How To Back Up Your WordPress Site To Dropbox

Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. There are a lot of possibilities out there, but the following have served me well over the years. I usually only have to use them on shared hosting plans. Some of my sites are on managed WordPress hosts who take care of backups as part of the plan.

Here are my criteria for a backup solution:

  1. Ability to back up both database and files
  2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
  3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be lost. Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups would be too large to email.

My preferred solution is to backup sites to my DropBox account. You can get 2GB of storage with a free account.

I typically use one of the following 2 plugins to back up my sites:

Both are free plugins that meet the criteria described above.

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2 Ways To Sell Using PayPal and WordPress

Sell Products With PayPal And WordPress

There are many, many ways to sell things from your WordPress site, from physical products to digital downloads or access to content. The best solution will depend on your particular circumstance and needs. While WordPress can get quite sophisticated in the ecommerce department, a lot of folks just want to be able to sell a few items quickly and easily using PayPal.

In scenarios like this where the user wants the simplest possible solution and knows they want to use PayPal, a fully featured shopping cart / ecommerce solution such as WooCommerce might be overkill. Sometimes simple PayPal buttons will suffice.

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A Guide to Moving WordPress Sites

If you work with clients using WordPress in any capacity, or even if you are a solo site owner, at some point, you will probably need to move a site from one server to another (also known as migrating).

In this guide I’ll show you 3 methods of migrating a WordPress site.

Migrations are required in numerous situations, such as when you’re switching webhosts, when turning a development site into a live site, or when making a test site. Even restoring a site from a backup has some similar steps.

Understanding how this process works will greatly empower you. There are a few moving parts but it’s completely possible to do, even if you are not a developer, and you will feel like a champ. I’d suggest practicing on a test site before handling anything that’s important 🙂

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How To Make a WordPress Test Site In 8 Small Steps

How To Set Up a WordPress Testing Site

Every time a new version of WordPress is released, some people will experience compatibility problems with their sites. These can be minor and easily resolved, or they can  be more tricky to diagnose. Either way, especially for non-developers, such problems are a little scary, particularly if they make your website inaccessible or unusable. One way to ease the stress of an upgrade, or to experiment with any changes you may want to make on your site, is to create a sandbox, or testing site. The video below shows you how you can easily do that using free tools. 

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How to Update Old Content on Your WordPress Site

Maintaining a steady flow of traffic to your WordPress site isn’t only dependent on constantly producing brand new content. Updating old content is a great practice to keep benefitting from the posts you’ve already worked on. It’s possible to take advantage of Google’s freshness algorithm and generate a new burst of traffic for the updated content, as well as provide a better user experience for visitors to your site ensuring they never find old or irrelevant information. 

In this post I’ll cover:

  • The easiest way to update existing posts in WordPress
  • How to push your content to the top of your blog feed again
  • How to let Google know your content has been updated without pushing it to the top of your blog feed again
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