If you have spent a lot of time and money creating a website (or in the planning stages), setting up a secure and reliable WordPress backup for your site should be your number one priority.
A backup can give you the added security and peace of mind you need in case you hit a nightmare scenario such as getting hacked, locked-out or find that you have accidentally installed a plugin or theme that conflicts with your site and crashes the entire project. Just one tiny mistake can potentially set you back to square one after months of development.
While there are several WordPress backup plugins that offer both free and paid backup services, most do not provide the reliability needed to keep your site safe. In this article, we will look at what we believe to be the best backup plugin for WordPress: UpdraftPlus
With over 3 million active installs and a five star rating, UpdraftPlus is the world’s most popular WordPress backup plugin. It offers both a free and paid version that allows you to create a complete backup of your WordPress site via remote cloud storage options – including UpdraftValve, Google Drive, Google Cloud, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, Rackspace, BackBlaze, FTP, SFTP, via email, or a download direct to your PC. The UpdraftPlus Premium version also gives you the option to schedule backups, which can be incredibly useful if for example you have set up a WordPress shop that changes its stock and database settings every day.
The Premium version of UpdraftPlus also comes with extra add-ons that will allow you to create cloned websites, migrate a website, automatically backup your site before an update, WP-CLI integration, enhanced reporting, no adverts, fix backup time, more files, conduct database ‘search and replace’, multisite/network, WebDAV, Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP/FTPS/SCP, enhanced support for Dropbox (sub-folders), Rackspace, Cloud Files, Amazon S3 (Standard and Standard – Infrequent Access Storage classes) and Google Drive (sub-folders), free backup storage and free UpdraftClone tokens.
The pricing for UpdraftPlus Premium is also very reasonable and comes in several packages to best suit your budget and the needs of your site. While the free version provides an excellent backup option, we highly recommend taking out the UpdraftPlus Premium option so that you have all the extra features and security needed for your website.