Backing up the WordPress is easily one of the most important maintenance activity that should be performed at regular intervals. This is because building and maintaining a website requires a lot of effort. It doesn’t include only writing posts, but also choosing themes, plugins and making several other decisions.
Backing up the WordPress will give you the peace of mind that you have multiple copies of your website as a backup and even in any case of fatal error or a hacking activity, you have a copy to get back your website as it was.
Although people can question this activity saying that it is not compulsory as there are hardly any crashes or hacking attempts on their website, there is no assurance of anything. And it’s always better to be safe rather than feel sorry at the later stage.
Properties of a good Backup Plugin
- Capable of complete backups: A backup should include media libraries, themes and various plugins in addition to your database.
- Gives an option to automate: Automating this procedure at regular intervals will make things much easier for you
- It should be easier to restore the original form of the website using this Backup Plugin
So here we will discuss some of the best Backup Plugins for WordPress powered websites available on the market:
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BackupBuddy
Considered one of the best in the market, BackupBuddy is a premium WordPress plugin. Using BackupBuddy, it is incredibly simple to schedule periodic (daily/weekly/monthly) backups for your website.
BackupBuddy is capable of backing up all your information in offshore services like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. or simply emailing it to yourself. It is pretty easy to set up and the entire system is highly customizable.
This plugin also provides some extra features such as database and malware scans, and performing repair operations, among many others.
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UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the most famous free backup plugin available for WordPress. It is also the highest rating backup plugin for WordPress with over a million currently active installs.
It allows the users to back up the data directly into the cloud via Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud, Amazon S3, Google Drive, etc. The paid version allows for Microsoft OneDrive, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure, etc.
UpdraftPlus is very fast and uses fewer resources. There are some additional functionalities provided with the premium version, like migration and dedicated support.
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BackUpWordPress
BackUpWordPress has a free as well as a premium version. It is a highly rated backup plugin and is used by hundreds of thousands of people. It also offers support for multiple languages.
BackUpWordPress backs up your entire website including the database and all the files and this whole process can be automatically scheduled beforehand. This is particularly good because it works in low memory and is very good for shared-hosts environments.
It provides the option to back up the files selectively and also email back to yourself if you desire so. Their premium plan offers dedicated support for any issue that might arise while using this plugin.
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WP-DB-Backup
It is also one of the most popular WordPress Plugins present for WordPress. But there is a massive issue here. WP-BD-Backup will only backup the database of your website. This means that media files will have to be backed up manually.
If you do not change your website too often, then this is an excellent option. Creating, scheduling and restoring database backups is really simple with WP-DB-Backup.
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BackWPup
With over 5 million downloads, there is no doubt that this plugin is very popular. It lets you backup your entire website and then pushes it to an external backup service like Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.
This plugin is extremely easy to use and allows for automatic backups. There is a premium version available too which opens up some more features of this plugin.
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VaultPress
VaultPress is developed by Automattic and recently became a part of another Automattic product called JetPack. This basically means that you will need JetPack subscription to use VaultPress. If that’s a deal breaker for you, then you should not consider this option at all.
They offer automatic real-time backup options and an easy way to set up the entire system. They also offer security scans with some of their services.
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Duplicator
This is a popular plugin mainly used for migration of websites but also contains backup features. Unavailability of an automated backup option is a big downside to this plugin though (for free version).
All of the common features including automated backups are available with the premium version. The best part about duplicator is it doesn’t impact the speed of the website negatively.
There is another issue that it is quite complicated for beginners to easily understand and use it and also has a trickier procedure for setting up the plugin.
All in all, there are several options available to make a backup of your website and any one of them can be used. It depends on the individual situation and requirements.
An important thing to keep in mind is that backup should not be in the same server as your original website and should preferably be in another server or in some off-shore cloud accounts like Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
