Best Backup Plugins for WordPress

12 Best Backup WordPress Plugins In Case You Get Into Trouble

By in WP Plugins

From the beginning of the internet, hackers have attempted to infiltrate websites for their own personal gain. As technology has progressed, bots have taken over the majority of the grunt work, scanning for ways to get past your login credentials to take advantage of website source databases and servers.

Fortunately, the people behind WordPress have thought about these attackers quite a bit, and dozens of developers have made backup plugins to ensure that all of your website data is stored properly for a restore.

Will you need a WordPress backup plugin? Hopefully not.

Is it a good idea to constantly have one running in the background? Absolutely.

Why? Because a website restore can be one of the more tedious and expensive parts of handling a website, and without a backup you’re bound to get stuck losing some files.

So, keep reading to learn more about the top backup plugins on the market. We’ve revealed pros and cons to each and analyzed which backup plugin is best for certain webmasters.

1. BackupBuddy

Price: Starting at $80 per year

The BackupBuddy plugin provides a premium solution, with ticketed support, plugin updates and syncing. The plugin backs up your entire WordPress site, including posts, plugins, widgets and the database. It’s all consolidated into one tab in the WordPress dashboard, with options to restore, migrate, scan and schedule.

Pros

  • You gain access to the iThemes community with free Stash space, 10 free sync sites and ticketed support
  • Visualizes what takes up the most space on your site with the interactive site directory map
  • Automatically scans and repairs common issues with your database
  • Completes a full site backup
  • Schedules automated backups that store in off-site locations
  • Restore files with ImportBuddy, and receive email notifications when a backup is completed

Cons

  • The pricing is on the higher end
  • Refunds are not permitted if you don’t like the plugin
  • The plugin doesn’t support multi-site
  • It does not work if you’ve moved or changed the name of your wp-content folder

2. Duplicator

Price: Free and starting at $39 for a premium license

The Duplicator plugin does more than just backup your site. If you’re interested in cloning, copying or transferring an entire WordPress website, this will do the trick as well. We like this one for developers who would like to bring a production site down to a local machine, since the transfer is so seamless.

Pros

  • Choose from storage options like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon, and FTP
  • Receive email alerts when a backup has been made
  • Custom search and replace is awesome for when you have lots of backups
  • Multi-site is supported
  • This is one of the best backup plugins for supporting larger sites

Cons

  • The free version is extremely lightweight (with the only features being backups, directory filters, database table filters and a migration wizard)
  • You don’t get any customer support with the free version
  • Both the free and premium versions require some technical knowledge, so this one isn’t recommended for beginners

3. BackUpWordPress

Price: Free 

Th BackUpWordPress plugin is one of our favorites for beginners, because the interface is easy to use, and it completes full site backups without much complexity. It also uses a small amount of memory with its shared hosting environment.

Pros

  • You don’t have to debate between a free and premium plugin, because it’s all free
  • Manage multiple backup schedules
  • Faster backup processes are available with zip files
  • About 12 translations are available for those who don’t speak English
  • Backup files can be emailed to you
  • Backup files to places like Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Rackspace, Azure, DreamObjects and FTP/SFTP

Cons

  • Since everything on your site is backed up, we’ve noticed that the backup files can get rather large
  • Restoring a backup takes a little bit of technical knowledge, so beginners may have to find some help for this if needed

4. BackWPup

Price: Free and starting at $52.50 per year

The BackWPup plugin has a reasonable price, along with a fairly powerful free version to get started with. The process is pretty simple with the scheduling of automated backups that can then get stored on other platforms.

Pros

  • Backup to places like Dropbox, FTP, Microsoft Azure, S3 and more
  • You receive a list of all installed plugins for seeing how they affect your system
  • You get multi-site support
  • A built-in assistant is there for scheduling backups for you
  • This is a complete site backup with email reports

Cons

  • They clearly state that you won’t receive much support with the free version
  • There is no feature to restore a backup
  • The server load can sometimes be overwhelming
  • If something goes wrong, troubleshooting is very technical
  • The Google Drive backup only comes in the paid version

5. WP-DB-Backup

Price: Free

Consider using the WP-DB-Backup plugin if you’re not looking to pay any money, and you’d like a simple solution without many bells and whistles. The plugin focuses on your core database tables, but it also has the option to backup other tables in the same database.

Pros

  • You’re guaranteed to backup the most important files on your site
  • Translation files are provided
  • The plugin is super easy without tons of crazy features you may never use

Cons

  • You’re forced to use phpMyAdmin for any restores, which can get a bit technical
  • If backups aren’t working you need to go into the source code to edit a few lines
  • This isn’t a full site backup
  • It’s more of a manual backup

6. VaultPress

Price: Starting at $9 per month or $99 per year

VaultPress is one of the more impressive premium options, since it uses daily and real-time syncing of your entire WordPress site to keep you at ease. The interface looks clean, with tabs for items like backups, security, stats, activity, and settings.

Pros

  • Browse all of your past backups
  • Restore a backup with a simple click of the button
  • Notifications are sent to you for potential security problems
  • It’s one of the few backup plugins with stats for seeing your most popular and vulnerable times
  • Manage multi-site backups in one location
  • If you don’t want to complete a backup or restore yourself, the VaultPress professionals will do it for you

Cons

  • The premium (more expensive) version is required for malware scanning
  • The premium version is also needed for automated threat resolution
  • Large sites require many hours for a backup

7. blogVault Real-time Backup

Price: Starting at $9 per month

The blogVault Real-time Backup plugin has a free plugin, but none of the features are going to be working unless you pay for a plan. Once you pay for a plan you gain access to a system with complete site backups that occur on a daily basis.

