Being prepared for the worst now will save a lot of stress later. Once your website is running smooth there are several things that could bring your site down such as a hacking or WordPress core update, theme update or plugin update? If you haven’t had your site go down you’ve been lucky. Right now the perfect time to make sure it doesn’t happen without a path to a quick recovery. Having a backup of your WordPress site’s files and database is crucial. The regular backing up WordPress should be something that is done during development, before any theme or WordPress core update and scheduled routinely throughout the life of your website.
Backing up WordPress is easy with backup services offered by hosting providers and several good WordPress plugins. We recommend a hosting solution as well as a WordPress plugin backup.
Web hosting companies such as HostGator, WPengine, Flywheel, Godaddy and BlueHost offer different solutions for backing up WordPress so we won’t go too in-depth with the individual settings. Most hosting companies with cPanel have backup services listed in the cPanel settings panel. Normally the backup service will cost a few dollars per month but the service is worth it. Our favorite hosting company WPengine offers daily snapshots of your files and database for free. Knowing that you can revert to the previous day gives the site owner and developer piece of mind.
Backing Up WordPress - The Plugins
UpdraftPlus
Backing up WordPress couldn’t be easier with UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus allows site administrators to manually perform backups or schedule backups hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. If something with your site goes wrong you can easily press the Restore button next to the backup you wish to restore. UpdraftPlus backups can be stored locally on your web server or uploaded to a remote storage. The current remote storage UpdraftPlus will upload to is UpdraftPlus Vault, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Could Files, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, FTP, Microsoft Azure, SFTP/SCP, Google Cloud, WebDAV, OpenStack, DreamObjects and email.
UpdraftPlus is the highest-ranking backup plugin on wordpress.org, with over 800,000 currently active installs. Widely tested and reliable, this is the world’s most popular and mostly highly rated scheduled backup plugin. Millions of backups completed!
The only downside we’ve experienced with UpdraftPlus is on low-cost hosting with limited resources. We haven’t experienced problems on HostGator but have noticed issues on websites running on GoDaddy shared hosting with Resource Levels 1 & 2. During the backup process servers with throttled resources can be brought to a crawl.
To try this plugin you can go to Plugins > Add New and search for UpdraftPlus or you can visit wordpress.org by clicking here.
BackupGuard
BackupGuard is another good WrodPress backup choice. BackupGuard offers an easy way to backup, restore and migrate your WordPress based website or blog. You can backup/migrate your files, database or both.
Free Features
- Unlimited backup – create as many backups as you want, there is no limit
- Backup files, database or both – you can backup your database or files, or both
- Unlimited restore – restore any backup file whenever needed
- Download backup – download your backup files for migration
- Import backup – upload your backup file to restore it right away
- Backup cancellation – cancel the backup process while it is not finished yet
- Manage backups – delete backups, view backup or restore log
- Backup customization – you choose which folders you want to backup
- Live progress – precise progress of the current backup and restore process
- WordPress multisite/network support
If you would like to try BackupGuard you can install it from Plugins > Add New or go to their page directly on wordpress.org by clicking here.
