7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins Of 2023

Things can go wrong anytime for anything with your WordPress blog. It can be due to a theme, a plugin, or anything else. Things are very uncertain when you have a WordPress blog.

The best bet is to take backups regularly. Most web hosts offer a server backup feature. But you can not really depend on that. Think of a scenario when your server crashed. Your server backup also will be gone. Right?

For your own peace of mind, you should keep a backup of your website regularly on top of your web host backups.

Fortunately, there are many plugins for WordPress that can take backup automatically. This article will be all about discussing those 7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins.

What Is WordPress Backup?

A WordPress backup is keeping a copy of your website files either in Cloud or on your local computer so that when your live website crashes, you can use the backup data to restore it.

WordPress backups can include all your website data like all files, images, database, and any other files that are required to build that website.

If you have a backup, you can easily restore your site within a couple of minutes.

Why Back Up Your WordPress Website Is Important?

You never know when your website might crash. You should back up websites regularly so that you are always ready if any uncertain things happen to your website.

With over 100K themes and plugins, you never know what may cause your website to go down. All your effort and money will go in vain if you don’t have a backup to restore.

Ideally, all WordPress backup plugins take a backup of your website when you update WordPress, themes, or plugins.

Backup is useful too when your website is attacked by any malware or virus. Downtime will be minimal, service impact will be reduced and he will not lose your hard work.

Key Features Of A WordPress Backup Plugin

While you are shopping around for a backup plugin for WordPress, you have to make sure that the plugin has these bare minimum features.

Ease of Use

No one will use a plugin that does not have an intuitive interface and is not easy to use. It should be easy to navigate too, else it won’t be of no use as the users will have a hard time finding options.

Automatic Scheduled Backups

People usually forget to take backups. So automatic backup is a must to have complete peace of mind without worrying about a crashed website.

You should just set the interval when the plugin should take a backup and it should do it automatically.

All plugins use a corn job to take automatic backups. Please make sure that you are not disabling cron jobs.

Incremental Backups

Full backups can put a lot of load on your server. It can also take up a lot of storage space. The solution to this problem is an incremental backup.

Instead of backing up the whole website again and again, an incremental backup will only back up from the last restore checkpoint. That will put less strain on your server and your website won’t be slow.

Backup To cloud storage

You can not always depend on your web hosting backups or local backups. This is the era of cloud computing and you should back up your WordPress websites to cloud storage like Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, etc.

Using cloud storage on top of local storage can give you peace of mind that you have an extra copy of your backup.

Self Storage

When a backup plugin backs up your website, it usually stores data either in the web server or cloud server depending on your setting.

Frequent backups can bloat your web space. That is why some plugins offer dedicated storage where you can back up your website into that plugin storage itself.

Off-Site Backup

I always emphasized the point that frequent backups can slow down your website as all backup plugins use your web resources to back up your website.

However, there are some plugins that will use their own resources to take backups. In that case, there will be no load on your server, and your website won’t get slow.

Reliable Support

Reliable support is a must for backup plugins. Although you can always restore your website by yourself, in case you face any problem, there should be a helping hand to take you out of the problems.

How To Take WordPress Backup

You can use below two methods to take WordPress backup. Both methods are effective in completely restoring a website.

  • Backup at the server level
  • Backup Using A WordPress plugin

Backup At The Server Level

If you are using shared hosting then you might have a backup option in the C panel. From there you can take your complete website backup.

You can also back up your database and home directory as needed. To back up using the C panel please follow the below steps.

  1. Login to the C panel
  2. Search the Backup Wizard option and click on it.
  3. Select Backup
  4. Select Full Backup or Partial Backup
  5. Select the location where your backup will be stored
  6. Click Generate backup

To restore, you have to follow the same process but instead of selecting backup, you have to select restore in the backup wizard.

Here is a nice video from the Hostgator team explaining the backup process using C Panel

Backup Using A WordPress Plugin

WordPress has many plugins that back up WordPress blogs manually and automatically. With a few clicks, you can back up your WordPress website without even logging in to your web control panel.

Best WordPress Backup Plugins

Here is the list of the 7 Best WordPress Backup Plugins. Most plugins have a free version with limited features. To unlock more features, you need to buy the pro version.

