The conversation we have most often after a website disaster goes like this. The phone rings on a Sunday evening. A Newton Abbot business owner is in a panic because their site is showing a white screen. They cannot take bookings, the contact form is dead, and Google has started showing the error in search results. The first question we ask: "when was your last backup?". The answer is almost always a long pause.
A website without a tested backup strategy is a business one bad afternoon away from losing months of work. For any Devon business that takes enquiries, bookings or orders through its site, professional backups are not a nice-to-have. They are infrastructure.
What "your website" actually contains
When people picture their website they tend to picture the front-end pages. The reality is much bigger. A typical small business WordPress site holds:
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- Images, PDFs and uploaded media (often gigabytes)
- The plugin and theme code that makes it all work
- Customer enquiry submissions and any e-commerce orders
- Member accounts, if you run a paid area
- Booking calendars, if you take reservations
- Configuration: SEO settings, payment keys, integration credentials
Lose any one of those and you have lost something it would cost real money and real time to rebuild. Lose the database and you have effectively lost the site.
The threats are mostly mundane
Hollywood-style hacking is rare. The everyday causes of website data loss are duller and more common:
- A plugin update conflicts with another plugin and the site goes white
- An accidental click in the editor deletes a critical page
- A server hardware fault corrupts the database
- A weak admin password gets compromised by an automated bot
- A theme update introduces a fatal PHP error
- A CDN propagation issue serves a stale version of the site for hours
Any of those can knock a small business offline for a day, a week, or permanently. Without a clean recent backup, the only options are paying for emergency forensic recovery (£500–£2,000+) or rebuilding from scratch.
What a proper backup strategy looks like
We install and configure UpdraftPlus on every WordPress site we host. The configuration matters as much as the plugin itself:
Automatic schedule. Daily database backups are the floor for any active small business site. Sites with frequent enquiries or orders should run more often.
Off-site storage. Backups stored on the same server as the live site are useless if the server itself fails. We push every backup to a separate cloud location — Dropbox, Google Drive or an S3-compatible bucket — entirely outside the hosting account.
Versioned retention. We keep the last 14 daily backups, the last 8 weekly backups and the last 6 monthly backups by default. That gives us recovery points at multiple time horizons in case data corruption is not caught immediately.
Tested restores. A backup that has never been restored is a backup that might not work. We periodically test restores into staging environments. Untested backups have a horrible habit of failing exactly when you need them.
What this is included in
Every site on our £300/month retainer gets the full UpdraftPlus configuration as standard, including off-site storage, retention, and the restore service if anything goes wrong. We do not charge extra for backups, and we do not charge to restore a site we are looking after.
If you are paying separately for hosting, backups and emergency support — or worse, you have no idea whether you have backups at all — let us audit your current setup. Send your site URL to 07887 988780 and we will check whether you are actually protected. Starter rebuilds begin at £250 and most clients move to the £300/month retainer for ongoing peace of mind.