TLDR; ** I’m a business partner at a retail shop in the UK, as a business we paid £10,000 for a website and £70 per month for hosting, maintenance and e-commerce functionality. I amended something on the website out of business hours. Said amendment affected a couple buttons on the basket page. I reverted changes back, however, the buttons showed fine in elementor editor, but still distorted on the production site.
I tried for almost two hours to rectify this, thought screw it and restored from a backup. Issue is, the backup was 5 months old. The restore has completely reverted 5 months worth of work on this website, so theme changes, new hero slider and a infographic. Not to mention the product database and stock count.
Who is responsible for backing up the website? **
For context, the business is a side hustle. I’m a cybersecurity analyst full time so have limited technical knowledge, but understand foundational knowledge of the WordPress site and the infrastructure it sits on. I am not a web developer or web designer, but I am comfortable enough making changes when required (that’s what the web hosting company implemented elementor for, so it requires limited code knowledge for editing.)
I have reviewed the ‘web design proposal’, essentially the agreement for their services and responsibilities and it reads: “Back up plugin (easy to restore content if needed.”
So does this mean, the web designer and hosting company are just going to install a plugin for backups and leave it for a customer to configure and set up?
I am praying that they do backup sites through FTP and not just rely on a single plugin.
I am aware that they will definitely have server images and incremental backups of the server, but I do understand that it will revert other websites if work has been conducted between the server backup and if they were to restore from that backup.
If you’re actively paying someone else to maintain (inc backups) your site, then they are responsible for it. There may very well be legal repercussions if they weren’t doing what was promised.
They should be the people you should be speaking to… not Reddit.
Is that all that it says “backup plugin”..? Backups should be done on the site & server and don’t understand why you’d need a plugin for it.
But if that’s all it says, that’s super vague. Nonetheless, a maintenance plan should come with a daily/weekly backup but that all depends on the agengy/business and what it lists in the contract.
In any case, because you’re paying for maintenance I would assume it’s the web agency’s responsibility.
ur hoster will probably have a recent backup he can retore. usually costs about 50 bucks.
In my humble opinion, the people you pay should be offering this as part of your package, at no extra cost.
I run a REALLY small web dev agency and charge less than your guys, and still have daily backups of all client sites. I would not be willing to host a customer’s site without having regular backups available in case of disaster.
>So does this mean, the web designer and hosting company are just going to install a plugin for backups and leave it for a customer to configure and set up?
It sounds like your contract was pretty vague and the answer to your question is “yes.” It’s up to you to decide if “I only had a 5 month old backup” is a breach of your contract; we can’t tell you if that’s your fault or not. Doesn’t seem to me that your contract specified “daily/hourly backups” from what you have shared.
And, I don’t mean to kick you too badly while you’re down, but you’re a cybersecurity analyst and you didn’t think to figure out when your restore point was from? Chalk that one up to a bummer.
Take this as a lesson and find (or pay someone else to) find a backup solution that runs automatically every day. WordPress backups are largely a solved problem as it’s extremely rare for a site to be so big that you can’t get hourly or daily backups of at *least* the database.
So you paid $10K for a website, didn’t want to pay a web developer to make changes and got the hosting company to install Elementor, then restored a 5 month old backup? Sorry but you’ve done this to yourself.
Usually the hosting company has SOME backups, for example we offer 15-180 days worth of backups for our customers (depending on their plan), but we also encourage them to do local backups as well.
Whoever will suffer the consequences when the site disappears for good.
It’s a good practice to secure a backup of your site’s files and database before making any changes. This way, if something goes wrong, you can easily restore your site. Relying on backups from your hosting provider isn’t always reliable since they capturing backups randomly. Backup plugins are only set to schedule regular backups daily, weekly, or monthly but there’s no guarantee they’ll capture the exact version you need to restore. So, it’s best to manually back up your site before making any changes to ensure you have the most current version saved.
“Maintenance” would imply regular backups, but check the terms of your hosting agreement for what is actually included in maintenance. It seems they failed to properly set up the backup plugin to have it automatically make backups regularly. But they didn’t specifically say automatic backups at regular intervals, so you may be out of luck. From how it’s worded, sounds like you were responsible for manually triggering the backups.
