This is one of those tasks that should become a regular habit on all of your Joomla! websites. You’ll definitely thank yourself for investing the time in backing up each of your websites if your website host has an unfortunate server crash (it does happen), or the server is maliciously hacked and your website is compromised.

“This won’t happen to me…” is not the rhetoric you’ll be expressing if you fail to backup your website. We all know someone that didn’t bother to backup their home computer and suffered the unfortunate consequence of losing valuable data. With that said, let’s get started!

When it comes to backing up your Joomla! website, I highly recommend Akeeba Backup for the task. While I can certainly use an FTP client such as WinSCP (my personal favorite), Smartftp or Filezilla to grab all the important files (everything in the root directory), I much prefer Akeeba for automating the task and saving quite a bit of time in the process.

Getting Akeeba Backup

The first thing that you’ll need to do is to download and install the Akeeba Backup extension. You can find the extension here: Akeeba Backup

Follow the instructions in the Quick Start Guide document to help you install the extension.

Once you’ve successfully installed the extension, login to your Joomla! backend.

Do you want a way to increase the traffic to your website? Here is a very simple recommendation that you can easily implement to increase your website traffic.

However, before I give you the recommendation I want to highlight one very important concept; Organic Traffic Growth.

So What Is Organic Traffic?

People use search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo to search for various topics of interest to them, such as researching natural solutions for cancer treatment vs. the modern treatments, or perhaps to search for ways to fix a vehicle that is having a certain problem (I just did this with my diesel suburban and saved a considerable amount of money fixing the problems myself).

Search engines “crawl” your website (on a regular or irregular schedule depending on certain factors) and index the information on your website similarly to how a library would with all of the books it contains. Library’s have an index of all the books they contain and where to find a particular book. If your website has valuable information on a certain topic, when someone uses a search engine with various key phrases, more than likely your website will be listed in the search results. The challenge is to increase your odds of ranking higher in the search results than your competitors do.

The best solution for increasing traffic to your website is to generate organic traffic growth. Organic traffic growth typically isn’t quick growth, but it’s the very best kind of growth a website can have. An important note though; if your website content is stagnant, you won’t do well long-term. You need to have “movement” on your website or the search engines won’t frequent your website.

I was reminded over the weekend how proper planning can achieve excellent results. Our family Suburban had been running ok, but there were definitely some improvements needed. With just over 180k miles, it was time to install a new harmonic balancer, flush the cooling system and adjust the IP (injection pump).

Jon and I started on Friday, disconnecting the radiator and associated hoses. We pulled the radiator and flushed it completely. We then proceeded to flush the entire engine to remove gunk. I was rather surprised at how much “non essentials” were in the system.

Anyway, after cleaning the system and reinstalling the radiator, the vehicle drove much better. During the cleaning we also installed a new harmonic balancer (not changing this part could result in complete engine failure, so it was a proactive move to ensure reliability).

The last challenge on our list was to adjust the IP (injection pump). A friend had e-mailed me the procedure and we felt confident in tackling the job. Remember, we’re not mechanics, but rather nerds. The adjusting took all of (5) attempts (rather quick attempts) and we succeeded at setting the correct IP timing. The Suburban runs really well now!

How Does This Relate To Website Design?

The reason I share this brief story about our weekend with you is that effective planning is essential for success. That's also true when it comes to effective website design. Remember the old but very true saying: "If you fail to plan you plan to fail!"

Just imagine what would have happened if we didn’t have the correct parts to install in the vehicle. What would we have done if our friend hadn’t e-mailed the correct procedure for timing the IP? Supposing we hadn’t purchased the required coolant. We’d still have a vehicle but it may or may not be running well and we'd still be fiddling around wondering why!