Yes. Unambiguously yes. Every website needs regular backups, and every business owner who has lost their website without one understands this lesson more viscerally than they'd like.
Let's talk about why backups matter so much, what the risks of not having them are, and what good backup practice actually looks like for an outdoor living or paving company website.
Why Backups Are Non-Negotiable
Your website can be damaged or lost in multiple ways. Hackers attack websites. Not just large corporate sites — small business websites are targeted constantly by automated scripts looking for vulnerabilities to exploit. When a site is compromised, the malicious code often corrupts or deletes content. Without a backup, you may have nothing to restore from.
Accidental changes cause problems. A developer making an update, a plugin installation that goes wrong, a content change that breaks a layout — these happen regularly. If your site breaks and you have no backup from before the problem occurred, you're rebuilding from scratch.
Hosting provider failures, though uncommon, do happen. Servers fail. Data corruption occurs. Some hosts are better at protecting against this than others, but none are perfect. A backup that lives somewhere separate from your host means a host-side catastrophe doesn't erase your site.
Ransomware and malware can encrypt or destroy website files. Recovery without a clean backup is often impossible or extremely costly.
What Good Backup Practice Looks Like
Frequency matters first. Daily backups are the standard for any business website that changes regularly. If you update your project gallery, add blog posts, or receive new enquiries through a form that logs submissions, you want a backup that's no more than 24 hours old. Weekly backups are acceptable for simpler, more static sites that change rarely.
Redundant storage matters second. Your backup should not live only on the same server as your website. If your host has a server failure that destroys your site's files, a backup stored on the same server will also be gone. Good backup systems store copies in at least two separate locations — often your host's servers and a cloud storage service like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud.
Retention period matters third. You want to keep multiple backup versions, not just the most recent one. If your site was silently compromised a week ago and you only have yesterday's backup, you're restoring a compromised site. Having 30 days of daily backups available gives you the range to restore to a clean version even if a problem went unnoticed for a period.
Testing your backups matters fourth. A backup is useless if it doesn't actually work when you need it. Occasional test restores confirm that your backups are complete and restorable.
How to Actually Get This in Place
If your host includes daily automated backups in your plan — and all good hosts should — your backups are likely already running. Log into your hosting control panel and check. Look for a backup or restore section. You should see a log of recent backups and an option to restore from them.
If your host doesn't include automated backups, or charges separately for restoring from them, that's a genuine problem. You're either paying extra for something that should be standard, or you're exposing your business to an unnecessary risk. Many business owners don't find out their backups aren't in place until the moment they need them.
For custom-built sites on platforms like Next.js, backup strategy often works differently. Your site's codebase lives in a Git repository, which is version-controlled by nature. Your content and database are backed up separately. A good developer will have this architecture in place and be able to explain where your backups live and how frequently they run.
The Cost of Not Having Backups
Rebuilding a website from scratch after a data loss can cost anywhere from £500 to several thousand pounds in developer time, depending on complexity. You also lose everything that wasn't saved — your project gallery images, your content, your page structures. For a paving or outdoor living business where your website's before-and-after photography is one of your most powerful sales tools, losing those images without backup copies is a real commercial setback.
The cost of proper automated daily backups with a quality host is essentially zero — it should be included. The cost of not having them, when something eventually goes wrong, is potentially substantial.
Set up your backups properly once and then stop thinking about it. That's the goal. Done right, it's invisible, automatic, and invaluable the one time you need it.