Once WordPress is installed on your server, the VERY FIRST thing to do is to create…a Gmail account dedicated to your website!
Because the second thing to do is to setup a backup/restore solution! And Google drive will be a free large enough cloud backup space. If you are interested in Analytics, it is a good thing to use a unique Gmail account for each website.
On WordPress sites, there are nearly 4 billions Cyber Attacks… per day. And even if you take great care of your website safety, no one can insure that your website will be up and running the next day. In 2020, all the websites that I manage were infected by a backdoor because of a faulty plugin update.
So you definitively need a backup/restore plugin.
In fact, this is not obvious to chose a professional plugin. I say « Professional plugin », because you absolutely need support for this critical backup/restore function, so you need to spend a little money.
You should avoid to buy a professional plugin that cannot be fully tested with money back guarantee, and even with this you can still make a wrong choice.
I have used and paid for UpdraftPlus backup/restore plugin. 3 millions users of the free version seemed to be a good point. But there is a big problem with plugins professional versions: you are not allowed to write a review on wordpress.org about non free versions!
I do not have added a link for UpdraftPlus above, because this is a very bad plugin!
- very weak or inexistant Quality Assurance: in 2020, one update fully broke every website that was using it, without any possibility to…restore previous version!!! FTP or Cpanel file manager was the only way to delete the plugin and get back a working website
- When several Google drives of my customers became full, I discovered that deleting remote backups was not working. As you are keeping a fixed number of backups, the plugin have to delete the oldest ones every day. I discovered several years old backups on Google drives, even the plugin was claiming it had deleted them! (Google was not faulty, same things happened for customers using a Dropbox for their backups)
- The ergonomics of their incremental backup function is terrible. One year ago, I posted on their support professional forum the disastrous effects of their ergonomics leading to fully unusable backups. Today, this has not been modified.
After trying several other backup/restore plugins, I finally have chosen WPvivid. Of course, to test a backup plugin, you have to test the restore function! And you cannot do this on a production website. So, to do this, I have 2 sandbox websites where I can make any testing without any risk.
The only little difficulty with WPvivid is the setup on servers with very limited resources. But as I succeed to setup backup and restore (with recent real restores) on the weakest shared hosting, I have kept it for all my customers.
