Table of contents
The best solution to backup your WordPress site without needing a plugin
Backing up WordPress through your hosting provider
How to Backup Your Website with a WordPress Plugin
What should a WordPress backup plugin ensure?
What should a WordPress backup plugin do?
The best WordPress backup plugin I've tried
UpdraftPlus
In summary
For as long as WordPress has existed, website owners, administrators, and developers have been concerned about how to backup WordPress. Even in its early days, WordPress was a complex system. You could do a lot with it, but creating a backup and restoring it took time, patience, and of course, developers.
Website owners understood that it was worth the effort to back up their websites. Natural disasters, bad guys, and even bulldozers were the enemies of websites, and without a good disaster recovery program, everything could be lost.
At first, my favorite solution was a plugin that simply backed up my database every night using mysqldump and then emailed it to me. I thought this was the ultimate backup solution. It was easy, it was external to the site, and I had an email rule that deleted them, so within 300 days, they were gone.
Now, the obvious problem is that my database, while important, is only one part of what needs to be secured.
I don't think there is a best WordPress backup plugin or a 100% winning solution. I think every website has different needs and those who have a WordPress website should evaluate them and choose the best solution for them.
That being said, any WordPress backup solution is better than no solution at all. If you don’t backup your WordPress website daily, read the rest of this article, choose a solution, and start backing up your website today.
The best solution to backup your WordPress site without needing a plugin
Backing up WordPress through your hosting provider
Most top-tier web hosts offer backup services as part of their monthly fee. They will be a little different than what a plugin does because your web host has access to the underlying infrastructure and can do things that plugins simply can't do.
Your hosting provider's backup solution will almost always work faster, both in creating the backup itself and in restoring it because they don't rely on WordPress to do the heavy lifting. This means that if you have a large website or a large database, backing up and restoring through your web hosting provider will result in less downtime.
One thing to keep in mind when using your web hosting backup and restore is to make sure that the backups are stored outside of your website, meaning they are not on the same server that your website is stored on, and hopefully not even in the same geographic region.
If a natural disaster hits the region your website is hosted in and the entire infrastructure goes down for an extended period of time, if your backups are also stored there, then you are out of business.
At SiteGround, they are well aware of this. That's why they create daily backups of your website that are made available to you for 30 consecutive days and distributed geographically to ensure that your data is stored safely.
Expert Tip : Just because you're using your web hosting provider's backup service doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to keep a copy of your website locally. If an automated service isn't available, log in once a month and download the latest backup for the month to your computer as a last resort.
How to Backup Your Website with a WordPress Plugin
Consider these 2 questions before choosing the WordPress backup plugin that best suits your needs.
What should a WordPress backup plugin ensure?
A good WordPress plugin or WordPress backup solution must ensure at least 2 things:
Your database
Your uploaded files directory
Additionally, it is also useful to make a backup of:
The WordPress Core
Your topics
Your plugins
The reason I'm not including these last three in the mandatory backup section is that they can usually be downloaded and installed, so technically they don't need to be backed up. Still, it's a good idea to include them in your backup because it makes restoring a website much easier.
What should a WordPress backup plugin do?
A good backup solution should cover at least these three points:
Create a backup of your website
Store the backup in a different location . In IT we call this “Off Site.” It’s a term from when we used to back things up to a tape and then physically take it to a different site.
Restoring your backup . A good backup solution is only half the battle, you need to be able to USE those backups in case of an emergency. Most plugin-based solutions require you to re-install WordPress and its plugin before you can restore. This is usually not a problem, but the solutions provided by top-tier web hosting providers are better because they can restore everything.
The best WordPress backup plugin I've tried
Now that we understand what a backup solution should do, let’s look at the best WordPress backup plugin I’ve found.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the one I'm using on about 70% of my sites and I consider it the best free WordPress backup plugin. The paid version is even better!
UpdraftPlus is a “freemium” plugin in the sense that some of the features are free, others cost money. So far I haven’t needed any of the premium features. That doesn’t mean they aren’t worth it. UpdraftPlus starts from just $42/year for two websites.
UpdraftPlus does not automatically store your backup offsite. You need to configure where you want it to be stored. If you do not configure offsite storage, it is simply backed up to your server's local file backup. I highly recommend that you configure backups offsite.
The good news is that UpdraftPlus will work with almost any storage provider when it comes to storing files off-site:
Dropbox
Google Drive
Amazon S3 (or compatible)
UpdraftVault
Rackspace Cloud
FTP
DreamObjects
Openstack Swift
…and email.
My favorite is Amazon S3 and any service that uses the Amazon S3 API. Since I already netherlands whatsapp number data store a lot of stuff in S3, it was easy for me to get it up and running.
Since FTP (and I assume SFTP) is on the list, you can use UpdraftPlus to store your backups anywhere you have an (S)FTP server. They are the vast majority these days.
used to migrate websites. Each license comes with “Clone Tokens” that you can use to clone a website.
One of the things I love about UpdraftPlus is that if you are using their WP-Optimize and you have UpdraftPlus installed, before you make any optimizations or database changes, it will first ask you if you want to backup everything. I love that they take the time to help me keep my head above water.
Restoring a WordPress site through UpdraftPlus is as easy as selecting the “menu” option and then the backup to restore.
