Maintaining periodic WordPress backups is one of the best practices for your website or blog security. Backing up your data backed up regularly gives you peace of mind and keeps you out of harm’s way in case of an emergency or disastrous event like when you mistakenly lock yourself out or your site gets hacked.
Talking about your site getting hacked, Make sure that you have a security plugin like iThemes, Sucuri, or Wordfence to help block malicious attacks.
There are tons of free and paid WordPress backup plugins and lot of them are very easy to install and use.
In trhese article, we will share the 10 best backup plugins for WordPress.
Note: While lots of WordPress Hosting Providers like us offers limited and unlimited backup services, we recommend that our clients should have a backup plugin.
If you do not have a plugin that is backing up your WordPress website, then i suggest you pick one of these 10 best WordPres backup plugins and start backing up your site.
Table of Contents
1. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is among the most popular free WordPress backup plugin available on the web. It is user base by more than 2 million websites.
UpdraftPlus makes it possible for you to create a backup of your WordPress site and save it directly on the cloud or download into your computer or any other harddrive.
The plugin supports timed backups as well as on-demand backups whenever you want. You also have the option to select which files you want to backup.
It can also automatically upload your backups to Google Drive, Dropbox S3, FTP, Rackspace, SFTP, email, and various other cloud storage services (see our step by step guide on how to backup & restore your WordPress site with UpdraftPlus).
Apart from automatically backing up each WordPress website, UpdraftPlus also lets you to restore backups directly from your WordPress admin panel.
UpdraftPlus has a premium version with add-ons that you can use to migrate or clone websites, database search and replace, multisite support, and several other features. This premium version also gets you access to superfast priority support.
Pricing: Free (UpdraftPremium Personal for $70)
Review: UpdraftPlus is the most users favorite WordPress backup plugin in the market. It has over 2 million active installs and 4.9 out of 5 star rating average. While the free version has a lot of features, we recommend upgrading to UpdraftPlus premium to unlock all powerful backup features.
2. VaultPress (Jetpack Backup)
Jetpack Backups is a well known WordPress backup plugin developed by Automattic, the company built by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg.
The plugin was originally known as VaultPress but now it’s been rebranded and redesigned as Jetpack Backups.
Jetpack backup plugin gives daily and real-time cloud backup service without making your website slow. You can setup Jetpack backups and restore from backups easily with a few clicks.
The higher cost of the Jetpack plan the more it offers additional security scans and several other powerful features.
There are a few disavdvantages of using Jetpack backups plugin for beginners.
First, it is a recurring expense that can add up if you have several WordPress sites because you pay on a per site level.
Second, the purchase flow is a bit complicated, and you to install the Jetpack plugin to purchase their subscription. The bright side of it is that you can manually disable all the unwanted features of Jetpack except for backups, so they don’t make you site slow.
Lastly, the backups are stored for only 30-days on the lower plans. If you want an unlimited backup archive, then you would have to pay the $49.95 per month per website which is more expensive for beginners when compared to other backup service providers listed here.
However even with it high price, Jetpack backup is totally worth it due to the stellar reputation of Automattic. This is why we pay for higher priced real-time backup plan for our new sites like All in One SEO because it’s an eCommerce store, and we want the best protection.
Pricing: From $9.95 per month for Daily backups plan or $49.95 per month for real-time backup plan.
Review: Jetpack Backup is a premium backup service. If you’re already using JetPack for other features like JetPack CDN for social media promotion, photos, Elastic search, etc, then it’s good value to buy their Complete plan bundle for maximum value. If you just need after real-time cloud backups for WordPress, then you can also take a look at BlogVault in our list because they provide more affordable pricing for beginners.
3. BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is one of the another popular premium WordPress backup plugins used by over 500 plus WordPress sites. It let allows you to easily schedule daily, weekly, and monthly backups.
When using BackupBuddy, you can automatically store your backups in cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Dropbox, FTP, Rackspace Cloud, Stash (their cloud service), and even email it to yourself.
If you are using their Stash service, then you also have the ability to do real-time backups.
One of the major advantage of using BackupBuddy is that it is not a subscription-based service, so you don’t have to pay monthly fee. You can use the plugin on the number of websites mentioned in your plan.
You also get access to premium regular updates, support forums, and 1GB of BackupBuddy Stash storage to save your backups. Plus, their iThemes Sync feature lets you have control of up to 10 WordPress site from a single dashboard.
You can even use BackupBuddy to duplicate, migrate and restore websites.
