The honest answer: often enough that losing everything since the last one would not hurt.
A reasonable baseline
- Brochure site, updated occasionally: daily automatic backups, kept for 30 days.
- Active blog or business site: daily, plus a manual backup before any significant change.
- Shop taking orders: daily as a minimum, and ideally more frequent database backups, an order placed at 2pm should not vanish in a restore.
Three rules that matter more than frequency
- Off-site. A backup on the same server as the site disappears with the server. It needs to live somewhere else.
- Versioned. Keep several days or weeks of backups, not just the latest. If a problem, a hack, a bad plugin, went unnoticed for a week, last night's backup is already corrupted.
- Tested. A backup you have never restored is a guess. It should be restored to a staging site periodically to prove it works.
Before you make a change
Whatever the schedule, take a manual backup before updating plugins, editing the theme, or changing anything structural. It turns a bad afternoon into a five-minute rollback.
Managed hosting from us includes off-site, versioned, monitored backups as standard. See what that covers.
Still stuck? Send us the details and we'll take a look.
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