Why You Need a Backup Strategy (or Safety Net) for Your Shopify Store

back up shopify store

Have you ever considered the possibility that your server could get hit by a meteorite? Well…it probably won’t. However, there are plenty of far more plausible circumstances that could wipe out or disable your Shopify store if you don’t take the time to install a backup program before you need it. From human error to being a bit too generous about what you assume Shopify will help you fix, there are dozens of reasons backing up your shop is a must. Here are a few of the most important reasons to back up your Shopify store, as well as real-life examples of what happened when companies didn’t and our top solution for reliable coverage!

3 Reasons to Back Up Your Shopify Store

Messing up your Shopify store is easier than you might think, and it’s not uncommon for you or someone on your team to do it. Here are three reasons why backing up your store is in your best interest.

Adjusting Your Code Could Wreak Havoc on Your Shop

Editing your shop involves plenty of experimenting, and you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where a new theme doesn’t look quite as good as you thought it would and realize too late that you have no way to go back to the previous version. Even experienced web designers make coding mistakes or find that a color combination doesn’t look as nice on their screen as it did in their heads. A tiny mistake in your code could mean hours of extra work to find and fix if you don’t have a copy of the site you started with backed up.

In addition, all of Shopify’s add-on apps or other third-party apps add trace amounts of extra code to your site, which may not automatically be deleted if you remove the app. For this reason, it can be a good idea to back up your shop before testing new apps to make sure it will still function correctly if you decide not to keep these apps.

Human Error Can Be Destructive

Your first instinct might be to identify a data breach as the most important reason to back up your Shopify store, but the truth is that human errors are much more likely to cause problems for your site than attacks from someone not associated with your business. It’s easier than you might think to accidentally delete listings, erase settings, or otherwise damage your shop, as it only takes a second of not paying attention to hit the wrong button or keyboard shortcut and perform an action you didn’t intend to do. These errors can and do happen to everyone from time to time, and they can become even more likely if you hire a freelancer to work on your shop that isn’t quite as good at coding and web design as they claimed to be or if multiple people are working on the same thing at once.

Even worse is the possibility that these “mistakes” could be made intentionally. The last thing you want is an angry or fired employee getting back at you by destroying your shop on purpose, which has happened to at least one Shopify user in the past. Shopify couldn’t restore more than 3,000 deleted product listings, but Rewind did.

Shopify’s Backup Protection Does Not Cover You

Although Shopify does maintain the ability to back up their own platform, this coverage does not extend to individual accounts. This limited backup capability protects the platform itself from problems on Shopify’s end that are far more catastrophic for the business than losing a single account, such as a server crash that wipes out hundreds or thousands of shops. Unfortunately, this coverage ends where your work as a business owner begins, and the platform does not provide backup restoration for a problem that occurs on your end. Choosing and implementing the most effective backup strategy for your shop is your responsibility, not Shopify’s, and skipping this crucial step could result in a completely avoidable disaster for your shop.

computer programmer backing up website

3 Real-Life Case Studies

As essential as backing up your Shopify store sounds, you don’t really know how much you need to until something goes wrong. Here are three real-life stories of businesses that started backing up their data with Rewind after dealing with costly situations.

Gymshark

You might not think eight hours could result in the biggest sales nightmare your Shopify store has seen, but that’s exactly what happened to Gymshark in 2015. A teen-run startup at the time, the fitness apparel site experienced an eight-hour outage…on Black Friday. Months of preparations went down the drain as the relatively new company missed out on approximately $143,000 in anticipated sales, not to mention the trust and loyalty of much-needed new customers. In 2018, the Gymshark team added Rewind to their store after realizing that the spike in eCommerce sales over the past three years would result in a much bigger loss if this problem were to happen again.

Crossrope

Nobody loves dealing with updates. They always seem to come at the worst times, and they’re prone to causing slow devices, program glitches, and other technical issues. Shopify stores also need to be updated from time to time, and Crossrope learned the hard way that updating a code can throw off seemingly unrelated parts of the shop. After accidentally disabling their checkout process while adjusting their site, which took approximately 24 hours to fix and resulted in a full day of lost sales, Crossrope installed Rewind to prevent being left without a recent backup in the future.

Whisker Seeker

Adjusting Whisker Seeker’s Shopify store to get it ready for Black Friday seemed like a good idea at the time, but its owners weren’t anticipating the trouble trying to upload a bulk import of changes to the site three days before Black Friday would cause. What was meant to be a quick fix to a file that wasn’t uploading correctly resulted in all of Whisker Seeker’s products accidentally being deleted from the shop.

Instead of turning to their nonexistent backup, the Whisker Seeker team spent the next three days frantically retaking photos, rewriting product descriptions, and re-uploading products to their empty Shopify store. Whisker Seeker’s owner came across a Rewind ad a few weeks later and quickly installed it to prevent another three-day nightmare.

Choose Rewind to Back Up Your Shopify Store

Although there are several options available for backing up your Shopify store, Rewind is more user-friendly than its competitors. Rewind provides real-time information about the status of your shop, which gives you peace of mind by letting you know if everything is running properly or if something needs to be addressed. It also provides detailed security policies and is hosted on the highly secure Amazon Web Services platform, while other backup services require users to choose their own data storage and are not as transparent regarding security.

At Future Holidays, we prioritize helping Shopify store owners keep their shops backed up to avoid costly mistakes. We can also assist with setting up your shop, migrating to a new platform, and creating effective email marketing campaigns. Set up a free Rewind trial today or contact Future Holidays to learn more about our services!