﻿Recently, a lot of WordPress websites were compromised due to a bug found in the WordPress REST API. This caused many posts with defaced content titles like “Hacked By SA3D HaCk3D” and “Hacked By GeNErAL”. WordPress backup plugins are important because if something like this happened to your website, your crucial data is protected.

Fixing this is easy if you make regular duplicate copies of your website and one of the most effective ways to do this is to install the best WordPress backup plugins.

Top WordPress Backup Plugins

Why Backups Are Important?

You do a lot to keep your website secure. You make sure WordPress stays updated, you install the latest version of plugins and themes, and you have Sucuri. But, they all are preventive measures.

Having backups is important as it is the only way of recovery if your website gets trashed by a hacker. Obviously, it will be faster to restore from a backup than recreating the entire website again.

So, be safe. Make copies.

How to Create Backups on WordPress?

Well, there are two ways: Manual Backups and Plugin Based Backups to backup your site. Manual backup is a great solution but requires a bit of expertise. If you keep an eye on plugins, then using one for backups is not a bad idea. Many plugins come with automatic settings that can be used for creating copies without human help.

10 Best WordPress Backup Plugins

If there had been a plugin that I wished WordPress could couple with its installer instead of Akismet and Hello Dolly, then UpdraftPlus would have been my top choice. With more than a million active installs and almost perfect rating (4.9 out 5 stars), it’s the perfect one to have.

With UpdraftPlus, you can store your copied files on the cloud as the plugin supports Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Google Drive. You also have the option to store backups on a server of your choice through FTP transfer.

UpdraftPlus Pricing: Free (UpdraftPremium Personal for $70 “Up to 2 sites“)

The plugin has a premium version for which you have to pay. With the paid version, you get more storage options, like Microsoft OneDrive, SCP, WebDAV, and OpenStack Swift) along with a dedication 1GB space on Updraft Vault. Secure FTP, cloning, and remote transfer features are also included in this feature. Email and forum based support is available. The price depends on how many site you’re planning to use it and varies between $70 and $145.

The name’s brilliant and it’s a popular option too. It has a 4.7 out of 5-star rating. There’s a good reason behind it. The plugin has low-memory usage, making it ideal for hosting environments with shared resources.

BackUpWordPress is full-site backup plugin which means it makes a copy of everything that’s important and it does on your provided schedule.

If you want your backups to be stored on Dropbox or Google Drive, you’ll have to pay up. However, it’s worth the price if you love the ease of using this plugin.

This one’s paid, but it comes with excellent support. Currently with a 4.5 star rating, blogVault has a small learning curve but it’s worth it. The plugin offers automated daily backups the way you wanted. The service keeps offsite copies; therefore, you do not to worry losing about your copies. The plans start from $9 per site and there are unlimited plans too with storage capacities

Most efficiently, you get email-based support. Last but not the least, the service provides incremental backups for huge websites.

Sometimes, you get really good stuff outside the official WordPress repository. When it comes to backups, then this WordPress backup plugin from WPMU DEV is perhaps the best in the industry. Snapshot Pro creates manual and automatic full-site copies to both local and cloud servers. This helps when you experiment.

The local backups allow you to undo a change quickly while you do not have to fear any data loss as a copy is simultaneously being stored on WPMU DEV Hub, a cloud-based off-site storage. For now, each account gets 10GB of space. You also get additional cloud storage choice. You can download copies through FTP or SFTP.

Their claim of having a Time Machine for your website is quite true. The plugin works like an efficient backup system with granular controls.

This is a service that comes directly from Automattic Inc., the force behind WordPress and Jetpack. Now, to use VaultPress, you need to install Jetpack and then subscribe to a plan. For as little as $3.95 monthly, you will get a topnotch backup and security service where the copies are stored at an off-site location. If you wish, you can download a copy from the WordPress admin.

Duplicator is one of the most downloaded WordPress backup plugins with more than 900,000 active installs. The plugin has a 4.9 overall rating and there is are solid reasons behind that. The plugin not only backs up your data, but also duplicates your entire website from one location to another. It is extremely useful in the event of primary website failure.

However, the plugin requires some technical knowledge. So if you are not sound in development and other technicalities, you might want to hire a professional to get the best out of this plugin.

Yet another underrated backup plugin that is super effective for your backup needs. CYAN Backup supports hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups. If you are looking to make backups of your website after a few hours, then this plugin is for you. The plugin also allows you to specify which data you want to or don’t want to backup.

A popular backup plugin with more than 500,000 active installs. The plugin saves your complete installation including the content and creates an external backup on Dropbox, S3, FTP and more. The restoration is super easy where you only need a .zip file.

BackWPup is free but the developer suggests that the free version will not be as effective as the pro version. The pro features include backups to Google Drive and Amazon Glacier.

9. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

As the name suggests, the backup solution works with Dropbox. A very well-known backup plugin with more than 100,000 downloads. For this plugin to work, you would need to have a Dropbox account. The plugin is free but it will cost you if your data exceeds 2GB. The installation is as easy as it gets. You just have to authorize your plugin with Dropbox and your data will start the backup process automatically.

The plugin also has a premium version with added functionalities and also provides support in multiple languages

Probably the best premium backup plugin for WordPress. Apart from the usual features, a backup plugin has, BackupBuddy is a plugin which can be tailor-made into backing up your WordPress website the way you want it to. You can choose to backup your website daily, your uploads weekly, and your plugins monthly or any other combination.

The interface is user-friendly and easily understandable. You can figure out what this plugin can do in a couple of minutes.

Best Practices for Website Backups

Once you have backed up your website using the above WordPress backup plugins, you have just passed phase one in making your site safe and secure. Disaster management is essential if you want to keep your website data out of trouble.

Here are the best disaster management practices that you must follow

Backup Your WordPress Website

By now, you must have realized the importance of backing up your website. Whether you do it through WordPress backup plugins, or you decide to do it manually, backing up your website must be on the top of your priority list.

You must also have a working backup of your website on your hard drive, even if you have stored the backup on the safest of places like Amazon S3. This is because you must have a working backup with you in case of the absolute worst case.

Replace files Rather Than Restore

WordPress white screen of death is one of the common issues in WordPress caused by messing around with the fuctions.php file. Your first thought would be to restore your entire website. However, there is a much more convenient way to get your website back and that is to replace the messed up functions.php file.

All you need to do is simply access your personal backups, find the functions.php file till the date it was working and overwrite it with the backup file using FTP.

Think Before Your Restore

Restoring your entire website should be the last thing that you must do to get your website back. Normally, your hosting provider creates a daily backup of your website. In that case, the most you would lose is 24 hours of your website data. You don’t need to restore your entire website for that.

Keep Your Copies Close

It does not hurt to be careful. Create copies of your websites and make as many as you like, but never store your copies on the servers where the websites are hosted. You should keep them on cloud storage services, like Dropbox or Google Drive. If you can, store the same copies at different online drives. This process can be automated.

This way, you reduce the chance of losing your backups to almost zero.

Final Words

Backing up your website data is crucial in making sure that your business runs smoothly without any hurdles. In this article, we covered the best WordPress backup plugins and also shed some light on why backing up is important for any website.

If you know any other WordPress backup plugins that aren’t in this list, do let me know in the comments or hit me up at moeez@wpblog.com