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Many threats can disrupt or take down your website. While cyberattacks get all the press, other common ways that websites go dark include server issues, human error, and natural disasters. If your business relies on a WordPress website, you need a business continuity plan (BCP).
This is a proactive strategy that ensures your site remains operational or quickly recovers from disruptions. To protect your business from the financial and reputational impact of a website outage, having a BCP for your site is critical.
This article will guide you through the essential steps and components needed for creating an effective BCP for your WordPress website, ensuring resilience and minimizing your downtime.
To protect your WordPress website, you need to be clear-eyed about the risks out there. There are a few common website vulnerabilities to be aware of:
If any of these threats impact your site, you will be experiencing downtime. Downtime can have serious consequences for your site and business:
In building out a BCP for your WordPress site, you should focus your efforts on six key areas.
The essence of risk assessment is identifying potential threats (like those listed earlier) and assessing their likelihood and potential impact on your website and business. Then, looking more closely at your WordPress site, determine which parts are critical, such as e-commerce checkout, contact forms, and main content.
You should also define a Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which is the maximum acceptable downtime for your site and its components, and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which is the maximum acceptable loss of data for your site and components.
Determine how frequently you plan to backup your website. A good rule of thumb is daily for databases and weekly or biweekly for the full site. In storing your backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies total, 2 different media formats, 1 offsite or in the cloud.
WordPress plugins can assist with backups, such as UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, Jetpack VaultPress Backup. Also, most managed hosting providers offer a backup service as an alternative to plugins.
Backing up is a waste of time if the files are corrupted. Test your backup restores regularly in a staging environment to make sure they are viable.
What are you doing to secure your WordPress site itself? Core security steps include enforcing strong passwords, two-factor authentication (2FA), and regular updates for core, themes, and plugins.
Security plugins provide another layer of security, including Wordfence and Sucuri Security for firewall, malware scanning, and overall hardening. Installing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and maintaining certification is essential for data encryption and trust.
Too often overlooked, a strong user role management strategy based on least privilege is essential. Least privilege means that anyone accessing website files and settings is only given access to what they specifically work on and nothing additional.
To be informed immediately if your WordPress site goes down, set up an uptime monitoring service like Uptime Robot or Pingdom, or enable this through your hosting service provider.
You can set up immediate notifications via email, SMS, or Slack to alert you for downtime or other performance issues. A response protocol for your business should also be set up at the same time to define who gets alerted and what immediate steps they need to take.
If you are using a managed hosting service for your WordPress site, you may have additional resources to consider with your BCP. Managed hosting services often provide built-in redundancy, automatic scaling, and optimized environments that help you maintain effective uptime for your site.
They often include access to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs have geographically distributed servers, which supports faster content delivery and basic protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Your BCP should also include both an external and an internal communication plan.
The internal plan covers how your team will be notified and coordinate if the site goes down. This plan should include defined roles and responsibilities for getting the site back online.
The external communication plan covers how your business will communicate with customers and other site visitors during an outage. This might include setting up a maintenance page for site visitors and sending out updates through social media.
An effective BCP for your WordPress site should follow these valuable best practices:
Documentation: Create a clear, concise document that outlines all the steps, tools, and contacts that are needed to get back online in case your WordPress site goes down.
Training: Ensure that relevant team members understand their roles and responsibilities during disaster recovery efforts.
Regular Testing: Conduct periodic drills and testing, on a quarterly basis, to simulate website disruptions and to test recovery procedures.
Review and Update: A BCP should not be static, but revised to meet current needs and threats. Update your plan as your website, business, or the threat landscape evolves.
Consider Professional Help: For complex sites, a WordPress agency or consultant specializing in disaster recovery, business continuity, and/or security can prove invaluable.
If your WordPress business continuity plan includes a robust risk assessment that identifies critical resources, a backup and recovery strategy, additional security hardening measures, uptime monitoring and alerts, managed service provider redundancy and scalability, and a clear communication plan, your business is in good shape to weather the next threat to your website.
Proactive planning is not just about recovery; it also provides peace of mind and safeguards your valuable online assets. Start building your BCP today to protect your WordPress website and ensure its continued success.
Pressable is a reliable partner in helping your business combat threats to your WordPress website. We support your business continuity with a 100% uptime guarantee, automatic failover, global redundancy, and other resilience-supporting services.
Pressable provides a hosting foundation that delivers unmatched speed, security, and reliability. Your site’s page loads are optimized to deliver an efficient and consistent experience to your visitors. We give you the technical confidence you need to focus your attention on managing the other parts of your business continuity plan.
Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—is staffed by experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site. If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued optimization and growth.
Kevin MacGillivray is the Chief Marketing Officer at Pressable, where he’s focused on helping more creators build fast, secure, and successful WordPress sites. He’s driven to grow Pressable’s impact and make it the go-to choice for more businesses. Kevin enjoys making technology feel simple, useful, and inspiring through clear storytelling, creative experiments, and building new ways for the community to connect and thrive. Kevin lives in Victoria, British Columbia, where you’ll often find him swimming in the ocean, exploring local trails with his dog, Minerva, or embracing the West Coast’s vibrant lifestyle and easy rhythm.
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