Webmasters out there, how many times have you ignored the advice to backup your site when making an upgrade? Trust me, if you continue (like I’ve been doing) that way, it will come back to bite you one day.

Earlier today, I wrote a new post on this blog and having ignored the blog for a while, I noticed that there was a new upgrade for WordPress (the software that powers this blog) and I thought – “Hey why don’t I do some site maintenance in the process.” and there I went to click on upgrade automatically. I (like I usually do) ignored the advice to backup the site before upgrading and just clicked through. For some reason (I thought my Internet connection broke) the process didn’t display a success status but I assumed it went well.

Thanks for my friend Tunde Adeyemi (@barbietunnie) who pointed out the fact that the site was broken and needed fixing. I quickly replaced the site with a “We’ll be back soon” banner page and went about fixing it. Thankfully, nothing was damaged and the process took less than 30 minutes. So next time you want to do upgrades (especially when it involves the core), do take the advice you’re given.