Operating Your WordPress Website… Getting your IT systems squared away

(Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes)

One of the most unpleasant surprises to new internet entrepreneurs is that amount of overhead required to keep a single website operational. There’s just so much to know. Unless you’re able to outsource everything, as a website administrator, you need to be able to handle the following chores:

• backing up databases
• backing up files
• upgrading and updating software

We’ll take a look at at each of these chores in detail, then discuss how you can make your chores a system that helps run itself. Once you have a system in place, you won’t have to spend energy thinking about what to do, and you will be better able to outsource tedious chores.

Back up your databases

For every web application or set of web pages that requires a database, you need to have a plan for regularly backing up that database. For example, if you run a wiki and a project management tool along with WordPress on your server, you need to establish a system for backing up the wiki and project management databases as well. Dealing with the backup files is also important: you have to have them stored in a secure location, or back them up as well. This means “offsite” with respect to your hosting account.

In WordPress, backing up your WordPress database is easy using a plugin. My current choice is either Austin Matzko’s WP-DB-Backup, discussed in a previous article, or for more experienced users, Lester Chan’s WP-DBManager. Either works fine, pick one and learn to use it properly.

Files

File backups are different than database backups, yet equally important. In the same way as databases, backed up files need to be securely stored or backed up into a third location, offsite. There aren’t many plugins for handling this chore. I tried one recently and it crashed my WordPress with a whitescreen (that means bad PHP code). I won’t mention it by name as it doesn’t seem widely known, and I want to contact the author privately to see if I can get the issue resolved.

In the meantime, you should be keeping up with file system backups using an FTP client at the least. Download your WordPress files to your desktop, then upload them to a safe, 3rd location. Maybe burned to a CD, a thumb drive, or stashed elsewhere on a different hosting account.

Knowing which files to download is a very good question, and doesn’t have an easy answer. If you have modified any of your themes, or plugins, or any files associated with themes or plugins, you will need to back those up as well. But backing up your entire plugin directory is overkill, when plugins can be downloaded easily from WordPress.org. A middle way here is to back up your plugin directory one time to a convenient location on your hard drive, then all further backups should be only plugin files that you actively modify. An added benefit of having all your plugins quickly available from, say, a desktop folder, is using them to bootstrap a new blog. Instead of tediously installing each plugin from the plugin “Add >> New” menu, just FTP upload the lot right after you install the new blog.

Upgrade now…? Or wait…?

Updating and upgrading. This blessing and the curse of information technology is that it doesn’t stand still. It’s always evolving. You must evolve with it, or you will become so obsolete your entire system may need to be scrapped and completely replaced. In WordPress, updating and upgrading are fairly easy. WordPress installations now feature automatic upgrading capability, as do plugins. Themes, however, do not, and when you update a WordPress installation to a newer version, your theme may not work exactly the same. In the worst case, upgrading will break your theme. On the other hand, the longer you postpone moving to a new version, the more difficult it will be to perform an easy upgrade.

For a really great example, consider the browser share of Internet Explorer version 6. Nobody has been able to purchase IE 6 for years. But it’s hanging on in corporate IT departments which depend on certain functions of that browser which may break should they upgrade to IE versions 7 or 8. At some point, Microsoft will force an upgrade… which will be expensive to be sure for IE 6 users.

Here’s the tradeoff: when the cost of NOT upgrading exceeds the cost of upgrading, don’t hesitate.

Work your system

It’s important to have written policy for all of these activities. Backups need to be checked on a regular basis, for both databases and files. Upgrade policy should be established, and each site should be tested for behavior before pulling the upgrade trigger. Writing out procedure is much easier said than done. Start small. It may help to print your procedures to paper, and store in a 3 ring binder. Your exact procedure, when starting out, is much less important than simply having a procedure.

Tagged as: Backups, Systems