Keeping your WP site updated is very important.

To minimize incompatibility problems when updating plugins or your WP version itself, follow this order:

Using a child theme is a very smart thing. This way all your extra CSS is saved within the child theme, meaning if the main theme's updated your child theme won't be changed but stays the same. Besides, it's a lot cleaner and better organized. The easiest way's probably to use a plugin for it - some kind of child theme generator.

Hard to crash something on purpose, but still a good practice if you want to knkow how to restore your WP website. I literally deleted everything including the database on the hoster's side, after making a fresh backup.

Here's what I did to restore everything:

Creating a full backup of your WP installation is quite easy:

• navigate into your WP folder (best to use a ftp program)
• copy all 3 WP folders (wp-content, wp-includes, wp-admin) and all the files in the root folder
• navigate to your phpMyAdmin and export the database

That's it - so, basically, a WP backup consists of a database backup and a backup of all WP files.

After having installed a fresh WP in one of your website folders, go through the following list:

• WP settings (paths, timezone, SSL settings, etc.)
• PHP version check: if the PHP version is outdated, check the PHP settings of your domain (via your hoster) and change the version there to the latest one
• database settings: phpAdmin, wp-config