How To Backup A Site

Performing a manual backup in WP Engine is very easy. You need always to create backup points of the site before you do any of the following;

• Site updates for themes or plugins
• Install a plugin or a theme
• Uninstall a plugin or a theme
• Make major changes to the site content.

Performing a manual backup in WP Engine is very easy. You need to always take backup points of the site when you are going to do site updates, install or uninstall plugins and themes or before you make major changes to the content.

This allows you to restore the site to a stable version in case any of the changes do not go as planned.

In fact, you should test these major changes in a testing environment. This could be staging or development before rolling them out to production.

As discussed earlier, WP Engine offers both automatic backups and manual backups. Automatic backups are system generated thus we will not look at how to create them. Instead, in this lesson, we will focus on how you can create a manual backup point.

To do this, follow the steps below;

1. Go to the User Portal

Log into WP Engine and at the User Portal, select the site environment you would like to backup.

2. Go to Backup points

Click ‘Backup points‘ to go to the backups page for that given environment.

3. Create Backup

Click the ‘Create Backup‘ button at the top right side corner of the screen. A pop-up form will appear on your screen.

4. Fill in the Backup form

Submit details in the form fields. These two fields captured here are;

• Backup description, for example, “Pre – Yoast Plugin Update“. The backup description should be understandable to anyone.
• Email to send a notification when the backup point has been created. If you need to notify several emails. Add these while separating them using commas if you need to notify several emails.

5. Create environment backup

Click “Create Backup” to start the backup process.

You will receive an email notification once the backup process is done.