Never revert from a backup without backing up the current state of the website in case anything goes wrong. You should also make a backup before doing any significant work that could break things. A good backup restore program should automatically make a backup of the current state before restoring from an older backup, or at least warning you before you do it. If it didn’t do that, consider using a different backup solution.
Your hosting provider could potentially have backups at the individual hosting account level, but if someone didn’t manually opt in then you may not have them.
>So does this mean, the web designer and hosting company are just going to install a plugin for backups and leave it for a customer to configure and set up?
For the web designer and hosting that you chose, this seems seems to be the case. For a maintenance contract at that price I would have expected more. Your experience is unfortunately probably quite common in this industry. There is no unspoken rule about who is responsible, it’s all negotiated and agreed to in the contract.
First off, making changes on a live site? That’s living dangerously. But I’d say, the person responsible for maintaining the site, is the one that should back up. Also, before any updates, just make a backup first.
A good managed wordpress host should offer offsite backups. YOU are responsible for verifying it’s being backed up. It’s your business. I mean, you might not actually bear the responsibility… however “**trust but verify**” reigns supreme, especially in an industry (web development) with such a low barrier to entry and no real “licensing” or formal education. You never really know who is building your website.
That said, I’ve been a developer and designer AND host for 13+ years and I’ve never relied on a backup plugin to handle backups. All of my incremental backups are taken server-side, daily (e-commerce sites hourly) and any failed backups feed into a Slack channel to notify me there may be an issue.
Risk mitigation and reporting should be a standard practice for anyone hosting/managing a website. You should be ensuring they have taken proper measures to protect your investment.
You may need to:
1. Potentially find a better host/dev to work with or get clarification on who is responsible/liable for what.
2. Conduct due diligence to make sure your host/dev has configured things properly and are willing to assume the risk of a failed backup.
For future reference, reverting minor changes can be done inside Elementor (and/or WordPress core in many cases), but if you reverted to an old backup using updraft plus, those database entries would have been overwritten.
Somethings little unclear on the post. It sounds like you bought a web build but have not bought any ongoing maintenance. Is that correct?
If you pay a fee for ongoing maintenance (not hosting) then the back-up would be part of that. Also the restoration should be part of that in my opinion.
If the contract was to build the site only then it would be your responsibility. The developer should have brought your attention to the fact that back-ups need to be maintained and given some guidance but when they handed it over it’s up to you.
Your web host, if they are good, will have regular backups of your files and database. But you should always have an alternate, offsite backup solution, since hardware can fail and web hosts can go out of business. As to responsibility, that is going to depend on what agreements you have with your designer/developer.
Usually, the hosting provider does the backups depending on what they commit, could be daily, weekly with xx days retention.
A good hosting provider automatically backs up your entire account including sites, emails, database, etc. on a daily basis (that’s a normal practice).
However, I don’t solely rely on my hosting (HostWP.io) and set auto backup on my GDrive daily using the WPvivid plugin.
Having multiple backups is always recommended.
your host should do backups, and your web dev should have set up a plugin to save backups to an off-site storage.
I back up every website I crest using Duplcator Pro, that Plugin comes in very handy for Multisite to regular and subsites-Multisites. The problem with Multisites is that most hosting providers backup that comes with the services cannot back up multisites or revert back to them
If you have a contract, the responsible party is whoever said they’d do it in the contract. If the contract is unclear, then assuming someone else is doing it when you’re the one who stands the most to lose if the site gets lost is a huge gamble.
I would also like to also point out (at risk of being downvoted) the entire issue that prompted you to perform a restore was likely a browser caching issue in Elementor that’s very common with the plugin… and the restore likely wasn’t needed at all, just a clearing of the browser cache. Changes showing in the editor but not the live site is just cuz the browser cache is serving up cached assets instead of what you just changed – the solution is to hit F12 to open your developer console, then right-click the browser refresh button and then choose “clear cache and hard reload”.
Make them move you to wpengine, it’s all automatic