This WordPress guide teaches you how to manually backup your WordPress database without using plugins. It’s the hard way but most of the web developers prefer the manual backup. Why depend on a plugin when you know you can create a backup of your WordPress database whenever you need it.





Important: It is strongly recommended to backup your database before performing any upgrade on your Website.





Why should you backup WordPress Database?

WordPress database stores lots of stuff in the database such as all your post, pages, comments, users and other information like plugin and theme settings. You don’t wanna lose all these important stuff when something goes wrong with your site.

WordPress database backup allows you to restore all your WordPress content back to normal after an upgrade error leads to dysfunctioning of your site.

What if someone hacked your WordPress site and comprised your website content?. In such situation, you won’t be able to login to your wp-admin area. To fix this, first, you need to change your password from phpMyAdmin and then restore all your content using the WordPress database backup you created.

That is the reason you should create a database backup regularly.

Read: Reset WordPress password using E-mail

Manually Backup WordPress Database using cPanel

This is the simplest way to create a manual backup of your WordPress database. Most web hosting providers offer control panel (cPanel) feature to its customers.

However, you can use FTP to backup WordPress files such as themes, plugins, images, etc.

Follow the steps below to back up your MySQL database with cPanel:

Log in to your hosting cPanel account.

Look for the Backup option. Generally, it can found under Files section.

Here, you’ll find Download a MySQL Database Backup.