The Best Backup Plugins for WordPress

If you’re not regularly backing up your WordPress website then you’re running the risk of losing it or having it go down for a prolonged time. Bad updates, hacking, malware, crashed hard drives, while rare they do happen and can have a real impact on your business and search engine ranking.

Here at TheeDigital, all our hosted websites are backed up daily and then again manually before we push out an update. Many hosting companies also have backup options to help you recover when something goes wrong.

But for those without backups included in their hosting or for mission-critical websites that want a second secure offsite backup, here’s our list of the best backup plugins for WordPress.

VaultPress (Jetpack Backup)

Started by WordPress co-founder Matt Millenweg. VaulPress is now part of the popular Jetpack plugin and known as Jetoack Backup.

The plugin allows real-time backups and one-click restoration to get you back online quickly. The included activity log helps you understand what happened before your website broke so that you can diagnose the issue.

Jetpack offers two backup options. Daily backups (great for most sites) and Real Time backups which saves a backup with every edit.

BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is a little different from other backup solutions in its approach. They backup your entire Wordpress installation. You get a downloadable zip file of your entire Wordpress Website that can be used to restore the site on another server if necessary.

Backups can be customized so that only databases are backed up, certain files, or the entire site.

Backup’s can also be scheduled to run at certain times and sent to an offsite location like DropBox or Google Drive. The plugin also allows you to easily restore your website from a backup.

BlogVault

For some large complex website or underpowered hosting server a backup can slow the live site down. Because the software is running off of the servers resources. With BlogVault backups run on the BlogVault servers. So your website’s performance is never effected.

BlogVault also separates itself from other backup solutions by offering integrated staging. Their staging solution allows you to safely test updates and changes before you push them out to your live website. The staging website runs on their cloud servers and comes at no extra cost. Once you are happy with the changes you can easily push them out to the live site.

Blogvault also helps with migrating your website to a new server. With easy one click automation.

Their dashboard also lets you manage backups, staging, and migration for multiple websites. 

UpdraftPlus

Unlike the previously mentioned backup solutions. Updraft plus has a free option that is loved by many. Both free and premium versions allow you to backup a website on a schedule and restore it if necessary. 

But the premium version comes with some added features.

• Cloning and migration
• Incremental Backups
• Support (talk to a person)
• Backup non-WordPress files and databases
• Backup wordpress multisites
• Additional backup options like encrypting databases
• The ability to restore backups from other plugins
• And no ads

The free option works well for many people, especially if you are technically inclined.

Duplicator

Duplicator is another free backup solution used by over 1 million websites. The plugin allows you to move, migrate or clone a WordPress site between domains or hosts with zero downtime. Manually backup a WordPress site or parts of a site.

But it’s biggest limitation is the inability to automate/schedule backups of your WordPress website.

So while not a strong contender for creating a regular backup of your website. It’s still worth mentioning for those who need to create a backup for site migration or to pull down a live site to localhost for development.

Are you ready for your site to go down?

Hopefully your website will never experience hacking or a crash and go down. But if it does, will you have a copy of the necessary files to restore things? Will your hosting provider be able to help?

If you’re not sure I invite you to take a moment and audit your website’s backup solutions and make sure you know what steps you would take if it ever goes down and needs to be restored. 

Without a backup, website downtime can go from a small inconvenience to an outright emergency as customers can’t place orders, contact you to schedule an appointment, and in the case of downtime that stretches into weeks, it could affect your search engine ranking.

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