“Help! I’m getting the white screen of death.” Or “My website has been hacked!” These exclamations are just two examples of what we hear from clients or business owners, who have been recommended to us, asking for help. Over the years, we have seen many client business websites become damaged, lost or simply have bits of content gone missing for reasons unknown. This is the nature of WordPress, themes and plugins when they are not kept up to date or maintained by their authors. Things can go wrong with them which then impact your website negatively and cause things to break. And, when software is outdated, hackers can take advantage. There are ways to guard against this and you should ensure you always have the option of restoring the website from a recent back-up.
Watch this video giving real examples of where things have gone wrong and then view the 3 steps below about how to back up your website. And then should you ever need to restore it, you’ll be all set.
3 steps on how to back up and update your WordPress website
1. Log in to your phpMyAdmin via your hosting control panel. Click on your database on the left side and then click the Export button. 
2. Connect to your website via FTP (use Filezilla). Download all of your website files. You will need your FTP address, username and password in order to do this. All of these details are available from your hosting provider. 
Keep your database and website files safe on your computer, on an external drive or in the cloud.
3. Log in to your WordPress website. Click on Updates and update your theme, WordPress version and all plugins. 
Go steady: do this one at a time and check everything is OK with your website as you go. Do not update all plugins at once for example, because if something goes wrong, you’ll be able to isolate the problem quicker and easier by working one by one.
Keep the latest version of your database and website files safe on your computer, on an external drive or in the cloud.
We hope this is useful, please feel free to get in touch with us if you need help or would like us to manage your website for you.