How to Backup a WordPress Site

Backups are really important in this era of data, you never know you might lose your years of hard work. The reason can range from mistakes as simple as deleting database or as complex as getting hacked by someone. So in this article we will help you with How to Backup your WordPress site.

Have you ever faced an issue where you lost data? Or some plugin update caused an issue which made irreversible changes to your WordPress site? or any other scenario where you though of restoring back to a previous point?

Having backup can solve all those issues. I know you know the importance of Backup, That’s why you are here in first place.

So in this article i will guide you on How to Backup your WordPress site, with and without a plugin.

So here are the table of contents of this post.

• Backup WordPress Site through Control Panel
  • Backup your WordPress site using EasyWP
• Backup through WordPress managers
  • Using WordPress Toolkit
  • Using Softaculous Auto Installer
• Backup though Plugins
  • Updraftplus
  • Backup Migration
  • BlogVault
  • Backuply
  • How to backup your WordPress site using Backuply
    • Add Location to Backuply
    • Create Backup using Backuply
• Final Thought

There are mainly 3 ways you can backup your plugin

• Through your Control Panel.
• Through WordPress Managers like WordPress Manager By Softaculous or WordPress Toolkit.
• Though a Backup Plugin like Updraft, Backup Migration, BlogVault, Backuply or any plugin of your choice

Backup through Control Panel

Here I am using EasyWP for the example. Other control panels provide the functionality of Backup too I will link to their documentation for your use.

So with EasyWP it’s dead simple to create a backup. I would say these days the WordPress focused hosting provider have made the life really easy. They make handling WordPress simple yet they make sure you can access your files and database.

Backup your WordPress site using EasyWP

1. In your EasyWP Dashboard go to Manage.
2. In manage go to Backup tab and you will find and fill the backup name and click backup button.
3. Now EasyWP will start creating backup it might take a little time depending on your Website Size.

Pros

• It’s as simple as a single click and just a little patience.
• It creates backup of your Whole WordPress website with database.
• Creates backup in .tar.gz which is better than .zip file
• Backups Directories and Database in separate backup file.

Cons

1. There is no information or progress bar while the backup is running. Just a loading icon which doesn’t gives any information about the progress of the Backup.

Here i am listing links to the docs to backup using other Control Panels

• Backup your WordPress site on Kinsta.
• Backup your WordPress site using cPanel.

Backup through WordPress managers

There are 2 WordPress managers that we have used.

• WordPress Manager By Softaculous/ Softaculous Auto Installer.
• WordPress Toolkit.

Using WordPress Toolkit

Here is a really good resource from clook which we recommend to read on using WordPress toolkit Backup. Backup your WordPress site using WordPress Toolkit.

Using Softaculous Auto Installer

Using Softaculous Auto Installer is as easy as with the WordPress toolkit. It have one advantage that is it lets you backup to other remote backup locations.

Backup your WordPress site using Softaculous Auto Installer.

Backup through Plugins

Here I will give a brief information about few of the plugins you can use, we will try to see what are their advantages and disadvantages.

So why choose a plugin when we have the above mentioned options that are already present.

• Convivence, WordPress plugins can be accessed from a single Dashboard.
• Backups from Control Panels don’t let you backup on other backup locations so you have to backup your site on the hosting you have.

Now we will look at some of the plugins in no particular order.

Updraftplus

If you ever looked for a backup plugin. Updraftplus would have popped up at the top. It’s one of the popular plugin out there on WordPress.

It is not in the list just because of its popularity. But how it works and how much value it adds for it’s users justifies it’s popularity.

The free version will be enough for most of the people out there. Only the websites that need constant backups will need the Pro version. The reason being auto backups. If you don’t update your website regularly free version is enough.

Pros

1. Free version gets the job done for most people.
2. The support is really good and quick.
3. The user Interface is good, not the easiest but once you know what things are where it is easy.
4. It supports incremental backups.
5. The free version has support for remote storage like Google Drive, OneDrive and AWS S3.
6. The pro version has S3 compatible Sotrages like DigitalOcean Spaces, Vultr Object Storage and few more.
7. It has incremental backups.

