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Best WordPress Backup Plugins Compared

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Using a WordPress backup plugin to create regular backups of your website’s content is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself from disaster. Whether you get hacked or your website crashes, you’ll avoid losing your entire website and the headache of needing to start from scratch. There are plenty of great WordPress backup plugins to choose from, and after spending hours researching and testing dozens of WordPress backup plugins, we found BlogVault to be the best. It’s comprehensive, cost-effective, and offers more than just backup protection for your website. 

The Best WordPress Backup Plugin for Most

BlogVault Logo

BlogVault

Best for Most

With a 100% successful restore rate, independent offsite backups, and access to 90 days’ worth of backups, it’s no wonder BlogVault is trusted by over 400,000 website owners. And all three of its plans are under $21/month. You literally can’t go wrong with it.

BlogVault is one of the most reliable WordPress backup plugins out there. It’s trusted by over 400,000 websites for their backup and migration needs. 

BlogVault can backup or migrate a 300GB site without overloading your server. In fact, it will never overload your server as BlogVault only ever stores your backups to its own server, leaving your storage out of the equation. 

BlogVault also offers a built-in staging area that enables you to make and test changes to your site, without risking breaking your current site. If you do accidentally break your site, BlogVault will restore your site 70% faster than its competitors, meaning less downtime for your business. 

The Best WordPress Backup Plugin Options to Consider

  1. BlogVault – Best for Most
  2. Solid Backups – Best for Backing Up Your Entire Site
  3. UpdraftPlus – Best Free Backup Plugin
  4. Jetpack – Best for Real-Time Updates
  5. WP Time Capsule – Best for Backing Up Recent Files

When It Makes Sense to Invest Into a WordPress Backup Plugin

To put it simply, it’s never too early to install a WordPress backup plugin on your site. Imagine spending hours pouring your heart and soul into creating the perfect website for your business before making an irreparable mistake and losing it all. That’s our idea of a nightmare. 

There is no reason to avoid installing a decent WordPress backup plugin as soon as you start building your website when there are so many great free options available.

As for purchasing a premium WordPress backup plugin, here are some rules that you can use to determine whether or not a paid plugin would be beneficial to your website:

  • You want the ability to schedule your sites backup’s for a time that suits your needs
  • You plan to make multiple, important changes to your website and want the security of on-demand backups
  • You want to be able to easily restore previous versions of your website with the click of a button 
  • The free plugin you’re using runs too slowly for your site and is overloading your servers
  • You have multiple websites and want everything backed up to the same location

At the end of the day, the most expensive backup is the one you never did! So whether you operate a large website or a small website, there are many advantages to investing in a paid WordPress backup plugin, all of which we’re going to discuss below. 

#1 – BlogVault — The Best for Most

BlogVault Logo

BlogVault

Best for Most

With a 100% successful restore rate, independent offsite backups, and access to 90 days’ worth of backups, it’s no wonder BlogVault is trusted by over 400,000 website owners. And all three of its plans are under $21/month. You literally can’t go wrong with it.

Over 400,000 site owners trust BlogVault for their backup needs. But it has more to offer than just secure backups. BlogVault is a complete all-in-one solution for total website management. 

BlogVault offers independent offsite backups so you can access them even when your site is down. Better yet, if your site experiences downtime, BlogVault will show users your latest backup until you get things back up and running. 

You’ll never need to worry about storage space limits or overloading your server. BlogVault stores backups to its own servers. You’ll also have access to an organized backup repository that lets you view, compare, and access 90 days’ worth of WordPress backups. 

Some other key features BlogVault has to offer include:

  • Daily automatic backups
  • Unlimited on-demand backups 
  • Quickly identify problems with changelogs
  • Safely test your website updates and changes with free staging
  • Automatically migrate your site with just one-click
  • Manage multiple sites in one centralized dashboard

One of our favorite things about BlogVault? It boasts a 100% success rate in website restores and you’ll recover up to 70% faster. When you have BlogVault on your side, there is really nothing that can go irreparably wrong. 

BlogVault is incredibly affordable, even for new website owners. Its affordable pricing tiers are:

  • Basic – $7.40 per month for website backup
  • Plus – $12.40 per month for website backup and security
  • Advanced – $20.75 per month for real-time backup and security

You can try BlogVault with a 7-day free trial

#2 – Solid Backups — The Best for Backing Up Your Entire Site

Solid Backups Logo

Solid Backups

Best for Whole Site Backups

There’s a reason Solid Backups was the original WordPress security plugin: it literally lets you backup EVERYTHING on your site. And you can store your backup offsite or in the cloud. Starts at $80 per year for one site.

