We’ve said it before, but we can’t say it enough: you have to back it up. And when we’re developing or maintaining a WordPress website, it’s especially critical. Your hosting company will often offer a free backup service, but don’t count on it. In our experience, even the best hosting companies will hang you out to dry. There is no substitute for taking backups into your own hands. There are several backup services we recommend for backing up the entire contents of your hosting package—particularly CodeGuard—but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to discuss WordPress-specific backup plugins and services. (Incidentally, CodeGuard costs $60 per year for a WordPress site under 5 GB.) In this post, we’ll discuss a few backup plugins for WordPress, which can help you secure your site at minimal or no cost and with very little effort.
BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is one of the most popular backup plugins for WordPress, claiming to protect half a million WordPress sites. It costs $80 per year for a single site, and it allows you to schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups that can be sent to Amazon S3, Dropbox, FTP, BackupBuddy’s own cloud service… or you can even email their backups to yourself. It can also be used to duplicate and move your WordPress website. That said, we’re not big fans of BackupBuddy. CloudGuard, which we mentioned above, is less expensive per year, and we’ve heard a number of reports from users who say that it’s glitchy, especially with larger sites. And because it’s most critical for a backup to be accurate when the site becomes larger, we can’t recommend it.
VaultPress
VaultPress is a subscription-based service similar in function to CodeGuard. We do like that it was developed by one of WordPress’s original creators. It’s a little more expensive than CodeGuard at $99 per year for a single site, but it is easy to use and makes it easy to migrate your site to another hosting company, if you should choose to do so.
WP-DB-Backup
The inelegantly named WP-DB-Backup plugin has over 400,000 downloads, and as such it’s likely to come up in searches for WordPress backup plugins. It’s free, which we do appreciate, but it only backs up your WordPress DATABASES. That means it does nothing to back up all your media files—images, audio files, PDFs, etc. It’s certainly easy to use the plugin itself, but since most users don’t know what to do with a database once they have one in hand, it’s not terribly helpful for a huge percentage of WordPress sites.
UpDraftPlus
And now for our favorite WordPress backup solution. There’s a good reason why it’s the highest-ranking WordPress backup plugin on wordpress.org and why it’s been installed over 700,000 times. It’s free, it’s flexible, it’s reliable, and it’s easy to use. UpdraftPlus supports backups to UpdraftPlus Vault (a paid cloud service), Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, FTP, or email, along with other options. You can also use a paid add-on to back up to Microsoft OneDrive, FTP over SSL, SFTP, and other more complex setups. You can choose to back up on demand or on a schedule, and you can choose to back up only your WordPress databases or your entire site. Like the other backup plugins we’ve talked about above, UpdraftPlus does have a site duplicator/migrator feature, though it does require an add-on to move a site to a new location. Other features that go above and beyond the typical backup plugin:
- Restores and migrates backup sets from other backup plugins. Currently supported: BackWPUp, BackupWordPress, Simple Backup, WordPress Backup To Dropbox. (This is a premium feature.)
- Files and database backups can have separate schedules.
- Remotely control your backups on every site from a single dashboard with UpdraftCentral – hosted for you or self-hosted.
- Failed uploads are automatically resumed/retried.
- Large sites can be split into multiple archives.
- Select which files to backup (plugins, themes, content, other).
- Select which components of a backup to restore.
- Download backup archives direct from your WordPress dashboard.
- Database backups can be encrypted for security (Premium).
- Debug mode—full logging of the backup.
Honorable mentions go to BackWPup and BackupWordPress, which are more similar to UpdraftPlus than the other plugins mentioned above, but for our money, we’ll pick UpdraftPlus every time. You can see a biased but helpful chart comparing the top backup plugins here.
We hope this post will convince you to install a backup plugin or engage a backup service if you haven’t already. If the possibilities are overwhelming, we can help. Just contact us!
