How mad would you be if you made a tiny change to your site that made the entire layout not function correctly? It happens to people all the time! By fiddling, you can create a tiny mistake in the code that will throw off the whole site. Normally it happens while people are installing a plugin, trying to add a widget, or adding custom graphics.

Taking 20 seconds to make a backup before messing with a file can prevent the problem. Before I make any change to a theme file, I make sure that I have it backed up. That way, I can fiddle as much as I want! If something gets messed up, I go back to the way it was before I fiddled!. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. Here are the steps:

• Login to your WordPress admin.
• Go to ‘Presentation’.
• Go to ‘Theme Editor’.
• Look at the right side of the screen, where you will find all of your theme files.
• Find the file you want to backup. If you are going to fiddle with your header file, you’re going to locate the header file. If you’re installing a widget in your sidebar, find the sidebar file, etc.
• Click on the file you want to backup. WordPress will then load the code for the file into the edit box, which is the huge box that will then have all the HTML funny looking symbols in it.
• Highlight the entire code with your mouse. To make sure that all the code is highlighted, you could just click your mouse in there and then hold ‘Ctrl’ and hit ‘a’. ‘Ctrl A’ highlights everything.
• Copy the code with your mouse. Right click your mouse and select ‘copy’ to do this.
• Open up Notepad on your computer. You can find Notepad by going to ‘Start’ in the lower, left-hand corner of your screen, then ‘All Programs’, and finally ‘Accessories’. Click Notepad.
• Paste the code you copied previously into Notepad.
• Save the file to a location where you can find it later.

That’s it! Now if anything gets messed up while you’re fiddling you can simply paste the original, backed-up copy of the code back into the code editor box!

I bet you can learn to do it in twenty seconds or less. Who can do it the fastest without messing up?