Solid Backups is the original WordPress backup plugin and another widely popular option. It allows you to easily schedule automatic daily, weekly, and monthly backups. 

What we love most about Solid Backups is that you’ll have the ability to backup your entire WordPress installation right from your dashboard. It will backup all the files in your media library, your themes and plugins and their respective files, your posts and pages, and even your post comments. 

What’s great about this is that if your website crashes beyond repair, you’ll be able to restore it perfectly to its previous state without missing a beat. There are not many other WordPress backup plugins that offer such comprehensive backups. 

Solid Backups page

Every time a backup is completed, you’ll get a downloadable zip file of your entire WordPress site to store in an off-site location. You can also send backups to remote cloud storage locations such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Solid Backups Stash. 

Some other notable features Solid Backups offers include:

  • WordPress database rollback for when you accidentally permanently delete a page, post, or comment
  • Customizable backup content that allows you to selectively restore data
  • Save hours of work migrating your site with the easy migration tool
  • Free malware scans to ensure your site is free of security issues

Furthermore, if you ever lose your site completely, you can quickly and easily restore your WordPress site using Solid Backups’s restoration tool, ImportBuddy. 

Solid Backups offers three pricing plans:

  • Blogger – $80 per year for 1 website
  • Freelancer – $127 per year for up to 10 websites
  • Gold – $199 per year for unlimited websites

Give Solid Backups a try today!

#3 – UpdraftPlus — The Best Free Backup Plugin

Updraft Plus Logo

Updraft Plus

Best Free Backup Plugin

Over 3 million WordPress users trust UpdraftPlus! With it, you can back up your site as often as every four hours and restore it with a single click. It’s free to use, and its premium upgrade is only $42/year!

UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins on the market with over 3 million active installations. It’s also completely free to use and easily the best option if you’re running your website on a budget. 

UpdraftPlus lets you perform complete manual or scheduled backups for all your WordPress files, databases, plugins, and themes right from your WordPress dashboard. You can set backup schedules every 4, 8, or 12 hours, daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. With so many opportunities to backup your site, you can rest assured your data is safe and sound. 

Other important features UpdraftPlus offers include:

  • Restore backups directly from your WordPress control panel
  • Remote storage options such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and more
  • Easy-to-use interface for simple backup and restoration with a single click
  • Uses fewer server resources than other free backup plugins meaning your website won’t slow down

UpdraftPlus is free to use. You can install the plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard. 

If you like the way UpdraftPlus works for your site, you can upgrade to Premium from just $42 per year. Premium features include cloning and migration capabilities, incremental backups, personal support, backup WordPress multisites or networks, and much more. 

Check out UpdraftPlus Premium and get started now. 

#4 – Jetpack — The Best for Real-Time Updates

Jetpack Logo

Jetpack

Best for Real-Time Updates

If you want to make sure every change you make to your site gets saved, Jetpack is the plugin for you. It enables immediate restorations with just one click. Plus, backups are only one of many things Jetpack can do for your site!

Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins on WordPress. It can assist you with just about everything–security, performance, marketing, design, you name it! The reason Jetpack makes our top list for WordPress backup plugins is for its real-time updates. 

Jetpack Backups automatically saves every single change made to your site. This is particularly helpful when you’re making exciting changes to your site and something breaks. It happens to the best of us. 

With Jetpack, you can quickly restore your site to how it was right before you made that key mistake, with just one click. It also keeps an activity log of the actions taken on your site. This means you’ll know who’s responsible for breaking your site! 

Some other key features of Jetpack has to offer include:

  • Get back online with one click even if you’re not at your computer with Jetpack Backup mobile app
  • Automated daily backups with 30-day backup archive
  • Malware scanning and spam protection
  • Malicious hacking and attack protection

Jetpack does offer a limited free plan, but it’s important to note that it doesn’t include backups which won’t help you here. For its paid plans, there are three pricing tiers to choose from: 

  • Backup Daily – $7.95 per month, billed annually
  • Security Daily – $19.95 per month, billed annually
  • Complete – $79.95 per month, billed annually

If you want to take advantage of ultimate backup features, we recommend the Security Daily plan. Get started with Jetpack here

#5 – WP Time Capsule — The Best for Backing Up Recent Files

WP Time Capsule Logo

WP Time Capsule

Best for Backing Up Recent Files

Maybe you don’t need to back up everything, just some recent updates. WP Time Capsule is great for this, as its incremental backup protocols keep your backups from taking up too many resources. And they still happen in real-time!

