Why Backups are Important for Woocommerce Stores?

WooCommerce is basically an e-commerce plugin for WordPress which offers services that give you access to additional features and paid add-ons. It is a business model which allows individuals and firms to purchase and sell things over the internet. While WordPress is simply a web publishing software which allows the creation of websites or blogs, WooCommerce enhances this platform by changing it to an online Store.

There are many reasons as to why backups are important to WooCommerce stores; these mainly revolve around the safety and security of one’s website. While many believe that backups are a waste of storage and time, they underestimate the pivotal role it may play at urgent times of need. Even though you may have taken all the necessary measures to ensure the safety of your website, a strong backup plan is always essential to a store’s method to protect requests, payments, and additional information. Losing even a single order can play a huge role in one’s budget for online stores.

Furthermore, online stores are open round the clock and are unrestricted to business hours. The long hours of opening for these stores increase the chances for a plethora of scenarios which may damage and decrease your income.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has become more prevalent than ever today. The current Covid-19 situation has emphasized the importance and usefulness of technology with the wide usage of technology all over the world. As online shopping is on the rise, WooCommerce stores have an enormous customer database. Thus, WooCommerce stores fall prey and are easily susceptible to hacking as they contain a large amount of data. Secondly, despite the benefits of technology, it can never be 100% perfect or reliable. Technical errors and failures such as an outdated system or a server failure are always prone to happen.

While technical failures may put you in danger, human errors can be riskier. Disregarding or overlooking updates on your website or plugins can be unprotected or even end up in the deletion of your site. To add on, an outdated site also increases the risk of malevolent scripts infusing virus or dangerous malware onto your WooCommerce site. Lastly, even natural disasters can cause serious damages to one’s hosting systems resulting in the loss of business data. The hosting company may have multiple sites on the same server which increases the chances of site crashes and drive failures. Hence, it is impractical and risky to reply fully on the backups of your hosting company. However, a backup can always protect you from these scenarios and help you retrieve all your data and even your whole WooCommerce store.

Orders play an important role in WooCommerce sites where more orders bring more revenue. In an unfortunate instance where the site crashes, you may lose orders causing you to lose revenue. This also damages your corporate identity and takes up an excessive amount of your time during the recovery process. Thus, this scenario highlights the need for backups as they are reliable. Backups are always advantageous as they avoid the need for regret when time and data is lost.

There are various types of WooCommerce backups that cover various aspects of your WooCommerce store. These include backups from your web host provider, manual backups, and automated backups via plug-ins. Majority of WordPress web host providers contain backups in their hosting bundles. Thus, WooCommerce developers can save the effort and worry of doing regular backups or losing their content. However, these backups give a WooCommerce developer little or no control over where or how their backups are taken or stored.

In this situation, manual backups can prove to be more useful. Even though manual backup may seem lengthy and time-intensive, it is more thorough with the backup of all your data and it even fixes issues that may pop up during the backup process. However, manual backups require various technical skills by the WooCommerce provider which many may lack. Lastly, the quickest and most convenient method would be automated backups using plug-ins. These plugins can be easily installed, and the execution process is simple too. Among the three backup methods, this is said to be the best available choice.

As mentioned above, WooCommerce developers should be smart and backup their WooCommerce sites regularly and independently in order to have full control of your backups in the case of data loss. It would be foolish to assume that mistakes would not occur no matter how experienced you are as technical errors may jeopardise years of hard work and consumer loyalty. A single error can make customers lose confidence and trust in your site, urging them to shift to other available sites. In that scenario, it would be heartbreaking, frustrating, time-consuming, and costly to resolve the issue. In some instances, the loss of customer loyalty may never be gained back resulting in permanent loss of revenue.

Thus, WooCommerce developers should avoid being negligent and be vigilant at all times regarding the safety of their WooCommerce stores. The importance of backups is taken lightly and underestimated by many and this has to change to ensure safe online transaction between sellers and buyers. Hence it is always better to be safe than sorry as it is easier to spend time on backup than to fix the consequences of data loss which is way more time consuming and exhausting. In a nutshell, backing up your WooCommerce store is highly important and always safe!

Author Bio - Hermit Chawla is a MD at AIS Technolabs which is Web Design and Web development Company, helping global businesses to grow. He love to share his thoughts on WordPress design and development. For More:
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