How To Back Up Your Woocommerce Site: A Step-By-Step Guide
It is crucial to know how to back up WooCommerce databases properly and securely to ensure smooth online transactions. WooCommerce database backups should be something you start thinking about as soon as you open your online shop.
Your WooCommerce store will be your bread and butter. It is everything. It’s the same thing as losing your family and your business, right?
Let’s now talk about how to back up WooCommerce so you can protect the most important thing of your life, your online store.
What are WooCommerce Backups and how do they work?
Imagine that you are working on a book, and Microsoft Word is your editor. It is likely that the book project will take several weeks, if not months. Do you save your work when it is finished?
It’s not. It is necessary to save it every day, so you don’t lose all of your hard work.
Backups of your website are exactly the same as saving Word files. Your WooCommerce website may contain many files and databases. Taking a backup is like saving your Word file.
How do WooCommerce Backups Work?
Let me explain what backups are in WordPress and WooCommerce realm.
For example, you made a backup of WooCommerce today and stored all files in a secure location. You find out that there is an important update to your plugins five days later. You update the plugin. But sadly, your site breaks.
Do you need to panic? No.
You’ll be able to access a backup that is only 5 days old. That backup will allow you to restore your site as needed.
Why is Backup WooCommerce Database so Important?
It’s a great thing that you are reading it instead of ignoring it.
Backups of WooCommerce databases are like having a duplicate car key. It’s like taking every precaution to protect your office or home. It’s like an insurance for your valuable assets.
Online shopping is no different. You are more vulnerable online than offline. One error or one misstep can cause you to lose everything. Let’s take a look at the many things that can go wrong when you have a WooCommerce store.
- Crashing your WooCommerce store can be a possibility
There are many reasons why your WooCommerce store could crash, from high traffic during the festive season to malicious cyber-attack.
This is one of the downsides to using WordPress for your eCommerce store. WordPress and WooCommerce are free, open-source, and manageable. They require regular maintenance. Your store could crash if you aren’t careful with its technical maintenance.
You can avoid website crashes by choosing a reliable, secure WordPress hosting provider. You should also ensure that you have the resources necessary to handle your traffic load.
Hosting is a service where you pay what you get. You can’t afford to pay too much if you don’t have enough bandwidth or you compromise security. Your website will crash in all of these situations.
- It can be hacked and made a victim of hacking.
One, WooCommerce is extremely popular with a large number of themes and plugins. Third-party themes and plugins that you use on your website are the most problematic. Hackers will take down your website if there is a vulnerability to a plugin or theme.
You can simply increase your security and avoid plugins or themes that are not from trusted authors. These hacking incidents will be kept to a minimum by regular maintenance and proactive security measures
- WooCommerce Sites Can Be Broken Accidentally
WooCommerce stores are not immune to errors. Sometimes it’s a tiny piece of code that isn’t in the right place. It could be a simple plugin update or theme change. There is a possibility that your site will be broken every time you update a theme or plugin.
It’s software, guys! It can break for many reasons.
How to Backup WooCommerce Database
In case you didn’t know, WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress CMS. The backup of WooCommerce is the same as backing up WordPress. WooCommerce has the same WP files as other WordPress sites. The process will be identical to a regular WordPress site backup.
There are three options to backup your WooCommerce store
- Manual method
- Use a WooCommerce backup plugin, either free or paid
- Use a service provided by your hosting company
The Manual Method to Back Up WooCommerce Stores
Let’s now talk about manually backing up WooCommerce databases without any plugins.
Let’s reconsider our decision to go manual before we do so. There are so many plugins available that it makes no sense to do it manually.
One reason is plugin bloat. Perhaps you have a small store with limited data backup. It would be a good idea to back up your WooCommerce store manually, rather than adding another plugin.
Two steps are required to backup your WooCommerce store manually
- Take a backup of your website files
- Backup of the database
Backup Your Site Files
Log in to your cPanel Account, which is provided by your hosting company, to backup your site files. Scroll down to find the File Manager App.
Select the website that you wish to back up and click the link to open the document root folder.
The next screen will display a list of files. Select Zip Archive to choose the compression type. Change the name of the zipped folder to something more descriptive like your site-backup-date.zip
Click on Compress Files to wait for the files to compress.
Click on the Reload button now to view your zip folder in the file list.
Next, download the zip file and store it securely in a remote place. Simply highlight the file and click on the Download button in the top menu. Select the destination folder to download.
It may take some time to download, depending on how large your files are and the speed of your internet connection.
Once you have done this, all files on your site are now backed up. Next, backup your database.
Backup your WooCommerce database
You will need the database name to backup WordPress or WooCommerce databases.
This is particularly important if there are multiple WordPress installations within your hosting account. It is unlikely that you would be able to recall the database name by heart.
Open the wpconfig.php file in the File Manager app to find the database name.
Find the line in the PHP text file that looks like the following:
//** The name of the WordPress database */
define (‘DB_NAME’, ‘your-database-name’);
You have your database name. It was there!
To back up your database, you can now open phpMyAdmin in your cPanel dashboard.
Two panels are available in PHPMyAdmin: left and right. The left panel lists the database names, while the right panel displays the tables within that particular database.
Open the WooCommerce database from the left panel.
Click Export on the top menu.
Next, select Quick as the export option and SQL as your format. Next, choose the destination folder to which you wish to save your database.
Once you click OK, your database will be backed up and stored in the location that you choose. The database will be automatically backed up and stored at the location that you choose.
Now you have both your site files as well as your database backed up.
How to backup WooCommerce database using a plugin
Although the manual method is not difficult, it is not recommended that you rely on your human brain for the most important WooCommerce maintenance tasks.
UpdraftPlus is used to backup WooCommerce databases
There are many backup plugins available, both paid and free, but you can use UpdraftPlus to automate backups of your WooCommerce store.
UpdraftPlus allows you to set automatic backups every week and the plugin will keep the backup for the specified number of weeks. Old backups will then be automatically deleted.
UpdraftPlus allows you to link your Google or Dropbox accounts, so you can securely store backups and prevent them from being lost in the event of a site crash.
The plugin makes it easy to restore your site. To restore your site from a backup, simply open the UpdraftPlus settings screen and click on the Restore button.
Here’s what to do if your site crashes or you are unable to access the admin area.
- You can delete and reinstall WordPress or WooCommerce.
- Reinstall the UpdraftPlus plug-in
- To retrieve your backups, link your Google and Dropbox accounts
- These can be restored to your site
To backup, your WooCommerce store, use the service of your hosting provider
Backups of WooCommerce stores can be done easily by using the backup service offered by your hosting provider.
You should use a reputable WordPress hosting company to ensure that you have reliable backups. If you have an issue with your website, a low-quality or cheap hosting provider will not be able to back up it.
Do you need help with eCommerce development? We at Woocommerce development agency provide top-quality and reliable eCommerce services to companies. Get a free consultation today.