Pricing: $80 for Blogger Plan (1 Site License)
Review: BackupBuddy is an economic premium WordPress backup service for you. It contain features you’ll need to backup, restore and migrate a WordPress site. In a simple term, it’s a powerful UpdraftPlus and VaultPress alternative that you can use.
4. BlogVault
BlogVault is another choice WordPress backup service for WordPress. It’s not just a WordPress plugin, it is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. It stores offsite backups independently on BlogVault servers, so it won’t slow down the load time on your server.
BlogVault creates backup of your site on daily and also lets you to manually create unlimited on-demand backups. It features smart incremental backups that sync only incremental changes for minimal server load. This ensures optimal performance for your site.
It also helps you to recover your website easily. You can store upto 90 days backup archive on lower plans, and a full year backup archive on higher plan, so you can recover your site from any issue.
It also has a built-in staging site feature that allows you to test your website easily. In addition, they provide an easy option to migrate your website to another host.
BlogVault features are ideal for small businesses, and their real-time backup plan is quite cheap when compared to Jetpack backups. But if you compare it to self-hosted plugins like Updraft or BackupBuddy, then the cost per site is more expensive.
Pricing: $89 per year for Personal Plan 1 Site License for daily backups. $249 per year for real-time backups.
Review: BlogVault is a very simple WordPress backup solution. It creates offsite backups, so your website server will not be slowed down with your backups. The pricing seems very ideal for small businesses who want real-time backups but are not willing to pay the premium pricing of Jetpack backups.
5. BoldGrid Backup
BoldGrid Backup is a WordPress backup solution developed by BoldGrid, which is also a website builder powered by WordPress.
It lets you create your website backups, restore your site after it crashes, and you can use it to move your site when changing hosts. You can set up automated backups or manually create backups with one-click.
BoldGrid Backup comes with a fault protection feature which automatically creates a backup of your site before it updates. If an update wasn’t successful, it will automatically roll back your WordPress site to the previous backup. this feature protects you against update errors.
With BoldGrid Backup, you can store up to 10 backup archives on your dashboard and more in a remote storage locations like S3, FTP, SFTP or Amazon.
Pricing: $60 per year (Includes all of BoldGrid Premium tools & Services)
Review: BoldGrid Backup is a WordPress backup plugin that you can use to create your website backups. The advantage of using this plugin are other powerful tools you’ll get when you purchase the plugin.
6. BackWPup
BackWPup is a free plugin that allows you to create backups for free and store it on the cloud (Dropbox, Rackspace, Amazon S3, etc), FTP, email, hard disk or on your computer.
It is very easy to use and allows you to schedule backups according to the frequency of your site’s update.
Restoring a WordPress site from backup is also very simple. The BackWPup Pro version comes with the ability to store backups on Google Drive, priority support, and some other cool features.
Pricing: Free (Premium plan is also available)
Review: Used by more than half a million websites, BackWPup is a great alternative to other backup plugins in this list. The premium version of the plugin has more powerful features which includes an easy and quick website restoration from the backend with a standalone app.
7. Duplicator
Duplicator is a popular WordPress plugin used for sites. However it also equiped with backup features.
It does not allow you to create scheduled backups which makes it less than ideal primary WordPress backup solution for a regularly site.
Pricing: Free
Review: Duplicator lets you create manual backups of your WordPress site easily. If your web host offers regular backups, you can use this plugin to create backups to use on staging environment. It’s an awesome site migration plugin.
Final Thoughts
Each WordPress backup plugin in this list have their pros and cons, but all of them offer complete WordPress file backup as well as full database backup features.
We use Jetpack Backups for two major reasons which are, it offers real-time incremental backups and It is extremely easy to use.
This means that instead of backing up all of your files daily or every hour, it only creates a backup of what has been updated almost immediately it was updated. This is a great choice for large website like ours because it allows us to manage our server resources more efficiently.
Also, if you run a small to medium size site and hate paying monthly fees, then we recommend that you use the UpdraftPlus plugin. It comes with features like backup encryption, encrypted backup transport, and lots of cloud storage options.
Whichever WordPress backup plugin you choose, we recommend that you do NOT store your backups on the same server as your website.
Because you would be putting all of your eggs in a single basket. If your server’s hardware crashes or maybe you get hacked, then you don’t have a backup which makes the purpose of setting up regular backups useless.
This is why we highly recommend storing your backups on a third-party storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.
That’s all. We hope that this blog post helped you pick the best WordPress backup plugin for your site.
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Cheers
-Temple
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