If you are not backing up your WordPress site regularly, you are always in the danger of losing all your data. And if something happens to your website such as being hacked or accidentally deleting something you shouldn’t you will also lose not only lose all your data but also all the time you have put into building your website. It doesn’t matter if your website is business related or a personal blog, you should take a few minutes to protect your digital asset.
While you always have the choice of backing up your site manually or relying on your web hosting company to do it for you, by using a backup plugin it will make your life much easier and regular backups of your site not only give you peace of mind but also help you revert back to the previous state if you break something.
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While there are hundreds of WordPress plugins out there, most of them don’t offer much functionality or just offer partial backups of your website. So, in this article, I will guide you through the best WordPress backup plugins available in 2017, we have listed the main premium offerings designed for businesses or people who need extra safety and functionality and also a number of free backup plugins which you can start using right away.
Backup Buddy
Backup Buddy is one of the most popular backup plugins available for WordPress. It is a premium WordPress plugin offered by iThemes. It not only allows you to backup your site, it also helps with migrating your site to a new host.
BackupBuddy is not a subscription service. That means you don’t need to pay every month. It allows you to schedule regular daily, weekly and monthly backups.
With Backup Buddy, you can automatically store your backups on Amazon S3, DropBox or their own cloud storage service. When you buy this plugin, you get free 1GB of storage space on their own cloud storage service.
Features:
- Comes with 1GB of free storage.
- Allows you to store your backups on Amazon S3, Dropbox, and many other external services.
- Offers functionality to migrate your website.
- Allows scheduling daily, monthly and weekly backups.
Price: Starting from $80/year/site
Updraft Plus
UpdraftPlus is one of the highest rated free backup plugins on WordPress.org. It allows you to set up multiple schedules for your backups. It allows you to store your backups to Amazon S3, DropBox, Google Drive and a lot of other popular services.
While the free version of this plugin includes a lot of features, you can always buy premium add-ons available for this plugin like the site duplicator add-on. It is multi-site compatible and can backup sites as big as 100GB in size.
You can also buy the premium version of this plugin that comes with all the add-ons and 1GB of free space on UpdraftVaul, the cloud storage service by UpdraftPlus.
Features:
- Allows you to store your backups to Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive and many more services.
- Schedule multiple daily, monthly and weekly backups.
- Exclude themes, directories, and plugins from backups.
- Available in over 15 languages.
Price: Free with premium version starting at $70
VaultPress
VaultPress is a premium backup service by Automattic, the guys behind WordPress. It comes as a premium module for JetPack. So, if you want to use VaultPress, you will have to get a premium subscription of JetPack.
While VaultPress offers unlimited storage space on all plans and also scans your site for malware, code vulnerabilities, and other security issues. The lite plan, their most basic plan, starts at $39 per year per site and offers daily backups with a 30-day archive.
Features:
- Automatic daily backups.
- Comes with unlimited storage.
- Scans your website for vulnerability, malware and security issues.
Price: Starts at $39 per year
ManageWP.com
ManageWP is a free service that allows you to manage all your WordPress sites from just one dashboard. While the service comes with free monthly backups, you will need to buy their premium Backup Add-on if you want more functionality.
The premium backup add-on is available for $2 per site per month. It offers on-demand and scheduled monthly backups. It offers one-click restore and allows you to save your backups on your own external storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox.
ManageWP also offers performance checks, security checks and analytics for your website.
Features:
- The basic version of this service is available for free.
- Offers a lot more functionality than just backups.
- The premium add-on is available at just $2 per site per month which is relatively cheap.
Price: Free
BackWPUp
BackWPUp is a free WordPress backup plugin with over 4 million downloads. It allows you to backup your whole site to an external service of your choice. It supports saving backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, Dropbox and many more services.
BackWPUp comes with a step-by-step restoration wizard and also offers multi-site support. It can also store the backups on your server or email it to you on your preferred email address. It offers automatic scheduled weekly and daily backups. The premium version of this plugin, BackWPUp Pro, comes with priority support and even more awesome features.
Features:
- Supports storage to external services including Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
- Comes with a simple, step-by-step restoration wizard.
- Allows scheduling daily, Weekly and Monthly backups.
Price: Free
WP-DB-Backup
WP-DB-Backup is a free WordPress database backup plugin with over 400 thousand active installations. It creates a backup of the core WordPress database tables and emails them to your preferred email address.
This plugin only backs up your database and not your whole site. If you just want to backup for your site’s database, WP-DB-Backup is the best choice. But if you are just a beginner, I would recommend you to choose some other plugin from this list.
Features:
- Totally free WordPress plugin.
- Allows you to backup your whole database or just parts of it.
- You can schedule monthly backups.
Price: Free
Duplicator
Duplicator is a popular plugin that helps you duplicate and migrate your WordPress website. Although it’s a migration plugin, it does come with the functionality to backup your whole site or just a few parts of it.
The free version of this plugin doesn’t offer automatic backups and doesn’t allow you to save your backups to external services. The premium version this plugin allows you to schedule your backups and offers the functionality to save your backups to an external service like Google Drive, Amazon S3, and Dropbox.
Features:
- Allows you to choose between backups of the whole site or just a few parts of it.
- Also, offers functionality to migrate your site to a different host.
- Offers manual and automatic scheduled backups.
Price: Free with premium version starting at $39
BackupWordPress
BackupWordPress allows you to schedule complete backups of your WordPress site and is available for free. While the free version does offer a lot of features, it doesn’t allow you to save your WordPress backups to external storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox.
BackupWordPress doesn’t consume much memory and can easily work in shared hosting environments. It allows you to exclude files and folders from backups. It stores a backup on your server and also offers the option to email you the backup once done.
If you want to store your backups on an external service, you will have to buy the premium version for $29 that allows you to store backups on Google Drive, Amazon S3, DropBox, Rackspace Cloud, Dreamhost DreamObjects, and Microsoft Azure.
Features:
- Can easily work in low-memory “shared” environments.
- Premium version allows you to store your backups to Google Drive, Dropbox, and many more external services.
- Allows you to exclude files and folders that you don’t want to include in the backup.
Price: Free with premium version starting at $29 per site
Cyan Backup
CYAN Backup is a totally free backup plugin for WordPress that allows you to backup your entire website including the database in a zip file. It allows you to schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups.
While it doesn’t offer storing backups on external services like Dropbox, it does come with remote storage options including FTP and SFTP. It is not as easy to use as the other plugins on this list and is not recommended for beginners.
Features:
- A totally free WordPress backup plugin.
- Allows you to backup your entire website in a zip file.
- You can schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups.
Price: Free
WordPress Backup to Dropbox
WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free backup plugin for WordPress with over 80 thousand active installs. It’s a simple plugin that allows you to backup your whole site to Dropbox. And as the name suggests, this plugin only allows you to store backups to Dropbox.
It offers on-demand and scheduled backups. It’s totally free and doesn’t come with a premium version.
Features:
- A really simple plugin that does what it says.
- Allows you to schedule backups to Dropbox.
- Totally free WordPress plugin.
Price: Free
Can’t Decide?
If you still can’t decide on which plugin to use, let me make it easy for you.
If you are looking for a free plugin, your best choice is UpdraftPlus. It is free and offers the most features.
But if you are looking for a premium plugin, you should go with Backup Buddy. It is very affordable, offers dozens of features and comes with 1GB of storage – perfect for business websites.
If you are just starting out or run a hobby website, I would recommend you to go with a free plugin as they offer some good features and will help keep your site backed up – you can always upgrade to a paid plugin later on if your site starts to make money and you wish for more peace of mind.
