How Often Should You Back Up Your Website?

The right backup frequency depends less on a fixed rule and more on how much data you'd be comfortable losing if something went wrong today.

The Core Question: How Much Can You Afford to Lose?

If your site changes constantly — a busy e-commerce store, a membership site with daily sign-ups — a day of lost data can mean real lost revenue. A mostly static brochure site can tolerate a longer gap between backups.

General Guidelines

E-commerce and membership sites: daily backups, minimum. Actively updated blogs or business sites: at least weekly. Rarely updated brochure sites: monthly is often sufficient, though more frequent never hurts.

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule

Keep at least 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of storage, with 1 copy stored off-site. This protects you even if your hosting account and your local backup both fail at once.

Automate It

Manual backups get forgotten. Automated backup schedules through Plesk remove the human error factor entirely.

Test Your Backups

A backup you've never tested restoring is a backup you can't fully trust. Periodically confirm you can actually restore from it.

Further Reading

• SSL Certificates
• Talk to Our Security Team
• Get Cyber Safe – Government of Canada