Showit Backs Up Your Blog, Not Your Design

A Showit site is two pieces of software wearing one domain. The designed pages come out of the Showit app. The blog is a WordPress install that Showit hosts for you, served at the blog path of the same address. Most owners think of it as one site. It is backed up as two, and only one of the halves is backed up at all.

If you are a designer handing a Showit site to a client, this is the part worth explaining before they find out on their own.

The blog half: genuinely backed up

Showit's blog hosting is managed WordPress, installed at your root domain with the blog living at the blog path. On the hosting side, Showit states that it keeps 30 days of daily backups of the WordPress sites it hosts, and it recommends running a plugin such as UpdraftPlus to send your own copies of the blog to Dropbox or Google Drive.

That is a real backup policy, and better than most builders offer. Your posts, in the normal course of things, are recoverable.

Two caveats. Thirty days is a window, not an archive: a problem introduced in February and noticed in June is outside it. And these backups live on Showit's infrastructure, attached to your Showit account. They are there to recover a site, not to hand you a copy you keep.

The design half: an undo button

The pages you actually designed, the canvases, the layouts, the mobile versions, are in the Showit app. What Showit documents there is undo and redo in the design app, not a version history you can browse and roll back to.

Undo covers a lot. Delete a text block, an image, a whole canvas, and the undo button brings it back. But Showit's own help center names two exceptions: deleting a page cannot be undone, and changes to a Site Canvas cannot be undone once you leave that canvas.

Those are exactly the two changes most likely to cause a bad afternoon. A Site Canvas is shared across every page that uses it, which is the point of it, so an edit there is site-wide by design. And page deletion is the one action where someone is most likely to want a step backwards.

So where does that leave a Showit site

• Blog posts. Covered by 30 days of daily backups, and exportable from the WordPress dashboard whenever you want.
• Designed pages. Covered while the browser tab is open and you have not deleted a page or left a Site Canvas.
• The published site as visitors saw it. Not covered. Showit has no site export, and the designs do not translate into any other builder.
• All of it, if the account or subscription goes. Not covered. When the subscription ends the site stops being served and the blog goes with it.

The gap worth closing

Nothing here is a criticism of Showit's hosting. The gap is structural, and it is the same for every hosted builder: the safety nets live inside the account they are protecting.

What closes it is a copy of the published site held somewhere else. Not to restore, since nothing can push files back into Showit, but so that:

• You can see what a page said and looked like before a Site Canvas edit went site-wide.
• A deleted page still exists somewhere in readable form.
• A client who leaves, or a designer who cannot be reached, does not take the only record with them.
• You can rebuild, on Showit or anywhere else, from something better than memory.

How we do it

Dead Simple Backups crawls the public site the way a visitor sees it. Every public page is saved as HTML, with a full-page screenshot of each page rendered in a real browser, plus the images and fonts it uses. Both halves are included, because to a crawler the designed pages and the blog are just pages on one domain. It runs on the 1st of every month, keeps 12 months, and emails a private link. There is no Showit login and no WordPress plugin, because it only reads what is already public.

The screenshots matter more on Showit than almost anywhere else. Showit is a canvas builder: the design is absolute positioning, with a separate mobile layout. HTML alone reconstructs poorly. A picture of the page is the honest record of what was there.

Try one page free: paste your address on the Showit page and you get that page as HTML with a full-page screenshot in about a minute, no account needed.

A sensible setup for a Showit site

1. Export your blog posts from the WordPress dashboard now and then. It is a standard WordPress export and it takes a minute.
2. Use undo carefully, and treat page deletion and Site Canvas edits as one-way doors. Take the free single-page copy before either.
3. Run a monthly offsite copy of the whole public site so the published version exists outside Showit.
4. If you are a designer, put the copy in the client's name, or in your maintenance plan, so whoever holds the site holds the record.

Q: Does Showit back up my site?

It keeps 30 days of daily backups of the WordPress blog it hosts for you. The designed pages have undo and redo in the app, not a browsable version history.

Q: Can I undo deleting a page in Showit?

No. Showit's help center lists page deletion, and changes to a Site Canvas after you leave it, as the actions that cannot be undone.

Q: Can I download my Showit site?

Not from Showit. Blog posts export from WordPress. The designed pages have no export, so a copy has to be made by crawling the public site.

Q: What happens to the blog when my Showit subscription ends?

It goes offline with the rest of the site, since Showit hosts it. Export the posts before the subscription ends.