The Top 5 WordPress Plugins to Backup Your Site

What is the most important maintenance task for any website? You will get different answers to this question, but I am sure creating regular backups will pop up more than once. Having regular backups of your website is one of those tasks that are both important and often neglected tasks among website owners.

Contrary to popular belief, backing up your website does not take a lot of time. In reality, you can make the whole thing automatic by using the freely available backup plugins. In today’s article, I will introduce you to the five best WordPress backup plugins with which you should be familiar.

1. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

UpdraftPlus is arguably the most popular backup plugin for WordPress. The simple backup plugin lets you backup your website data into the popular cloud storage providers including Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Rackspace, OneDrive, and FTP. Once you have set up the basic options, you can backup your site by a single click only.

UpdraftPlus also lets you create scheduled backups. It is possible to create separate schedules for the files and the database. And if your site is large, you can split the backup into several parts. You can also choose to include or exclude specific files or folders in the backup. Last but not the least, UpdraftPlus also supports backups made by other popular backup plugins.

2. BackWPup Free

BackWPup is an excellent plugin for saving your WordPress site in third-party storage providers like Dropbox, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, SugarSync, FTP, etc. The plugin will save the backup as a single zipped archive. Therefore, you can easily restore your website whenever you want. Besides your website files, the plugin will backup your database tables too.

Additionally, you can choose to optimize your database to check and repair any potential issue. It is possible to send the detailed backup logs along with the backup files to a specific email address. If you are a super admin, you can use the plugin in multi-site installations. The plugin is also available in multiple languages.

3. BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is another popular plugin for backing up your WordPress site. The backup will include all the files and the database of your site. By default, the plugin creates two schedules. Depending on your requirements, you are free to update them or create new backup schedules.

For each backup schedule, you can set the day and exact time to start the backup. You can choose to save a specific number of backups and send an email notification once the backup is completed. The plugin also lets you exclude specific files or folders from the backup. The plugin is available in multiple languages.

4. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox lets you create regular backups of your website by following some simple steps. As the name suggests, the plugin will save the backup files in your Dropbox account. As the plugin uses OAuth technology, it will not store your Dropbox account details anywhere. Therefore, your account will be completely secure.

You just have to choose the day and time for the backup. Once you have done that, the plugin will automatically create the backup and save it on the specified time. You will also have separate options to exclude specific files or folders from the backup and to save a copy of the backup in your server too.

5. XCloner – Backup and Restore

XCloner is another popular WordPress plugin which lets you backup and restore your website in a simple and easy way. As the plugin creates the backup files in common formats like TAR and Mysql, you will have multiple options to restore the backed up data.

An interesting feature of the plugin is its powerful restoration system. By using the plugin’s automatic restore script, you can easily restore the backed up content in any other website. Besides customizing the backups, you can also create backup schedules for backing up your website automatically.

Final Words

I hope now you see how easy it is to keep regular backups of your WordPress site. If you haven’t done it yet, do it now! As you have seen, the backup plugins will take care of the whole thing, you just need to set the schedule and make sure that backups are being saved regularly.

Let me know which backup plugin(s) you like the most. And if you are using any of them in your website, please share your experience with us.