Cons

There are not that many cons but I felt only one issue that would be subjective to your needs.

1. The S3 compatible storages had issue while uploading file, as Updraftplus creates multiple zip files for backup, after first file I was not able to uploads the others. The tested Storages were DigitalOcean, Vultr Object Storage, Linode Object Storage.

Backup Migration

Another amazing Backup plugin. It’s not as big as Updraft, and Updraft is the only plugin in this list with a million active Installs. Still this plugin is good.

As much we testing the backup and restore happened smoothly.

Pros

1. The User experience is simple and question based for example Where you want to store the backup?
2. Ease of use.
3. They have the best logs in the list of plugins here.

Cons

1. In free version your backup can just be 2GBs in size.
2. There is no remote file upload option in free version.
3. The User Interface can feel cluttered for some.

BlogVault

This plugin is a little different. Other plugins on the list do everything on your server that is everything happens on your side. But BlogVault is different it connects you to it’s service and take you to a different dashboard hosted and managed by BlogVault.

Pros

1. Less load on your server as they do the heavy lifting of creating the backup on their servers.
2. Has staging feature which no other Backup plugin provides.
3. WordPress Monitoring services like Uptime Monitoring, Performance Monitoring and Visual Regression testing.
4. Security features like Malware Protection, Blocks Brute-Force attacks.
5. Incremental Backups.
6. You don’t have to worry about storage as they give unlimited backup storage with 365 days of backup archive.

Cons

1. The UI is cluttered in my opinion. Lot of things to see on dashboard.
2. There is no free version, it does have 14 days trial but it dosen’t compares to a free version like that UpdraftPlus gives.
3. It’s costly, it does provides a lot of features but for a small website I feel its a little costlier and as per their website they focus on Business critical Website.

Backuply

This plugin is the one I use here on WPArya. And it is the simplest Backup Plugin from this list. I am not saying it’s the best but the simplest. It’s a relatively new plugin as compared here.

Pros

1. It has a really simple User experience(UX) and User Interface(UI).
2. It creates backup of Whole WordPress core too which can be helpful for WordPress compatibility.
3. You can even restore manually as all it need is to replace the content of the directory where your WordPress is installed.
4. It provides 2 remote location option in free version that is Google Drive and FTP.
5. It supports S3 compatible storages in its Pro version like DigitalOcean Spaces, Linode and few more.

Cons

1. It doesn’t have incremental backups. Which are important for larger sites. Small sites wont need it mostly.
2. The logs could be improved in my opinion.
3. It has just 2 remote location options in free version as FTP is not secure and not everyone uses Google services.

How to backup your WordPress site using Backuply

As we use Backuply we will show how to backup your website using Backuply.

Once you have installed Backuply go to Backuply Dashboard.

Here we will be demonstrating backup of database to Google Drive.

Add Location to Backuply

1. Go to Backup Location tab then Click on Add Location Button
2. In the Popup select Google Drive as Backup Location and set Backup Location name.
3. Click Add Backup Location in the Popup and it will redirect you to select your Google account once you complete selecting account and giving permission you will be redirected back to your Backuply Dashboard in your WordPress admin.

Create Backup using Backuply

1. Now go to Dashboard tab and select Google Drive as your Backup location and select Database and click Create Backup.

2. A pop-up will open with the log of Backup and once backup is created click on finish button in that pop-up. And you will see your backup in the Backup History tab.

Final thoughts

So we know that Backups are important but which of this option is the best. To be honest i suggest you create backups through all of these options. At least you should use 2 out of the 3 options mentioned above to backup.

The truth is creating backup is easy the real test comes when you go to restore it. And because of that you cant trust just one option because at restore they can fail and then you wont have any other way to bring back your data. I know it’s cumbersome but that increases chances of data recovery.

If you have any suggestion or Plugin you use for backups do mention them in the comments.