How To Quickly Zip WordPress Files Under 1 Minute

Trying to zip WordPress files under 1 minute is not a hard task, yet it requires some patience as it may take time to zip your WordPress files. It all depends on the space your WordPress takes up and the number of images that are being hosted on your WordPress site. The more files you have, the longer it is going to take to zip your site.

How To Zip WordPress Files Manually

The manual process requires a bit of technical knowledge because in this process you will have to access your cPanel directly or if you are using a Linux server, then you can easily do it via command line. In this article, I am going to explain both of the processes.

How To Zip WordPress Files Using cPanel

The most basic step is to first login in your cPanel and search for "online file manager", it should be under files section.

After that, you would want to find a folder called "htdocs", usually all your web files are inside that folder. Please note that some web-hosts may use different file managers, however it should not be an issue since these file managers are usually very easy to use to perform certain file operations. Right-click on your htdocs folder and either click "Download" Or "Compress As Zip File", in my case only the download tab appears.

That's it! It is a very easy process, however, downloading may take time depending on how much space your WordPress site takes up. Now, let us talk about the process that you should use for a Linux server.

How To Zip WordPress Files Using A Linux Server

This process is a bit harder than the first one and requires technical knowledge, you must know how to use a terminal. Once you are logged in your terminal, execute the following command to check whether zip is installed or not.


sudo apt install zip unzip


Usually the files are either hosted in your "/var/www/html" folder or "/usr/share/nginx" if you are using Nginx as your web-server. The command goes as:


zip [options] output_file [folder-name]


In our case, it would be:


zip -r test.zip /var/www/html


The file would be outputted in the folder you are executing the command from, this way Linux will compress your files in the most efficient and quickest way possible.

How To Backup Your WordPress Database

This process is similar as the first one, all you need to do is login in your cPanel until you see a section called Databases, under it you will find "phpMyAdmin", click on that and it will redirect you to the database manager.

Once you log in, click on the database where your WordPress is being hosted and click on the "Export" tab to download your database just as a precaution to not lose your data.

After backing up your WordPress sites using any of the methods mentioned above, you can migrate your host easily without paying anyone or waiting for someone to help you out.