What Would It Cost You To Replace Your Site’s Content?

A couple weeks ago we started thinking how you could calculate the replacement cost of your site’s content in another effort to showcase how vital it is to have a solid backup strategy for all of your WordPress sites. To give you a little backstory … I’ve personally lost content on my sites before. Back in November 2009, my personal site was on one of our dedicated servers at iThemes when it had a catastrophic hardware crash. If you’ve been around the iThemes community long you know the story well because we tell it often (good therapy!). So I wake up one day and find that our sites are down including mine. We furiously tried to find backups (they weren’t there) so we started scrapping cached content from Google to replace what we lost… but I know, just personally, I lost several months worth of blog posts (and images) I could never get back. They were vapor. Gone. I lost time. I lost content. And it sucked. And as you know, we built and released BackupBuddy as a result because we didn’t see anyone offering the complete backup strategy that includes full site backups of everything (settings, themes, content) and the ability to easily restore it all back or move it elsewhere. Anyway … Today my personal site has 555 blog posts, 54 pages, and 652 comments. Additionally, I’ve got 405 images in my media library. Putting a value on 6+ years of content is impossible because it’s priceless. Many of those blog posts represent thoughts and experiences I had and with my kind of memory, I’d never be able to recreate them as I first did. So how much would it cost in time to replace my site’s content? We came up with a formula, much like your insurance company does on the “replacement” value of a car or house and called it our Content Replacement Cost Calculator 5000.

It’s one way to find some kind of minimum value to your site if you have to go through and manually replace just the blog posts and pages you created on your site. Content lost is probably never coming back. But you can put a price on your time. Our Content Replacement Cost Calculator 5000 is a way to put some kind of value on your site … I was shocked to learn to rebuild everything I’d done would cost me about $15,225 at a minimum (assuming I value my time at $50 an hour and spent 30 minutes per post). That’s of course not counting those 400+ images or my site setup.

• Imagine though if you’re a blogger like Chris Lema who blogs every day.
• Imagine if you’re a photographer like Cary Anne in OKC who posts her gorgeous family photos.
• Imagine if you’re a freelance web designer who depends on a nice looking site for getting clients.
• Or an ecommerce company like us with hundreds of products, posts, pages, forum posts, Codex docs, etc.

What would it take them to rebuild and replace all of that hard work? Or maybe more importantly … what are you doing today to protect it all? Calculate my Content Replacement Cost