Backing up your site is an essential practice, when you work with WordPress, to ensure that you don't lose any data during major changes or updates. Your WordPress backups are worth the entire investment you’ve made in your website. The day may come when you get hacked, when something goes wrong with an update, your server crashes or your hosting company goes bust – without good backups, you lose everything.

There are several free plugins with which to backup your site, our suggestion is to use UpdraftPlus to perform a full site or database backup. We also suggest a manual method to backup only your Theme Options.

Important: before restore a backup you must disable all the extra plugins (which consume vars) and fix possible problems with the Max Input Vars.

Backup with UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin is the most highly-rated and popular plugin out there – and for good reason. Not only is it comprehensive in terms of its features, but it’s also easy and intuitive to use. You can download the plugin at the above link or install it via your WordPress dashboard.

To perform a backup:

1. Click the 'Backup Now' button, screenshot ;
2. Select your backup options, screenshot .

To restore a backup:

1. Select your backup and click the 'Restore' button, screenshot ;
2. Select to restore your 'Database', screenshot ;
3. Confirm you want to 'Restore' it, screenshot ;
4. Wait for the confirmation message, screenshot .

Backup Theme Options Manually

If you do not want to backup through UpdraftPlus or other plugins you can perform a simple and quick manual backup of your Theme Options. This procedure is useful if you are not compliant with the Max Input Vars.

To manually backup your Theme Options please copy in a text file the codes from Options Utils → Exports. If you need to restore your Theme Options just paste the saved code in Options Utils → Import, screenshot .