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If there’s one thing you should never forget about having a website, it’s backups. This can mean the difference between keeping your business online if the unexpected happens or losing it forever.

Securing your website has never been easier with WordPress as a robust platform. Of course, I’m talking about plugins. Sure, you might have backups at your hosting provider or something, but read this article we created to explain why that’s not enough.

With hundreds of backup plugins out there, finding the best one can be difficult. Also, a more general theme is not knowing what you’re missing. In this article, we’ve done the hard work, so we’ve listed the best backup plugins and what they offer.

Why Should you Back Up your Website?

You never know when you’ll get a website-breaking error or an update-breaking-feature error. If you have a WordPress website, it’s important to create a backup beforehand just in case.

If you make changes to your WordPress website, you can use your backup to revert to an older version. Downtime is minimised, service impact is reduced and all your hard work is not lost! Saved backups protect your data if you fall victim to a cyber attack also helps. These are relatively rare, but when you put your heart and soul into your website, you’ll want to protect it.

What should I Look for in a Backup Plugin?

There are hundreds of backup plugins with different features. In this section, we will highlight some important features when choosing a WordPress backup plugin.

Storage

Check how much data the plugin can back up. Some plugins only provide partial backups of your WordPress database, while others provide full backups. The latter includes backups of your entire website, databases, and WordPress files such as posts, pages, media files, plugins, and themes. All of these take up space that some plugins limit.

Complete Website Backup

A WordPress website contains many files and tables including posts, pages, site settings, plugins, themes, media, etc. A WordPress backup plugin should back up your entire site, including all of these things. As, not all WordPress backup plugins are capable of doing this.

Incremental Backups

Creating regular backups is a good idea, but creating a full backup every time takes a lot of time and disk space. Alternatively, you can choose incremental backups. This means that instead of creating a full backup of your website each time, it creates a backup from the last saved checkpoint.

This is a smarter and more efficient way to protect your website. Weekly or monthly full backups and incremental backups at other times is a good strategy.

Safe Storage

What if the drive you use to back up your website is lost? Or what if your hosting account is hacked? If so, how do you restore your site?

Website backup location must be secure. Most backup plugins can store backups on your web server. However, it increases the load on server performance and introduces a single point of failure.

Some plugins have their own servers to keep your website secure, while others support cloud storage. Consider storage options when choosing a plugin. The more the better!

Cloud Backups

Some plugins help you store encrypted versions of your website on third-party cloud storage such as Amazon AWS, Google Drive, or other trusted storage services. Using cloud storage along with a local or downloaded copy of your website makes your website even more secure.

Scheduled Backups

Select a backup plugin to automatically run a backup at a specified time. This is an essential feature because you don’t have to remember and you can be busy with other things while your backups are processed automatically.

Real-time Backups

If you run an online store with WooCommerce, you should look for a real-time backup plugin. Every order is important in an online store and the loss of even one transaction can result in significant financial loss.

A robust backup plan can save a day in such cases. However, frequent backups are resource intensive. Luckily, some backup plugins offer real-time backups and track every small change on your website. Plugins can sync these small changes to the primary save file to keep them up to date.

Reliable Support

One important things to consider, when you are choosing a backup plugin is customer support. Even the best plugins are cause problems at any time. Also, Developer support is require in some cases.

Knowing which plugin to use to backup your WordPress site can be hard, so lets now take a look at the best 6 plugins in this WordPress Wednesday.

1. BackWPup

Backwpup WordPress Backup Plugin

BackWPup can backup all your WordPress content and store it in a remote location of your choice. Like Google Drive, Amazon S3, etc. This is one of the best WordPress backup and restore plugins, that get trusted by over 600,000 customers.

The plugin allows you to back up your files to multiple locations as needed. You can also easily download a .zip file of backed up content to restore your installation.

This plugin also occasionally checks and repairs the database. Not only that, but it also logs and backs up via email. The free version of this plugin is enough. However, the premium version offers additional features. So you can also try the premium version.

