The pieces you need to restore depend on how your site works. A shop might have products, orders, photos and theme settings. A service business might have a contact form connected to a separate inbox. List where each piece lives, including data held by a booking or email provider.

Keep a copy you can reach

Ask where backups are stored, how long they are kept and who can retrieve them if the hosting account is unavailable. Record how often important data changes. A site that takes orders every day needs to know what would happen to orders placed after its last backup.

Rehearse the recovery

Have your developer restore a copy in a private environment. Open a service page, check the images and test a form with sample data. Confirm its test messages stay separate from customer communications. Record the date and what worked so the next person knows where to start.

Write down what a restore leaves behind

Think about a café with a menu, a catering form, and a separate ordering provider. A hosting backup might recover the menu and the form itself while leaving form submissions or order history with the outside provider. Make a list of the records the business needs to keep serving customers and record where each one actually lives.

  • Website files and content. Include uploads, templates, and the data that connects them.
  • Business records. Check which bookings, orders, or enquiries live in a separate service and how to export them.
  • Access and recovery details. Store these securely so the owner can reach the right account during an outage.

Check the recovered copy

Open the restored site privately and check a few pages that use different layouts. Repeat a customer task and check that its confirmation works without sending real customer emails. Compare the date of the backup with the date of the most recent changes. If two days of requests would be lost, decide how those records could be recovered and whether backups need to run more often.

A short recovery note should include the backup location, the last successful restore, and the person who can approve putting the recovered site back online.