Securing Your eCommerce Store with Backups Using WooCommerce

When it comes to securing your eCommerce store, security is not just important; it’s a necessity. This means making sure you are running with a valid SSL certificate, have a payment processor that you and your customers can rely on, and monitoring the number of people who have access to the back end of your eCommerce store.

The easiest way to fix your site is to load a backup. Unfortunately, nothing makes eCommerce store owners groan more than “backup” day. A lot of store owners feel as if it is a waste of valuable time to sit in front of their computer doing a bunch technical tasks that typically requires copying, saving, and exporting essential files from numerous databases and FTP directories. This is sometimes why many smaller eCommerce sites do not perform backups as often as they should.

Why You Should Backup Your Site

Unfortunately, no matter how strong your security practices are, things happen. You might run into an issue with the script or coding on your site, or the site might have become compromised in some way and allowed an unauthorized user to make changes to your site. The best way to quickly combat most of these issues is to restore your site to a previous time in which everything was working properly.

There are times when the theme you are using, including your WooCommerce theme, gets updated. There will be times when the custom coding you have on your site doesn’t work properly after a recent update. This could cause things to appear incorrectly on your site or cause some of your other plugins to stop functioning altogether.

Making Backups of Your eCommerce Site Is Easier Than You Think

Thankfully, backups have come a long way since eCommerce businesses first started to operate. Case in point, most WordPress and WooCommerce sites make use of Jetpack. Jetpack allows you to use excellent eCommerce backup tools for WooCommerce, such as VaultPress.

VaultPress gives you the ability to have real-time backups that are created daily, automatically. The best part is, the files are kept off-site in a secure location, so if the need ever arises, you can quickly restore your site knowing that it is only using the most recent files. Best of all, you can restore your entire site with a single click. The VaultPress plugin also sends email alerts to you when it catches any of your plugins acting oddly or not working the way that it should.

Restoring Your eCommerce Store in the Event of a Problem

One of the biggest concerns for business owners who operate an eCommerce store is losing orders during the restoration process. This is why it is recommended that you run two sites. One, as your primary site and the duplicate site, as your staging site. Simply restore the desired restore file to your staging site. Once this has been done successfully, compare the order history and transition history between the sites and transfer the appropriate data to the staging site. If all of the information transfers successfully and the staging sites continues to run smoothly without a hiccup, create a backup of the files on the staging site and use that file on your primary site.

Conclusion

It is important to note that you should temporarily put your main site into some type of maintenance mode to prevent new orders from generating while you are transferring orders to your staging site. Once you’ve got the right restore files ready to go back to the primary site, go back to your WooCommerce backup plugin, direct it to your main site and send the file over. Once everything is up and running, deactivate your maintenance plugin, and you are ready to go. Now you know how to easily backup, secure, and maintain your WooCommerce eCommerce store, without all of the headaches and stress that you’re afraid of.

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