Pros

  • Real-time WordPress backups are completed for the entire site
  • Easy migrations and restores are completed through the WordPress dashboard
  • The offsite backups can still be managed on your end
  • Multi-site is supported

Cons

  • There isn’t really a decent free plan (they market one with weekly backups, but it’s super watered down)
  • The only alternative backup solution is through Dropbox

8. UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

Price: Free and starting at $70 for the premium version

The UpdraftPlus plugin is one of our favorites because it has various options for choosing where to locate your backup files. This is an incredibly popular solution, seeing as how the ratings are high and the only reason you really need to upgrade to the premium version is if you require multi-site.

Pros

  • Most of the best features are in the free version
  • Multi-site is provided in the premium version
  • The hosted dashboard is wonderful for managing your backups
  • Backup to places like S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and others
  • This is the highest rated backup plugin in the WordPress plugin market
  • You can migrate backup files from other plugins you’ve utilized before
  • Large sites can be split into multiple archives
  • Choose which components of your site to backup and restore

Cons

  • The only problem is that they kind of trick you with some of the backup solutions. Basically, you may have to pay a little extra for an option like Microsoft Azure storage

9. WP Database Backup

Price: Free and $22 for the premium version

Check out the WP Database Backup plugin if you’d only like a database backup by using the free plugin. You can gain access to the features for a full backup if you want to pay for the pro plugin, but we would recommend another plugin with more features if you plan on paying.

Pros

  • The premium version is pretty inexpensive
  • An automated, scheduled backup for your database is completed in the free version
  • Store backups in Dropbox, FTP or email
  • Search and sort your backup list
  • Restore your backup with a single click
  • You can clone and move a site with the premium version

Cons

  • You only get a database backup with the free version
  • Multi-site compatibility is only available in the paid version
  • Backups take a very long time with large sites
  • The interface is a little messier than others

10. myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin

Price: It depends on how much storage space is used

The myRepono plugin is a lesser known backup plugin, but we want to mention it because of the pricing structure. Basically, the developers don’t believe in charging people for resources they don’t utilize, so they have a system setup where you pay a certain amount of cents per GB used each day. For example, the lowest pricing is at $0.02 per 1 GB per day.

Pros

  • The pricing structure can be rather beneficial if you don’t use much storage space
  • Backups are compressed to very small sizes
  • Backup an unlimited number of websites
  • Restore files based on the ones that are needed
  • Backup individual files or complete folders

Cons

  • We don’t have extensive experience testing the plugin out, and not many other people have either. So, it’s unclear as to how well it works

11. XCloner – Backup and Restore

Price: Free

The XCloner backup plugin has a more technical build, with backup and restore features built-in. It uses a custom script that must be implemented when you need a restore, and multiple formats and standards are used, so you have several ways to complete a backup.

Pros

  • Take a backup and move it to a completely new location
  • The plugin works for restoring PHP/Mysql applications
  • Share custom backups with clients

Cons

  • You don’t get any support unless you pay for it
  • The script for restoring isn’t exactly for beginners

12. CYAN Backup

Price: Free

The CYAN Backup is another more complex plugin for making backups, but we like it for more experienced developers. Daily, weekly and monthly backups are offered, and each of the scheduled backups are compressed into a zip file.

Pros

  • You don’t have to pay anything
  • The plugin is ready to be translated into any language
  • Set the number of backup files you want to keep
  • Schedule numerous backups

Cons

  • The only storage options are FTP, SFTP, and FTPS
  • Backing up takes a while
  • This is one of the more technical options
  • Restoring must be done manually

Which Backup Plugin is Best for You?

Seeing as how you have lots of WordPress backup plugins to choose from, you still might be wondering which one is ideal for your website.

Here’s our take on it: If you don’t want to pay any money (or you only want to pay a small amount of money) go with BackUpWordPress or UpdraftPlus. The premium solutions we like are UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, VaultPress, and Duplicator.

Duplicator is by far the best if you also want migration and cloning tools, while the most user-friendly solution is UpdraftPlus.

We hope this article helped you find the right backup plugin. You may also want to see our guide on best WordPress landing page plugins (Pros & Cons).

If you have any questions about the best WordPress backup plugins, or if you have experience playing around with these plugins, let us know in the comments section below.

Our Content is free. We may earn a small commission, if you purchase a product using our referral link.
Previous

JPG vs JPEG File Formats: Is There a Difference?

Next

6 of the Best WordPress Invoicing Plugins for Creating Invoices in 2020

2 comments on “12 Best Backup WordPress Plugins In Case You Get Into Trouble”

    • Dayaar
    • February 20, 2019
    Reply

    Thanks for sharing this informative article. To be honest, I am a big fan of Updraftplus. I have tried many freemium backup plugins and found that only the free version of Updraftplus and WPvivid Backup/Restore totally cover the backup and restoration features. But I encountered memory exhausted issue on shared hosting while creating backups with Updraftplus.

  1. Reply

    Thanks to this plugin, I can store the site safely so I don’t have to worry anymore if the site has an error and also the article writing is very good

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *