Are you prepared for a website disaster?
Imagine for a moment the unthinkable happens. Your website breaks, gets hacked, or it just completely goes down, nothing showing. You’ve carried out all the simple checks, but nothing helps.
Here’s where your recovery plan comes in. These are put into place to prevent this kind of thing from becoming an issue. Although things can go wrong no matter how prepared you are, having a disaster recovery plan is super important. It can make the difference between saving or losing your website.
If you don’t have a website recovery process in place, you should. Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take in order to get that started.
- Backups – Just like writers keep copies of their manuscripts in case they spill coffee on the working one, you should keep a backup of your website. Don’t skip this step, or leave it to chance. If your current website is lost, and you have no backup, you could be looking at having to rebuild it entirely. Backup your website somewhere other than your hosting platform so it’s safe. To be safe, you should have at least 2-3 backups of your website in different places.
- Maintenance – If you keep your website maintained regularly, you have a much higher chance of spotting and fixing something before it becomes a bigger problem. Ensure that someone is responsible for maintaining and performing security updates to the website. Ideally, these should be performed every week. Be sure to take a backup of your website before you perform any updates.
- Content Updates – Updating the content on your website will typically happen on a semi-frequent basis, although this depends on the type of website that you have. Have a plan in place for any content updates to be performed after a backup. Ideally, you’ll have a second pair of eyes to confirm the content update is visible correctly on the front-end. This can help to stop any embarrassing typos.
- Uptime Monitoring – Unless you have nothing else to do, you can’t sit and watch over your website 24/7. However, you can set up monitoring for your website so that you can check to ensure that it’s online and working correctly. Services such as Uptime Robot, will let you set up a free monitor that checks your website every 5 minutes. If it detects.
- Passwords – It’s important to carry out a regular password audit every 2-3 months. Use strong passwords for your website and store them with a password manager. Also, make sure you review who has access to your site and whether that access is needed.
- Contact Details – Be sure you have the contact information of any businesses involved in hosting or managing your website. At the very least, you should note the hosting company, domain provider, and email provider. It is easier to respond to a disaster if you have these details at hand.
Want a no-hassle solution?
One of my Website Care Plans might be for you then!
My Website Care plans take care of everything to do with your websites upkeep to ensure it is bringing in the money.
My aim is to deliver peace of mind to you and your business. I’ll help you keep your website safe, secure, maintained and updated. This will allow you to focus on the tasks that are most important to you and to spend more time with your family and loved ones.
If you have any questions you can always book in a free chat to see how it can benefit your business.
