Following on from our recent blog, in which retired FBI agent Jerri Williams shared with us the story on how her site was saved by UpdraftPlus, we have some new customer feedback to share.
UpdraftPlus has spent years ensuring that we offer the best backup services to our users. We love hearing stories from people who use our plugin about how it helped avert disaster caused by hacks, plugin problems or theme issues.
Janet Reasoner recently contacted us to share the story of one such instance. Janet has been a consultant working in grant writing and fundraising for nearly ten years and has worked at and with nonprofit organisations for over 30 years. After having a lot of fun building her own company website, Janet decided it would be a great idea to branch out and start a second business offering simple WordPress sites for businesses and individuals.
Janet stated that she “loves WordPress because it is easy for anyone to use and maintain.” While this may be true, there can be many issues waiting to trip up even the most experienced of designers in the website building process, as Janet discovered when she ran into an issue that many WordPress website developers are only too familiar with.
Can you tell us what happened regarding the problem that required you to restore your site using UpdraftPlus?
The first site I put Updraft on was a new site for a client that I am building using the Dynamik child theme. I knew that I wanted to experiment and that I needed a good backup system. As I was using the new version of Dynamik, I thought I’d try different skins. That didn’t work out as I planned and I nearly wrecked the whole site. I could have rebuilt the site, but Updraft made it possible to restore the site in under five minutes – much less time than it would have taken otherwise!
Do you have any idea the issue was?
The site had some very confused coding from the new skin that made it look awful. Plus I lost much of the design I’d worked on for hours.
How long did it take for you to restore your site using UpdraftPlus and was the process straightforward and easy to do?
It look about five minutes. It was super easy and straightforward. It was also very easy to set up and the instructions are, thank goodness, clearly written or edited by native English speakers who take the time to make sure everything is clear and readable. I actually no longer will use themes or plugins where the description has grammatical errors or is oddly written.
What advice would you give to other website owners who may be at risk (such as backup and security)?
Install UpdraftPlus on all your sites. It is so easy to use and I make sure that I carry out a backup before making any changes. I would recommend, after years of working on computers and having to rely on backups (find out how to backup your site with UpdraftPlus here), that you also download the backup files to a thumb drive or external hard drive. Belt and suspenders!
As Janet’s story shows, even making a small change can potentially cripple a website beyond use. Without the proper backups all of her work could have been lost, forcing her to start rebuilding the site from scratch. We were happy to hear that the problems encountered when changing the theme skins did not result in lasting or costly issues. But without UpdraftPlus installed, this is often not the case.
With 2 million+ active installs, UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular and trusted WordPress backup plugins currently on the market. Download and install your copy today.
