Last Updated on December 28, 2022 by Steve
We recently published a post on our blog about how to backup WordPress using UpdraftPlus. In my opinion its the best backup plugin for WordPress.
cPanel is a popular control panel that is offered to shared hosting and virtual private servers. Check out this other useful article on backing up sites using cPanel and restoring them if need be.
While you should have an automated WordPress backup solution in place, having multiple backup systems is something we strongly recommend. This way if one of your backup solutions fails, you have a secondary backup system to call upon.
The guide below details how to manually backup WordPress using cPanel
Step One:
Login to your cPanel account
Navigate to your login page for cPanel. This is normally your domain name or IP address followed by the port :2083
e.g. https://bestwordpress.solutions:2083/
Step Two:
Under the files section, click on the backup Wizard Icon
Step Three:
Click on the “Backup” button
Step Four:
If you want to backup your complete hosting account then click Full Backup button or Under Select Partial Backup you can backup specific parts of your WordPress site.
Step Five:
In this tutorial we will choose Partial Backup option instead of Full Backup.
Under the “Select Partial Backup” header, click on the “Home Directory” link
Step Six:
Click on the “Home Directory” button to download a compressed copy of your home directory.
Depending upon the size of your site, this may take a little while
Step Seven:
Now that you have a copy of your home directory on your local machine, the next step is to download a copy of your WordPress database
First click on the “Go Back” link to get to the previous page
Step Eight:
Under the “Select Partial Backup” header, click on the “MySQL Databases” link
Step Nine:
Finally, click on the link for your WordPress database, to download a copy to your local machine
Now that you have a local copy of your WordPress files, we recommend that you archive them in a suitable location.
You may even want to upload them to an offsite data storage provider such as Dropbox
Summary
If you’ve followed all the steps in the guide, you will now have a copy of your WordPress files and database.
Next we’ll discuss how you can restore these files using cPanel.