The WordPress Disaster Plan: Prepare Before It Breaks

Every WordPress site will break at some point — a bad update, an expired domain, a host that vanishes, a login nobody remembers. The WordPress Disaster Plan is a 13-lesson course that gets the answers written down before that day: where the site lives, who controls it, how it's backed up, and whether those backups actually restore. You finish with a one-page plan a rescuer could work from at 2 a.m. without you.

What you'll learn

The course is built around the "2 a.m. test": if your site went down tonight and you couldn't be reached, could someone else bring it back? Most owners fail it not for lack of skill but for lack of records. So you'll start a plan document and fill it in module by module — your site's real URL and login, the people and accounts that control it, the registrar and nameservers behind the domain, the host and the panel a rescuer would need to navigate, how backups are taken, where they're stored, how long they're kept, and the security layer that's quietly in place. The backup module doesn't stop at "there is a plugin": you'll verify that a restore works. The last lessons cover storing and sharing the plan safely and putting an annual review on the calendar so it stays true.

Inside the course

• Module 1 · Why This Might Save Your Business: The 2 A.M. Test · Setting Up the Plan Document
• Module 2 · Your Site's Identity: Your Site's Identity: URL & Login · Who Controls This Site?
• Module 3 · Domain: Finding Your Registrar · Nameservers: Where DNS Lives
• Module 4 · Hosting: Identifying Your Host · The Panel Tour a Rescuer Needs
• Module 5 · Backups: How Are Backups Handled? · Where Backups Live & Retention · Trust, But Verify
• Module 6 · Security & Keeping It Alive: Recording Your Security Layer · Storage, Sharing & the Annual Review

Who this course is for

Site owners, small-business operators and the person at a nonprofit who "looks after the website" — anyone who would be the one blamed if the site disappeared and isn't sure they could get it back. It pairs naturally with WordPress Fundamentals (take that first if you're new to the dashboard) and with the UpdraftPlus course if you don't yet have backups at all. If you build sites for clients, the plan document is a handover you can give every one of them.

Frequently asked questions