup procedure

As the name suggests, this is the built-in backup tool in WordPress.

First, you need to log in to the WordPress dashboard. To do this, use the URL xxx.com/wp-login.php (where xxx stands for your domain name) or xxx.com/wp-admin and it will redirect you to the login page. Once logged in successfully to your dashboard, Navigate to tools then export.

The export section should look like this

To back up the entire site makes sure the button ¨all content¨ is checked under choose what to export, Scroll down and click on the download export file button.

After hitting the download button, a file manager will be opened. It will ask you to enter the location of where you wish to save the backup file.

After you enter the location, click on ok, the backup file should be downloaded to the location you have specified on your laptop. The download time will depend on the size of your site.

How to restore WordPress site from a backup file

In the export section, you will see a list of import options. scroll down to WordPress, click on install now and then click on the run importer.

The next screen will display where you will be prompted to choose the backup file from your computer, the upload file, and the import button will turn blue, click on the button and your files will be imported.