Running an e-commerce website has unique and exciting challenges that non e-comm sites needn’t worry about. One of those challenges is how best to manage backups.
Every site needs a backup plan, what’s so special about e-commerce?
Most website managers don’t add new content, or edit existing content, all that often. This means that the number of changes in between backups is relatively small. For these types of sites, even our Essential Support daily backup schedule could be considered overkill. Sites that have more frequent updates, have a high amount of traffic, or a large commenting community certainly need daily backups. But what about an e-commerce website?
The best backup schedule for an e-commerce site is to track and save changes on a real-time basis.
As orders come in, new customers are added, order statuses are updated, and other incremental changes to the database are made. Losing even one order or new customer is clearly unacceptable. Having the ability to quickly restore data on a real-time basis should be the goal of every e-commerce site manager.
How to set up a real-time backup schedule
The easiest way is, of course, to let us do it for you with our WooCommerce Support Plan. You’ll get real-time backups along with all the other awesome things our service provides – like our famous 30-minute fixes!
If you’d prefer to do it on your own, there currently are no free plugins available to run real-time backups. You’ll need to use one of the available services. Currently there are three: VaultPress, Blogvault, and BackupBuddy Live. Of the three Blogvault is our recommendation. It backs up off-site and through iterations rather than a brute-force full backup on your server.
Set up Blogvault
Setting up Blogvault is very easy. Simply install their plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. Once activated, you will see a link to connect to your Blogvault account, or to create a new one. Once the site has been connected, your site will get an initial backup – both files and plugins, and you’re all set.
Summing it up
For any website, the risk of data loss is a serious issue. As an online retailer, data integrity is mission critical. Data loss or corruption can cost you time, money, and customer trust. Real-time backups are the best way to protect your e-commerce
