The Most Important Plugin Type You Will Ever Use on Your WordPress Website
Okay!! Welcome welcome to WordPress website design for the absolute beginner. We are moving right along in this video series we’re actually a video number 12 I believe. Some of the other videos please don’t hesitate to check out the description as every description of every one of these videos is going to have a link to all the other sites. So just in case you missed it we’ve talked about domains selection, we’ve talked about hosting, we’ve talked about .com versus .org, talked about pages versus post, plugins, themes, embedding a video on a WordPress pager post. Talked a little bit about the importance of categories and tags and adding pages to menus and now is where it’s really going to start to get good. I’m very very excited to get all the really really really basic stuff behind me because now we’re going to come back to plugins. And I want to talk to you about the single most important plugin you will ever install to your WordPress site. Above and beyond all else it is the first plugin you should employ on your website.
So of the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of plugins that are available for WordPress, what could possibly be the one that is more important than all the rest? Well that’s why you’re here and I’m going to answer that question. And here we go. Boom!! The single most important plugin that you can employ on your website isn’t necessarily this particular backup software but a backup software. Now one of the things you get out of this video series is my 10 or so years of experience working with these plugins, playing with them, failing with them, succeeding with them and researching them. Probably hundreds if not thousands possibly of hours playing with researching, investigating plugins and I will tell you that this is my absolute hands down favorite backup plugin. It’s called BackupBuddy by ithemes. I’ll include a link in the description of the video and essentially this thing is amazing in terms of how easy it is to back stuff up; how easy it is to package your back up so if you need to move from one server to another it’s very very simple and also just so that you know ithemes I believe started with BackupBuddy but now they’ve got a whole bunch of other offerings as well. We’re going to look a little bit at the security later, we’ll look at sync later, these are all things that I use. They also offer themes, I’m not…. I don’t use their themes but perhaps maybe I should look a little bit more and get the themes.
So let’s dive right in: now the vast majority of plugins and a lot of the plugins that I use are free. This one is not free. So if I click here you can see that you’re going to spend 80 bucks to back up one site and I’m going to tell you if you are creating a website for a business and you are not willing to spend 80 dollars a year to back up your website, you’re the one who’s going to need it the most because if you’re not willing to make an investment in your site to protect it you’re probably going to be skipping in other places too. And my guess is that if you’re skipping in other places too you’re going to get hacked. And when you get hacked if you don’t have anything to revert back to, you’re pretty much going to lose everything and then you’re going to spend thousands, thousands of dollars if not tens of thousands depending on how big your business is trying to get your site back. It’s very unfortunate that I see people wanting to skip in areas as important as this but I’m going to go ahead and recommend go for it. This is $80 per year well spent, it’s an unbelievable program, it will save your ass more than once. And if you don’t know anything about hacking you’re probably going to get hacked.
Alright so making the assumption that you signed up and you’re ready to go with a BackupBuddy, I’m going to go ahead and click down the button and giving it a second to end up in my downloads folder. Once I get to my downloads folder here it is BackupBuddy. Currently 8.0.1.5 and I can go ahead and show in folders. So there it is it is in my downloads folder. So I go to my website I can go to plugins and I’m going to go drop down here to add new and I’m going to select it. And then here you can see upload plugin. So I’m gonna click on that and I’m going to have an opportunity to choose the file and takes me to my downloads folder, so I’m going to go ahead select it and hit open. It informs me that the information is right here so I’m going to go ahead and install now and I’m going to activate the plugin. Okay now that I’ve downloaded it, I’m going to go to plugins and install plugins and I’ll come down to BackupBuddy, I’m going to click on license. Okay so unlicensed products I’m gonna come down to BackupBuddy and I’m gonna put in my username and password and hit license products. And as you can see I have both BackupBuddy and I have also purchased ithemes sink, alright so now it’s ready to go for it. So now if you come back over into your, your dashboard here if you mouse over BackupBuddy you can see that there’s a whole bunch of different options here and I’m just going to go straight back up and there is a wizard. OK now your screen might not look exactly like my screen. I’ve purchased the developer package for this so I’m not sure whether you’re going to see this or not. But take a look at the dropdown. There’s a pretty good chance that you have one of these. You may have Amazon Cloud, you may have Dropbox, you might have a Google Drive and I’m certain you have an e-mail address that you could e-mail the backups to. But for me because I have BackupBuddy stashed I’m going to go ahead and send my backups to that. So what I’m going to do is I need to enter my username-password again. And I want to pick a schedule and definitely go with a weekly backup. Alright so I’ve created a password for restore or migrating. You’ve got to make a selection as to where you want to put your stuff. You’ve got to re-enter your ithemes which is your BackupBuddy username and password and save settings.
So here’s the cool part. You’ve got all these options for what kind of backup you want to make. I am going to go ahead and do a manual backup right now and I’m gonna do a complete backup and it kind of gives you a review of what it found and now it says it’s backing up the database. And now it’s as zipping the files and you can go to the status log and look at status log too which is always fun. Look the process is finished in 22 seconds. So I can actually download the file on my hard drive right now if I want to but I can go back to backups and has a detailed summary of the backup. I’ve already done a complete backup which actually includes a database backup but for grins I’m going to do a database backup only…. and there it is. I can download the backup. So I’m gonna go back to backups and there there’re my two backups.
Next thing I want to do is I come down to schedules and click on schedules. Okay so here we’re looking at the schedules tab. This is the…. when we went through the BackupBuddy set up wizard we told it we wanted to do a day-to-day database backup and a weekly full backup. And you can essentially go in and edit the schedule here. It doesn’t have to be at 8:25 p.m. It could be in the middle of the night and be anytime you want. I can also look at my remote destinations, this is my ithemes stash is what they call it. This is where I choose to send my backups so that it’s on a third party server and if anything happens to my particular server and everything goes to caput all of my information will be stored on the third party completely separate server. So that’s what restoring to a remote destination is all about. There’s also kind of a cool malware scan feature to BackupBuddy, it’ll give you just kind of a quick overview and tell you about your blacklisting status and that sort of thing. Also mentioned I can restore or migrate my entire website to a different server and it’s very, very easy. I will do a video later in the series when we get to more complicated stuff. I can basically download either my database or my complete backup. And there is a transfer tool called import buddy which is just unbelievably awesome takes, just a couple of minutes to take a complete website and move it to a completely new server. So there’s a ton more that you can do with this thing, I want to just kind of give you the general overview but you can have it e-mail you when you get an error; you can have it e-mail you when it starts, when it finishes. The option lists go on and on and on.
Hope you enjoyed this video. It is like I said hands down the single most important plugin you will ever put on your site and in future videos I will be sharing with you my experiences of the best plugins that you can add to your site and helping you pare down from the tens of thousands of plugins that are out there and kind of point you in the direction of the ones that I’ve discovered and learnt to like and more importantly learnt to trust over the years. So I’m Steve wrapping it up here for the backup plugin. And I hope to see you in the next video. See ya!!
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