1

WPVivid

WPVivid-Best WordPress Backup Plugins
WPVivid

WPVivid 40% Off

Backup and clone websites
Remote backup
Incremental backup

Key Features Of WPVivid Plugin

  • Remote backup
  • Scheduled backup
  • Incremental backup
  • Clone website
  • Database backup
  • Image Optimization [Pro]
  • White labeling [Pro]
  • Staging area[Pro]
  • Multisite support

Uncertain things can happen to your WordPress blogs. It can happen due to a new theme, a new plugin, or it could be because of an update.

It could also be due to a malware attack or poor coding.

It’s always safe to take a backup of your WordPress blog periodically so that you can restore your blog in case of any issues.

When we talk about backup plugins for WordPress, WPVivid is the first choice of many bloggers. It can create backups of your website automatically or on demand.

In case of any issue, you can easily restore your website from the backup.

WPVivid also has an option for remote backup. What that means is that you can take a backup of your WordPress website in the cloud servers like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

So in the worst case, even if you lose your WPVivid backup, you can still restore your website using the cloud backup.

WPVivid can also take periodic automatic backups. Once you set the interval, WPVivid will automatically back up your blog.

WPVivid has a free version which is more than enough for a normal blog. But if your WordPress backup folder size is more than 500 MB, then it is better to use the premium version that allows you to take incremental backup.

2

UpdraftPlus

Updraftplus-Best WordPress Backup Plugins

UpdraftPlus

1 GB Updraft Vault storage
Multisite support
Incremental backup

Key Features Of UpdraftPlus Pro

  • Free 1 GB Updraft Vault cloud storage
  • Incremental backup
  • Run from WP-CLI
  • Lock setting access
  • No advertisement
  • Database encryption
  • Store backup files in multiple cloud locations
  • Automatic backup when you update WordPress, themes, or plugins
  • Multisite support

UpdraftPlus is one of the best backup plugins for WordPress. With more than 3 million downloads it is one of the most popular plugins to back up your WordPress website.

UpdraftPlus allows you to take a complete backup or partial backup of your website. You can store backup files either locally or you can store it in cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, One drive, etc.

You can also schedule backups so that you don’t need to worry about manually backing up your website. Restoring backup files is also very easy.

Unfortunately, in the free version, you can restore the website to the same domain only. You can’t duplicate the website and restore it to a different domain.

If you use the premium version, you can duplicate your website to a different domain. The Premium version also has the option of database search and replacement.

Overall, Updraftplus is a very good WordPress backup plugin. Even the free version has all the required features. However, to explore its full potential, you need to buy the pro version.

3

BlogVault

Blogvault-Best WordPress Backup Plugins

BlogVault

Offsite backup
Data encryption
Incremental backup

Key Features Of BlogVault Pro Version

  • Incremental backup
  • Offsite backup
  • Real-time backup
  • Data encryption
  • Malware scanning
  • Cloud storage
  • One-click staging
  • Up to 365 days of backup

The beauty of the Blogvault plugin is that it can take offsite backups. Off-site backups have two major benefits.

One is that it does not use your server resources or space to take backups. This means, your site won’t get slow while taking backups.

The other benefit is quick restoration in the case of a website crash.

Blogvault is a SaaS product and not a standalone plugin. That is why you need to connect your website to the Blogvault server for taking a backup.

Blogvault can take incremental backups. This means every time it won’t take the whole website backup. Instead, it will take a backup from the last changed point. The incremental backup will then merge with the main backup. Incremental backup means less strain on your server.

Blogvault also offers encryption to the backup data so that it is safe and secure. This feature makes Blogvault unique as even some reputed backup plugins do not offer this feature.

Blogvault can also take real-time backups for WooCommerce sites. This means, after every order, BlogVault will take an incremental backup. After all, every order data is important. Right?

4

Jetpack

Vaultpress-Best WordPress Backup Plugins

JetPack Backup ( VaultPress

Offsite backup
Data encryption
Incremental backup

Key Features Of VaultPress Pro Version

  • Incremental backup
  • Offsite backup
  • Real-time backup
  • Data encryption
  • Real-time malware scanning
  • Cloud storage
  • One-click restore
  • Website firewall

Jetpack backup (VaultPress) is owned by Automattic, the same company that is behind WordPress. This is one of the best backup plugins for real-time WordPress website backup.

