I have had sites that been hacked into and there were times when I made an Wordpress or a plugin upgrade and it completely made my website useless because it was no longer compatible or I had the white screen that required me to do a complete rollback.  

Of course, if you go with a hosted solution, your provider will handle all of the upgrades -  but in either case, hosted or self-hosted platform, there are different files you’ll need to backup.  So don’t be foolish in thinking this would never happen to you, it actually might not, but when it does, you won’t be a nice person to be around you’ll be surprise how much you’re will to pay someone to fix it.  

Before I answer that, let me explain the two areas to your website, your database and your website files.  Your database is where all the data is stored like your product, customer and order information.  Website files are more like your theme and images.

Some people prefer to backup their entire website on a regular basis, but it might not be necessary if your images and theme haven’t change.  If you have a thousands of image, it’s a waste of space if it hasn't changed since the last time you backed it up.  In this case, just back up your database where you keep the product, customer or order information.  Some platforms even allows your to export specific areas like your orders and customer files only.

How often to back up is based on how comfortable you are on not having the information since your last backup.  So ask yourself, is it critical to have my customer or order information from last week or even yesterday?

Depending on the type of platform you are using, self-hosted vs hosted, there are different methods of backing up your site.

So if you are using a self-hosted platform like a WooCommerce using Bluehost to host your business, you are completely responsible for backing it up.  Even though your hosting company might make courtesy backups, it’s not guaranteed.  

When backing your self-hosted platform, you can either manually back it up or use a third party tool to automatically back your database and your website files on a set schedule.  

Here's a video that you can use to manually backup your Wordpress site from Bluehost.

Don’t forget to export your website and database files and save it to a Dropbox or your computer.  I love Dropbox in general for file storage, but as you scale, grow and have multiple team members, this is great way to keep things in sync.

For third party Wordpress tools, I highly recommend BlogVault to backup your WooCommerce site.  All you have to do is install the plugin, sign up for an account on their site, and they will perform daily backups every day.  I used it many many many  times to migrate my business to different hosting companies as I grew out of plan and it made my transition quick and seamless to the customers.  

If you are on a hosted platform like a Bigcommerce or Volusion, you’ll need to manually export the critical files yourself, some of platforms like a Sparkpay has scheduled exports.  

Your products, customers, orders and theme.  If you have a blog include those as well.

For you media files, connect to your server and transfer your media to your computer.