Why backing up blog posts should be a priority for your growing business
According to HubSpot, the average company that posts business blogs receives 55 percent more web visitors. Blogs are still one of the most powerful and effective tools to reach an audience and improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, which help drive traffic to your site, strengthen credibility, and boost your organization’s visibility and profitability.
But if you do not do your homework and take the necessary steps to back up your content — especially in a small-to-midsize business — you can lose everything in an instant, including the engaged audience you worked so hard to build.
Read on for a few tips about why and how to back up your blog posts.
Reasons to back up blog posts
In today’s world, change is constant. As your company grows and evolves, you can count on your website undergoing many updates and iterations.
Tracking and saving different versions of your site is critical for valuable blog content. Even if your blog platform (content management system, or CMS) offers version history capabilities that allow you to revert to previous versions and restore content you have deleted, it is still vital to record changes and anticipate unexpected events.
Protect against the unforeseen
Dan Anderson, senior director of ecommerce and engineering at The Sill, recommends thinking about blog posts as if you are in risk management. “If a chunk of content went missing and that would be painful to your business, it makes sense to put that content somewhere else or to fully own the data,” he said.
Resources like Internet Archive or Google cached pages can help you get your content back in a crisis, but Dan says that process can also bring frustration and unnecessary extra work copying and pasting content. Archiving protects content from being in the clutches of technical issues and unplanned circumstances — saving time and energy in the long run.
As you plan, you should also consider how to store and transfer content.
Preserve pages as they migrate
Archiving posts takes a lot of space. That’s because compelling content usually includes photos, videos, and interesting design layouts. After all, “we’re not about a copy world anymore,” said Lori DeFurio, principal product marketing manager at Adobe. If you need to transfer posts to a new platform or location, you will want to keep the look and feel of your pages — and content — intact by comparing them against archived versions.
Review and revise content
In reviewing your blog posts, you may decide to repurpose content. Editing content to keep it relevant is a great strategy, but make sure to save the original version to track your version history. You might want to compare later or have the ability to revert to the original — and this begins by saving your content in the best way possible.
Elevate your export
Some blog platforms let you convert posts, or export posts, to different file formats in order to save them elsewhere. When searching for a blog platform, it will be beneficial to look for one that has a built-in option to export content as common files, such as XML and CSV.
According to Dan, while XML files are better for preserving relational or hierarchical metadata, CSV files are more user-friendly and accessible. But XML and CSV exports aren’t the best suited to capture data for pictures and videos.
To avoid losing visual or audiovisual data, you will need to export posts as Portable Document Format (PDF) files, which can accurately archive multimedia files.
How to save blog posts as PDFs
Most web browsers have built-in options for converting web pages to PDFs. Doing so is simple:
- In your web browser, open the blog post you need to convert to a PDF.
- Open the print settings window and change the destination to “Save as PDF.” (While many browsers offer an option to save PDFs through the “Save as” feature, the printing feature will more effectively preserve your content.)
- Chrome: File > Print > Destination > Save as PDF
- Safari: File > Print > PDF (select the drop-down window in the left-hand corner) > Save as PDF
PDFs are useful for reviewing and archiving. Tools such as Adobe Acrobat offer markup capabilities that make it easy to request and highlight changes wherever your team works.
Another effective way to capture everything in your blog — or even just part of it — is by taking a screenshot. Lori recommends using screen capture and recording software tools like Snagit that allow you to capture pages while scrolling.
Where to save backup posts
Your backup process should not end with converting the blog posts to PDFs. You will also need to consider the size of your exported posts and find a secure file storage location that can handle them. Depending on the amount or length of your posts, you might need to compress the PDFs or store them on the cloud to help save space.
For additional security, you can save your backup posts to an external hard drive. Some people may even go the old-fashioned route and print physical copies, although we recommend digital storage over paper.
Worth the investment
If you are spending time and resources creating content, you should handle it like you would other valuable data — back it up. Establish a backup process to document each time you add new text and images to your site, and you will be comforted knowing that you are in control of your content.
Archiving what you have published will help ensure you don’t lose critical information. You can review older content in your archive, and update newer content with important legacy data and information — which can help keep your digital content alive and available for your growing audience.