The Monthly Website Backup Checklist for Small Businesses

Most small-business websites have no backup because nobody owns the task. This checklist makes it a ten-minute habit on the 1st of the month. If you use a service that emails you a copy, most of it is reading an email.

The 1st of the month

1. Confirm the backup exists. If you use Dead Simple Backups, the email arrives on the 1st. Open the link, confirm the page count looks right, and glance at one screenshot. That is the whole check. If you back up by hand, run it now.
2. Check the domain. Auto-renew on, card valid, contact email one that a real person reads. Note the renewal date in your calendar.
3. Check the site plan. Same three things: renewal, card, contact email.
4. Download form submissions and subscriber lists from wherever they live. They are not part of the public site and are easy to lose.
5. Note what changed this month. A line in a notes file: "replaced team page, new prices on services." When something breaks, this tells you which backup to open.

Once a quarter

• Open a backup zip and open a page from it. Make sure you can. A backup you have never opened is a rumor.
• Check who has access: contributors on the site, who holds the domain login, who is on the billing email.
• Save a copy of one backup to a second place (a cloud drive and a local disk).

Once a year

• Export blog posts and product data from the platform, in case you ever migrate.
• Review what the site says about hours, prices, and policies against a backup from a year ago. Sites drift.

What a good backup contains

Every public page as HTML, a full-page screenshot of each page, and the images, fonts, and styles the pages use, dated, stored somewhere other than the site's own host. Without screenshots you have files and no proof of how they rendered. Without images you have text and holes.

If you do nothing else

Take the free backup of your homepage today. It takes two minutes, needs no account, and shows you what a copy of your site looks like. Then decide whether $79 a year is worth never thinking about this again.

Q: How often should a small business back up its website?

Monthly is enough for most brochure sites, which change a few times a year. Sites that change weekly benefit from a copy before each big change, which a free single-page backup covers.

Q: What should a website backup include?

The pages as HTML, a screenshot of each page as it looked, and the images, fonts, and stylesheets, all dated and stored away from the site's host.