As you know, your online store is an incredible and valuable asset.
This is your blood and sweat that you injected into perfecting your blog posts, products, and theme.
Whether you get one customer or hundreds of orders per month this is the backbone of your e-commerce enterprise. If something bad happens to it, every aspect of your company is negatively affected.
Just like you do with all your assets, you need to protect your online store.
Many online stores fail to operate due to human errors, malicious attacks, accidental deletion of data or even rogue apps that make unwanted changes, and in some cases deleting even the entire store.
While e-commerce providers such as BigCommerce and Shopify backup their platforms, these backups are useful in case disaster strikes their end. However, hiring an experienced Shopify Developers has its own advantages.
This backup is not used to restore individual backups. This is the reason why you need to back your store.
Some services such as Ottomatik will help you to automatically back up your databases and files on schedule and off the site so that when your store goes down, you are able to use your backup to go live in no time.
Below are 8 reasons why you need to back up your online store:
You are editing and modifying theme code yourself
You need to have an easy way to reverse or make changes that didn’t work if you are customizing a theme code. Without a backup, you will spend hours redoing the work to reverse changes.
It gets tiresome and sometimes you might even need to hire someone to aid clean up that mess.
The apps you are installing are 3rd party
Keep in mind that e-commerce apps available in e-commerce providers app stores are built by a different company, mostly the same developer.
These apps having been vetted and approved for these app stores, there is no guarantee that they will integrate perfectly with your e-commerce platform. When you install an app, understand that you are offering that app permissions not only to view but also edit and even modify your store data.
If an app does not integrate perfectly with your store, it can even completely wipe your entire inventory, setting you back for days before you recover fully. For this reason, you need to have a backup.
You have disgruntled employees
No one wants to think there is a possibility of their own employees to do malicious activities that can cost their business.
More often than not, your employees have access to your e-commerce store, giving them a window to edit or even delete crucial files if they want to. This situation calls for you to use your backup.
You often hire freelancers to work on your store
As it is with employees, when you hire a contractor or a freelancer to work on your e-commerce platform, you are granting them permission to modify your shop.
There is no proven way to vet freelancer so that you can find a trustworthy person.
If you find yourself in a fix and you have little knowledge about coding, you can’t stand a chance of fixing it. Backups are, therefore, very important to have to salvage you from fixes.
You have multiple online stores
It is possible for experienced online entrepreneurs to run multiple online stores. International brands dominate in this area, running multiple stores to enhance service provision to customers in certain regions.
In such cases, efficiency is of key importance. You cannot imagine the pain you’ll have to go through if your multiple online stores went down and you don’t have any backups. It will take years of blood, sweat, and resources to start afresh. That is why backup is important.
You can accidentally delete your blog, theme or even products
It is possible that you can delete things accidentally. That is part of the mistakes and failures that entrepreneurs make and go through.
One time you’ll be deleting just a category on your blog but end up deleting all the posts under that category. When you have a backup, you can continue building your stores fearlessly knowing that if anything goes wrong you can recover items lost or deleted easily.
Hacking of stores happens every day
Setting up an online store nowadays is very easy. Keeping it safe from hacking, copycats and frauds are not easy.
If you are a small entrepreneur, a small breach can see your business name stolen and your products copied, ending your business’ life. Just as “Lowe’s Vs. Home Depot“ represents healthy competition and branding in the market, ensuring your brand’s protection is paramount.
No matter how secure you think your store is, someone with the right knowledge can easily hack into your store. While for highly secured stores it can cost hackers an arm and a leg, they will still find ways into your platform and do whatever they want to do.
If hackers tamper with your store, you can use your back up to delete your store and rebuild it.
Upgrades can make your store to break
Often, you are needed to upgrade your store to meet new security measures and also enable new features on it.
Errors are likely to occur during this process. A back up is like having an insurance policy to cover you in case such errors occur.
As you can see, there is the great need for you to back up your online store. It is painful to work on your platform for years, pump in massive resource only to lose it just because you were not wise enough to create a backup.
Backups are painkillers for your troubles.
