One morning your phone rings. A patient wants to book an appointment but can't get onto your site. Or a customer wants to look at your menu and all they see is a blank white page. You look at the same page and try to work out what happened. If the site is back in a few hours, the damage is small. If it isn't, you will never know how many people found you that day and gave up.
Most business owners only think about this once it has happened to them. Yet the preparation is simple: an up-to-date copy of your site, kept somewhere separate from the site itself. In this article I explain what a website backup is, how sites get lost, and which questions to put to whoever looks after your site. You don't need to do anything technical. You only need to ask the right questions.
What exactly is a backup?
A backup is a copy of your website. Your pages, your articles, your photos, the messages from your contact form and your settings are all stored together in one package. If the site is damaged or deleted, that copy can be used to bring it back exactly as it was.
Think of a photocopy of your important papers kept somewhere else. If your office floods, the originals are gone but the photocopy is safe. If it sits in the same drawer, it is lost too. The copy must be kept away from the place where the site lives.
The computer that holds your site's files is called a server. Your hosting company rents that server to you. Ideally, your backup is stored outside that server, in a different place.
How can a site disappear?
The reasons are usually ordinary rather than dramatic. These are the situations I see most often with my clients:
- A faulty update: the site software is updated, something breaks, and the page stops opening.
- An attack: someone gets into your site without permission and changes or deletes content.
- A hosting problem: the hosting company has a technical failure, moves its servers, or closes down.
- An unpaid invoice: the hosting or domain name expires, nobody notices, and after a while the site is suspended.
- Accidental deletion: someone working on the site removes the wrong page, the wrong folder, or the whole site.
- Losing contact with the person who built it: the designer is unreachable and holds the login details.
What happens to your business without a backup?
A site without a backup has to be rebuilt from scratch. Preparing the texts, photos and design again can take weeks. During that time you have no site and you don't appear on Google.
If the old pages and addresses can't be rebuilt, the trust Google has built up in your site over the years can suffer too. Restoring from a backup, on the other hand, is often done the same day, sometimes within a few hours. That is the difference: a short interruption on one side, weeks of loss on the other.
There is also a hidden cost. If you were running ads while the site was down, people who click land on an empty page and your ad budget is wasted. If your address is printed on your business card, everyone who looks it up fails to find you. Email tied to your site address can be affected too.
What you can check yourself
You can check these without any technical knowledge:
- Find out the name of your hosting company and whether you have your login details.
- Note the dates your hosting and domain name are paid and which card is used. Put the card's expiry date in your calendar.
- Make sure your site's admin password is recorded with you, not only with the person who built the site.
- Ask when the site was last changed. A backup should be taken before every major change.
Questions to ask your hosting company or web designer
These five questions put you on safe ground. If the answers are vague, there is a problem.
| Question | What a good answer sounds like |
|---|---|
| Are backups being taken? | "Yes, automatically." |
| How often? | At least weekly. Daily for sites that change often. |
| Where are they stored? | Somewhere separate from the server the site runs on. |
| Has a restore ever been tested? | "Yes, on this date, and it worked." |
| Do I have a copy? | "Yes, we can give you one." |
The fourth is the most important. A backup that can't be restored is not a backup. I have seen backups taken faithfully for years that wouldn't open when needed. Ask "has it been tested?"
The fifth matters for your independence. If a copy of your site is with you, your work stays in your hands even if you fall out with the hosting company or the person who built the site.
What the specialist should do
This part is not your job but the job of the person doing the work:
- Set up backups to run automatically, rather than relying on someone remembering.
- Keep a copy of each backup away from the server the site runs on.
- Test restoring from a backup at regular intervals and report the result to you.
- Take an extra backup before any big update or change.
- Tell you in writing who to call if something happens and how quickly you can expect a reply.
This is usually a few hours of setup, after which the system runs by itself. The time depends on the size of your site and your hosting company.
A good specialist also prepares a short written disaster plan: who to call when the site goes down, roughly how long recovery will take, and what to tell customers meanwhile. It fits on one page and helps enormously in a crisis.
Frequently asked questions
My hosting company says it already takes backups. Is that enough?
On its own, no. The hosting company's backup often sits in the same place as your site, and if you fall out with the company you may not be able to reach it. A copy should be with you or somewhere separate.
How often should backups be taken?
It depends on how often your site changes. For a brochure site updated a few times a year, a weekly backup is often enough. For a site that takes online orders or bookings, a daily backup is safer.
Do backups slow the site down?
A well-set-up backup system doesn't cause slowness that visitors notice. Backups are usually taken at night, when the site is quiet.
If a backup is restored, do I lose my latest changes?
Changes made after the backup was taken may be lost. That is why frequency matters. With a daily backup, at most one day of changes goes missing.
Next step
The day your site won't open is too late to start preparing. Ask your hosting company or web designer the five questions above today and write down the answers. If something is missing, we can fill the gap together. If you are planning a new site, backups become part of the plan from the start. For details, see my website design page.