What would happen if your website crashed or got hacked and if all your data was wiped out?
You know what they say—better safe than sorry.
Backups work like a safety net if you aren’t sure how to cope with such a catastrophic situation, including;
Using a WordPress backup plugin is a smart move to quickly restore your website and make sure your backup has the latest changes. Otherwise, you can lose all important data and end up back to square one.
We’ve rounded up a buyer’s guide to the best WordPress backup plugins both free and paid to help you pick the right one for your needs. Let’s make sure you backup everything that matters.
Keep this in mind: Many WordPress hosting providers offer limited backup services. However, it’s wiser to not solely rely on them. We recommend keeping regular backups of your website.
Here are our top picks for the best WordPress Backup Plugins:
Jump through the content:
With over 3 million websites using it, UpdraftPlus is the best free WordPress backup plugin in the market.
UpdraftPlus is a smart choice to do complete backups of your WordPress site if you’re running your site on a budget.
Even with the free version, you can set up manual and scheduled backups of your website, including database, plugins, themes, and files, hassle-free. Besides, it provides an option to choose which files to backup.
It allows storing your backup on the cloud or downloading it to your computer. Apart from these, you can automatically upload your backups to Dropbox, S3, Google Drive, FTP, SFTP, email, and a few more cloud storage services.
Key Features
Pricing
UpdraftPlus is free, but you can upgrade to the premium version to access additional backup features.
Reminder: Your customers’ and visitors’ data safety is just as important. You might want to consider WordPress GDPR plugins for that.
BackupBuddy is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins, and it’s been around since 2010, protecting half a million WordPress sites. This plugin allows you to schedule automatic daily, weekly, and monthly backups effortlessly.
With BackupBuddy, you can automatically store your backups in different cloud storage services like Dropbox, FTP, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, and Stash (their cloud service.)
If you use their cloud service, you can also do real-time backups. The best part about BackupBuddy is that it’s not subscription-based (no monthly fee.) Instead, you will pay for the number of websites mentioned in the pan.
Key Features
Pricing
BackupBuddy has three one-time payment plans:
JetPack Backups is a real-time WordPress backup plugin that automatically saves your site changes in the backup, so if somehow your site crashes, you can restore the most recent version in a few minutes.
It comes with an activity log to find out the actions taken on your site. This plugin is one of the best backup options for WooCommerce stores. It allows restoring websites to any past state while keeping all orders and products up to date.
Key Features
Pricing
JetPack Backup price plans start at $4.77 per month. The Complete plan is $47.97/mo when billed annually.
WP Time Capsule is a great incremental backup solution if you want to back up only your recent files and changes, not an entire WordPress site.
This plugin performs backups automatically as you make changes. Additionally, it makes sure that your WordPress site is backed up every time an update is applied. This way, you can quickly restore to the older version in case the update breaks your website.
One valuable feature of WP Time Capsule is being able to test your changes or updates in the Staging site before making them live.
Key Features
Pricing
30-day free trial available. Paid plans start at $49 with an annual payment. One-time payments start at $149.
BlogVault is a WordPress and WooCommerce backup solution service that is more like a SaaS (software as a service) than a plugin. This is because once you sign up, you’ll see an independent dashboard where you can manage your backups for multiple websites.
It allows you to view website uptimes, schedule backups, and restore your WordPress website with a single click. That means you’ll be able to restore your website even if you lose access to your website and hosting account since the platform is independent of both.
Additionally, BlogVault uses incremental technology to back up, which is ideal for optimizing website performance and speed. Besides, you can download a copy of your backup anytime as this service copies and stores backups on safe off-site servers.
Key Features
Pricing
BlogVault offers a 7-day free trial. Paid plans start at $7.4 per month ($89 per year) when billed annually.
If you need e-commerce plugin recommendations, we have the perfect list: Best WordPress Ecommerce Plugins Reviewed.
BackWPUp provides an all-in-one solution to create complete WordPress backups for free and store them on the cloud (Dropbox, Amazon S3, RackSpace), email, FTP, or on your computer.
This plugin allows you to easily schedule automated backups based on your site’s update frequency.
It also offers a premium version with a broader feature set. You can encrypt and store your backups to multiple storage locations like Amazon Glacier or Google Drive with the paid plan.
Key Features
Pricing
BackWPUp’s basic version is free. Premium plans start at $69 per year and renew at $39, making it an affordable choice in the long run.
BoldGrid Backup allows scheduling automated remote backups for your WordPress site and restoring it, and rolling back failed updates with a single click.
This plugin offers plenty of remote storage options like Amazon S3, Google Drive, and FTP/SFTP. Once you install the plugin, you can set a date for automated and scheduled backups or create manual backups as well.
Total Upkeep comes with a toolset to avoid website crashes and ensure your web hosting account offers the necessary support, ensuring the integrity of backups.
Key Features
Pricing
Total Upkeep costs $2.5 per month when billed annually, and it covers unlimited websites.
BackUpWordPress is a very easy-to-use and straightforward WordPress backup plugin because it doesn’t require any configurations.
This plugin stores backup files in /wp-content/backups location of your website by default, but you can change the path as well. It is highly recommended to change the path since all your files, including non-WordPress files, will be stored in the WordPress site root folder.
However, it allows you to exclude the files you don’t want to backup. BackupWordPress works on Linux and Windows servers alike.
Key Features
Pricing: Free
Duplicator is a popular WordPress plugin used to migrate WordPress sites. This plugin supports cloud storage along with several other options, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and One Drive.
Its primary focus is on website migration, but it offers backup features as well. The downside is Duplicator doesn’t allow creating automated scheduled backups. It is not an ideal solution if you want to keep your site automatically and regularly backed up. You will need to do the backup manually.
Key Features
Review: Duplicator lets you perform manual backups efficiently. If your web host provides regular backups, you can use this plugin to create backups to use on a staging environment. Apart from that, it’s an excellent migration plugin for WordPress.
Pricing: Free
It’s essential to keep your visitors engaged while your website is still under construction. We recommend WordPress under construction plugins.
Backup Migration is a free WordPress backup plugin that lets you schedule automated backups or perform manual backups. It comes with configuration options like:
The biggest downside is its free version is limited to backups of 2GB in size. This plugin is also capable of website migration to another host.
Key Features
Pricing
The free version is limited to 2GB in size. The premium version starts at $19.98 for six months with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Using a reliable backup plugin for your WordPress site is one of the best methods of keeping your data and website safe. It gives you peace of mind in a scenario where you lose all images, files, data, blog posts, guides, and more.
So no matter which plugin you go with, it should be able to bring back all of that data with a single click. We picked UpdraftPlus as the best WordPress backup plugin as a free, complete solution with essential features coming right out of the box.
However, if you need premium backup features and incremental backups that save as you change or update anything on your site, you can use BackupBuddy. It’s best to consider all the options and select one that flawlessly fits your needs.
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To further improve your WordPress site, you might like these resources:
Which backup plugin would you suggest to your fellow WordPress users? Share with us in the comments below!