Pros

  • Plugin provides manual backup
  • Makes website migration easy
  • Seamless integration with cloud services
  • Supports multisite networks
  • Can schedule separate backups of databases and files

Cons

  • It doesn’t provide automated backups
  • Cloud backups are only available in the Pro version

2. WP Time Capsule

Wp Time Capsule

Another free WordPress backup plugin on our list is WP Time Capsule. The plugin provides real-time backups. Plus, your files are automatically backed up before each update to ensure you don’t lose important content.

You can also restore your data just in case. Also you can back up your database files. For added security, database backups can be encrypted. This will make your backups GDPR compliant.

The plugin also backs up and restores only modified files and databases, not the entire website content. You can also save your content to cloud storage locations such as Google Drive, Amazon S3, and Wasabi.

Pros

  • Provides scheduled automatic backups
  • supports incremental backups
  • Can be easily integrated with cloud drives
  • Supports calendar view of backups
  • Websites can be restored to any calendar date in the backup

Cons

  • The backup and restore process takes time.
  • Multi-site network not supported

3. UpdraftPlus

Updraftplus

UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin. There are over 3 million active installs. The plugin allows you to restore and backup your files in one click. Moreover, you can back up directly to cloud storage. Like, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, email, etc.

Needless to say, this plugin is easy and intuitive to use. UpdraftPlus allows you to set up automatic backup schedules according to your needs. Also, the plugin is very fast as it consumes less server resources. Plus, you can easily migrate your website and easily replicate it.

Pros

  • You can do a complete backup of your site
  • Store that backup on the cloud or your computer
  • Can do scheduled and immediate backups
  • Choose which files that gets backed up
  • Quickly restore backups

Cons

  • It doesn’t provide real-time backup
  • Gets Pricey for multiple licenses

4. Total Upkeep

Total Upkeep Boldgrid Backup

Total Upkeep is a complete 360-degree solution to protect all your data. The plugin not only protects your data, it also prevents your website from crashing. However, if you accidentally lose your data, you can easily restore it as the plugin provides a restore option along with backups.

You can back up complete files and databases as needed. Additionally, the plugin provides an automatic rollback feature that creates a backup before any update and rolls your website back to the last backup if the update fails.

Pros

  • Offers site migration even in the free version
  • Provides easy automated backup
  • Supports remote backups to different cloud storage options
  • Monitors your site for errors

Cons

  • It doesn’t support real-time backups
  • Does not offer backups for multi-site networks

5. Jetpack

Jetpack

The Jetpack plugin is an all-in-one solution. As it’s a security, performance, marketing and design tool. This plugin is one of the best free WordPress backup plugins. Plus it has over 5 million active installs to date and is still counting.

The plugin provides automatic real-time backup and easy one-click restore. Additionally, the plugin offers malware scanning and spam protection. Most notably, the plugin offers unlimited storage space for backups.

You can also easily download the free version from WordPress.org. There’s also a premium version if you want extra features.

Pros

  • Offers schedules automatic backups
  • Provides quick restore
  • Supports real-time backups
  • Responsive customer support

Cons

  • Most for essential features come in the paid plan only

6. BlogVault

Blogvault

BlogVault ranks as one of the fastest and reliable backup plugin for WordPress. It has successfully restored over 1 million websites and 4 million websites to has been backed up.

The plugin also includes a free staging environment. The staging environment allows you to clone your live website for testing purposes. Easily create a clone site on your BlogVault server with a single click.

The best part is that the plugin is beginner friendly and easy to set up even for laymen. The plugin speed is optimised and does not slow down your website at all. This is because all processing is done on the BlogVaults servers.

Pros

  • Easy backup and restoration of websites
  • Supports multi-site networks
  • Supports staging and migration
  • Monitors the site and alerts in case of any issues
  • Supports cloud backups

Cons

  • It doesn’t take partial backup
  • Cloud-only and doesn’t support local backup
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WordPress Wednesday – 6 Best WordPress Backup Plugins