How to Avoid Data Loss on a Website

It takes time and effort to build a website and even experienced developers can’t sit back and admire their work after less than an hour. Even if you use a content management system like WordPress, you still have to choose a suitable template, customize it, add plugins, and of course fill your site with exciting content. You may be able to have the bare bones of a website within a few hours, but creating a rich, SEO optimized and useful website is likely to take weeks, if not months of your life.

Can you imagine the pain of losing everything on your website? How would you feel if hackers stole your data or targeted your server with a DDoS attack? Even if you could recover the data, your brand reputation would remain compromised, and if confidential data was stolen,you could be in trouble with the law.

There is no way to completely secure a website, but with a bit of time, effort and money, you can take steps to secure data and make sure you don’t lose anything, accidentally or otherwise.

Accidental Errors

Accidents happen. We are all human after all. You could spend hours writing website content, only to see your work lost when the hard drive fails. For this reason, it’s very important that you take regular backups of your website. Secure data recovery techniques offered by Secure Data Recovery can help retrieve data from a damaged hard drive, but prevention is always better than cure.

Run regular backups through cPanel or install FTP software and take backups manually. However you elect to run backups, just make sure you perform them regularly. Running backups once a year is not enough, especially when you have a large website. Ideally, run backups at least once a week, but daily is a good option if you make changes every day.

Website Changes

The beauty of website design is that you can make changes whenever you feel like giving your site a new "look”. A new theme template can work wonders if your site is looking a bit old. It’s also a good idea to refresh content every once in a while, as this encourages search engines to crawl your website more often.

Unfortunately, though, making significant changes can lead to unwelcome problems, so it’s always a good idea to take a backup before you update the website or install a new WordPress update. That way you can restore the site if anything goes wrong.

Website Security

There are many ways to protect a website from hackers. HTTPS is essential if you accept payments on your site or you are storing confidential information, but the most obvious way to protect a website and its content is to keep software and plugins updated at all times, especially third-party plugins. Use website security tools to check for vulnerabilities and fix them as soon as possible.

Don’t wait for the unthinkable to happen. Have a risk management plan in place to protect your website.