If you’re looking for a solution that will only backup recent changes and not your entire site every time, WP Time Capsule is the one for you!

WP Time Capsule uses an incremental backup method, instead of traditional full backups. This means that only the files that have changed are backed up instead of backing up the whole website every time. 

The main benefit of a plugin like this is that you’ll use considerably fewer server resources since it doesn’t compress and zip the backup of your entire website every time. 

That’s not to say that any changes you make to your website aren’t backed up immediately, they are! And like the other plugins mentioned today, your backups can be saved to your favorite cloud storage sites like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3. 

WP Time Capsule also: 

  • Protects your site from hackers with easy restores
  • Provides a staging site for you to test your changes before making them live
  • Offers automatic, real-time, and incremental backups

Another cool feature WP Time Capsule offers is the ability to warp websites back in time using the calendar view. If you only want to restore a specific file from a particular date, you simply find the date, select the file, and hit restore. 

WP Time Capsule offers three pricing plans:

  • Business – $49 per year or a one-time payment of $149 for 2 sites
  • Freelancer – $99 per year or a one-time payment of $299 for 10 sites 
  • Agency – $199 per year or a one-time payment of $699 for unlimited sites

You can try WP Time Capsule totally risk-free for 30-days. Get started today!

Methodology for Choosing the Best WordPress Backup Plugin

Each of the plugins we’ve mentioned today is slightly different from one another. Some are best for on-demand backups and others have great site restoration capabilities. 

But which features really matter when it comes to choosing your backup tool of choice?

Backup Location 

In the old days, most WordPress backup plugins had you store your backup files on your own server. Not only did this cause storage problems for most people, but it also meant that if your site was ever hacked or you were locked out of your account, your backup files were in jeopardy. 

Nowadays, all good WordPress backup plugins support sending your backup files to remote cloud locations such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, or similar. Some plugins, like BlogVault, even store your files on its own server. 

This way, you will always be able to access or restore your files, even if your website is down, hacked, or compromised.

So if your preferred plugin doesn’t offer the option to send your files to a remote cloud location or at the very least, emailed to you in a zip file, we’d recommend choosing a different plugin.

Backup Schedule

Do you want your site files backed up daily? Or would a weekly backup suit you just fine? Not all WordPress backup plugins offer the same backup schedules so it’s important to consider this in your decision-making. 

Your preferred backup schedule will be completely dependent on the type of website you’re running. If you’re regularly making changes to your site or it’s one with high traffic and lots of visitor interaction, daily backups would be most suitable for your needs.

On the other hand, if you rarely make changes to your site and don’t receive a lot of traffic, weekly backups will likely suffice. 

Ideally, you will find a backup plugin that allows you to upgrade your backup capabilities along with the growth of your site so that you never have to compromise on backup frequency. 

Migration Features

Migrating your website is different from restoring because it involves changing your domain name or website host. It can be a complicated process and it’s possible to lose files in the process if you don’t nail it.  

There are plenty of plugins that can specifically assist you with WordPress migration, but many good backup plugins also support migration. So if you ever think you’ll need to migrate your WordPress site, choosing a backup plugin that will support your files sufficiently through the migration from the outset would be a great idea.

BlogVault Logo

BlogVault

Best for Most

With a 100% successful restore rate, independent offsite backups, and access to 90 days’ worth of backups, it’s no wonder BlogVault is trusted by over 400,000 website owners. And all three of its plans are under $21/month. You literally can’t go wrong with it.

Summary

When you use a WordPress backup plugin to keep your site safe and your files secure, you can rest easy knowing that you’re prepared for anything. In the event that you lose everything, your backup plugin will be ready and waiting to assist you in restoring your site with just a few clicks. 

Determining which is the best WordPress backup plugin for your website is entirely up to your circumstances. BlogVault is hands-down the best backup plugin out there. In fact, if you’re looking for an all-in-one website management solution, it’s got your back. 

Solid Backups is a close runner-up and another excellent paid solution for managing your backups. Or if you’re just getting started and don’t want to splurge on a premium plugin, UpdraftPlus is easily the best free plugin available. 

No matter which plugin you choose, it’s imperative that you get started with it right away, to avoid any unnecessary headaches during your website building process. 


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