Website Backup Checklist

Use this as a periodic review rather than a one-time setup task. Backup practices tend to drift over time — a plugin gets added, a schedule gets forgotten, storage fills up — so it’s worth revisiting this list every few months.

Frequency and coverage

• Backup frequency matches how often your site actually changes (see How Often Should You Back Up Your Website?)
• Backups run automatically, without relying on someone remembering to trigger them manually
• You know exactly what each backup includes, and what it doesn’t

Retention

• You have a clear retention window — how far back you can go if needed (see Website Backup Retention Explained)
• Older backups are pruned deliberately, not just accumulating indefinitely
• Your retention window accounts for issues that might not be noticed immediately

Storage and access

• Backups are stored somewhere separate from your live site, so a single incident can’t take out both
• Access to backup storage is limited to people who actually need it
• You know how to actually retrieve a backup, not just that one exists

Verification

• You’ve actually test-restored a backup at least once, rather than assuming it works
• You know roughly how long a restore takes, so you’re not discovering that during an emergency
• You periodically confirm backups are still running, rather than trusting a schedule set up long ago

Before major changes

• You take a fresh backup before installing significant updates, plugins, or theme changes
• You know how to quickly identify the backup taken right before a specific change

Documentation

• Someone other than you could figure out how to access and restore a backup if you were unavailable
• Backup-related information is written down somewhere accessible, not just remembered

What this checklist doesn’t cover

This list focuses on backups themselves. It doesn’t cover what to do during an actual incident — for that, see the Website Recovery Planning Guide — or how to evaluate whether a specific backup is safe to restore, covered in What to Check Before Restoring a Website.

The takeaway

A backup checklist isn’t about perfection — it’s about catching the gaps that tend to appear quietly over time. Working through this list every few months takes a few minutes and meaningfully improves the odds that your backups will actually help when you need them.