You will get up to 10 GB of cloud storage where you can store unlimited website backup data. VaultPress runs real-time malware scanning while taking backups. Your backup data is secure as it is encrypted.

VaultPress also offers incremental backups so that you don’t have to back up the whole site again and again. Instead, the plugin will back up from the last restore point.

The restoration is also very easy. You can even restore websites from your mobile app. Even if your server crashes, you can restore your websites in minutes.

VaultPress has a free version with limited features, however, most of the main features are included in the pro version.

5

Backup Buddy

Backupbuddy 1

Backup Buddy

Offsite backup
Scheduled backup
Cloud storage

Key Features Of Backup Buddy

  • Complete WordPress website backup
  • Scheduled automatic backup
  • Up to 5 GB Cloud storage
  • Off-site backup
  • Customizable backup contents
  • WordPress malware scan

Those who are fond of iThemes products will love Backup Buddy. It is an all-in-one backup solution for WordPress websites. However, there are no such features that will make you feel “WOW”.

You can schedule automatic backups, and download backup files in zip format to transfer your websites.

You can also store your backups in the Backup buddy cloud storage without wasting your web server space. You can also customize the backup content as per your need. You will get an instant email notification when the backup is complete.

All backups go through a malware scan to ensure that the cloud space is not infected. Your data is encrypted, so nobody can access your backup in the cloud storage.

Backup buddy does not have a free version, however, they offer a 30 days money-back guarantee. You can buy Backup buddy as a stand-alone license or buy the iThemes package that also includes products like Kadence Pro, iThemes security, etc.

6

Duplicator

Duplicator-Best WordPress Backup Plugins

Duplicator

Server-to-server import
Scheduled backup
Secure File Encryption

Key Features Of Duplicator Pro

  • Unlimited Backups
  • Unlimited Migrations
  • Scheduled Backups
  • Recovery Points
  • Server-to-Server Import
  • Secure File Encryption
  • Cloud Storage Integrations
  • Smart Migration Wizard

Duplicator, as the name suggests duplicates your WordPress website. It has an Intuitive interface to copy all contents along with the database and store it in a local drive or cloud storage ( Pro version).

You can restore backup files to the same domain or you can use that for a different domain. This helps when you plan to copy content from one domain to another.

One problem with the duplicator plugin is that it does not offer automatic backups in the free version. So if you plan to use it for regular backup, Duplicator free version is not a good option.

In the pro version, you can schedule backups which can be used for regular automated backups.

Restoring is very easy but the free version has a limitation of 500 MB. This means, if the backup file is more than 500 MB, it won’t work. You will need the pro version for that.

7

BackWPUp

Backwpup-Best WordPress Backup Plugins

BackWPUp

Complete website backup
Data encryption
Cloud storage

BackWPUp offers all the features that any other mainstream WordPress backup plugins offer. It has a free version that offers complete website backup in local storage or cloud storage.

It also has a premium version that offers data encryption, XML exports, etc. Surprisingly, the plugin does not offer any incremental backups or real-time backups. BackWPUp does not offer any self-storage as well.

The only extra key benefit that you will in the pro version over the free version is the addition of a few cloud storage providers and data encryption. So, it makes sense to use the free version only unless you are choosy about any particular cloud storage vendor.

Conclusion: WordPress Backup Plugins

Taking a WordPress website backup is an important task and you can not simply rely on any plugin unless you know about the plugin and its capability.

WordPress backup plugins listed in this article are all widely used and very popular among website owners. All are very reputable backup plugins that saved many website owners by restoring their websites.

Personally, I am using WPVivid on all my production websites and it never failed in taking backups or restoring the backup in the case of transferring my website to a different host.

The WPVivid free version is also feature loaded. In case, you are running out of budget, you can try the WPVivid free version.

Rajib
Rajib

Rajib Is The Founder Of RiansTech. A Seasonal Blogger And A Full-Time Product Designer For Over Two Decades. A Technology Freak And Loves To Write About It. RiansTech Is A Online Home For Him Where He Documents His Experiences And Learnings So That Others Can Get Benefited From It.

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