Short answer: daily for most business sites, real-time (or hourly) for busy WooCommerce stores, and always stored somewhere other than your own server. The reasoning:
The frequency question is really “how much can you afford to lose?”
A backup schedule is a decision about acceptable loss. Daily backups mean losing at most one day of changes. For a brochure site edited twice a month, that’s nothing. For a store taking orders every hour, a day of lost orders is real money and real customer chaos — which is why stores need real-time or hourly database backups.
Rules of thumb by site type
- Brochure/services site: daily full backup, kept for 30 days.
- Blog or news site publishing weekly+: daily, kept for 30–90 days.
- WooCommerce store: real-time or hourly database backups plus a daily full backup. Orders live in the database — that’s the part that changes constantly.
- Membership/booking sites: same as stores. User actions are happening around the clock.
Where backups must live (the part everyone gets wrong)
A backup stored on the same server as your website dies with the server. Disk failure, hosting account suspension, ransomware, a hacker who deletes backups first (they do) — one event takes both. The standard is 3-2-1 thinking: the live site, a backup at your host, and a backup somewhere completely independent — Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, or your maintenance provider’s storage.
Retention matters more than you think
Hacks are often discovered weeks late. If you keep only seven days of backups, every copy you own may already be infected by discovery day. Keep at least 30 days; 90 is better.
And test the things
An untested backup is a rumour. Restore one to a staging environment occasionally and confirm the site actually works. Every WP Hero plan includes daily off-site backups with a monthly restore included — tested, stored away from your host, and someone else’s job to worry about.