How Often Should a Website Be Backed Up?
Somebody asks you this after something has already gone wrong, or right before it does. A daily backup sounds like the obviously correct answer, and for a lot of sites it is, but the real answer depends on how much the site changes and how much you can afford to lose if the worst backup scenario happens: the moment right before the most recent one ran.
This sets out how to work out the right frequency for your specific site, not just repeat the default advice, and it sits alongside the rest of GoodHost’s security and backups guides.
Short answer: Back up as often as you could stand to lose the changes made since the last backup, and no less than that. For most active WordPress or ecommerce sites, that means daily. For a static brochure site updated a few times a year, weekly or even monthly is often enough.
What actually determines the right backup frequency?
The right frequency is set by how much content or transaction data changes between backups, not by a generic rule everyone should follow. A busy WooCommerce store processing orders every hour has a completely different risk profile to a five-page site for a local tradesperson that gets updated twice a year.
Ask a simple question: if you had to restore from your last backup right now, what would you lose? If the honest answer is a day’s worth of blog comments, that’s a different problem to losing a week of paid orders. Work out that gap first, then choose a frequency that keeps it small enough to live with.
- How often is new content, orders or form submissions added?
- Would losing a day of data be annoying or genuinely damaging?
- Does the site take payments or store customer information?
- How often do you or a developer make code or plugin changes?
How often should an ecommerce site be backed up?
Ecommerce sites should generally be backed up daily at minimum, and some high-volume stores benefit from more frequent database backups specifically, since orders, stock levels and customer records change constantly and every hour of data loss has a direct dollar cost attached.
Files (theme, plugins, product images) change far less often than the database (orders, customers, stock), so it’s reasonable to treat them differently. A daily full backup covers both, but if your platform allows it, more frequent, lighter database-only snapshots between full backups reduce how much you could lose in a worst case.
| Site type | Typical change frequency | Reasonable backup frequency |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce store | Constant (orders, stock) | Daily, database more often if possible |
| Active blog or news site | Daily or several times a week | Daily |
| Membership or booking site | Daily (bookings, member data) | Daily |
| Small business brochure site | A few updates a year | Weekly to monthly |
| Site mid development or redesign | Multiple changes per day | Before and after every significant change |
Is daily backup always necessary?
No, and treating it as mandatory for every site wastes storage and, on some platforms, wastes money for no real benefit. A brochure site that gets edited a handful of times a year loses almost nothing by being backed up weekly instead of daily, because there’s rarely a meaningful gap in what a restore would actually recover.
Where daily backups earn their keep regardless of how static the content is: right before and after any plugin update, theme change or migration. Those are exactly the moments things break, so an on-demand manual backup taken immediately before a change is worth more than a scheduled one from three days ago.
- Take a manual backup before any plugin, theme or core update
- Take a manual backup before a migration or major redesign
- Keep the scheduled frequency matched to normal content velocity, not the exception
- Increase frequency temporarily during a launch, sale period or campaign
How many backup copies should you actually keep?
Keeping only the single most recent backup is a common and risky shortcut, because if a problem goes unnoticed for a few days, that most recent backup may already contain the fault. A short retention window of the last several backups, not just the latest, gives you somewhere to go if the newest one turns out to be compromised too.
This matters especially for hacks and slow-developing plugin conflicts, where the damage isn’t obvious the day it happens; the wider process for dealing with a hack once you find one is covered in what to do in the first hour after a hack. If you only keep yesterday’s backup and the problem started a week ago, yesterday’s backup is already broken. GoodHost includes daily backups on cPanel hosting plans with JetBackup handling restores, which gives a rolling window to work from rather than a single snapshot.
Where should backups actually be stored?
Backups stored only on the same server as the live site are vulnerable to the exact same failure that might take the site down in the first place, whether that’s a hardware fault, a hack, or a full disk. A copy stored somewhere separate, off the same physical server or account, is what actually protects you.
This doesn’t need to be complicated. Most backup tools and hosting control panels support pushing a copy to remote storage automatically as part of the same scheduled job, so it isn’t extra manual work once it’s configured once. Off-server backups are also one item on a longer list worth working through once, which the website security checklist for Australian businesses sets out in full.
If you’ve never actually confirmed a restore works, treat that as unfinished business rather than a nice-to-have. The full process, including testing before going live, is covered in how to restore a website from backup.
Frequently asked questions
Is it bad to back up a website too often?
Not in terms of protection, but it does use more storage and, on some platforms, more server resources during the backup process itself. For most sites, matching frequency to actual content changes is more efficient than backing up as often as technically possible.
Do I need separate backups for files and the database?
Many backup tools bundle both together automatically, which is simplest for most site owners. Separating them makes sense mainly for high-traffic ecommerce sites where the database changes far more often than the files.
Does GoodHost back up my website automatically?
Daily backups are included on GoodHost’s cPanel hosting plans, with JetBackup handling emergency restores through the control panel rather than requiring a separate backup plugin.
What’s the difference between a full backup and an incremental backup?
A full backup captures everything each time it runs. An incremental backup only captures what changed since the last one, which is faster and smaller but depends on the full backup it’s built from still being intact.
Should I keep my own backup copy even if my host backs up automatically?
It’s a reasonable extra layer of safety, particularly before major changes like a plugin update or migration, since it puts a recent restore point directly in your control rather than only relying on the schedule.
If your current backup routine is more guesswork than plan, the security page sets out what’s included on GoodHost’s hosting plans and is a reasonable place to check what you’re actually covered by right now.