8 Best WordPress Backup Plugins to Migrate or Restore a Website for 2021
Having a website is probably the best thing to market your business and sell online. That’s why it is important to back it up from time to time. The reason is quite simple. Many businesses and individuals experience horrific loss of data due to viruses, system failures, accidental deletions, security breaches or hacking, fire or any other natural disasters.
Any business may suffer a huge loss if there is no proper backup plan. To reduce the impact or likelihood of closure, business continuity plans are designed to ensure that the business can continue to operate in a variety of stressful situations. Usually, the main reason for data loss are system failure and outside attackers. Even if you are taking precautions to ensure safety of data, you might lose it due to reasons beyond your control.
Many top hosting providers give you an option to backup data manually and automatically. They will take a backup of your site regularly on your behalf. Now it may not sound vital to some but it’s extremely important to take a backup of your site even if your hosting provider offers the regular backup feature. But sometimes backing up your data is not enough unless you have a copy of your backup in your hands. You may also need hourly backups depending on the number of users and how often your website content changes.
Often, people realize this need only when they are actually faced with this unwanted experience. You may not want to be one of those wishing they had a backup with them? So, instead of crying over spilt milk get smarter by opting for a reliable backup solution for peace of mind and snappy recovery from data loses.
In our selection, we have gathered some popular backup plugins for WordPress that will help you take regular backup of your data and fight off any unfortunate incident of data loss.
Top 10 WordPress Backup Plugins for 2021
BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is one of the most popular backup plugins offering most comprehensive and reliable backup solution. It’s an automated backup plugin that keeps your site safe by creating regular backups of your database and core files.
With BackupBuddy, you can take database backups daily for frequent backups or run complete backup to get entire media library, themes, plugins and everything else you need to restore your website. If you don’t want to spend time taking manual backups, you can simply schedule backups and the plugin will take care on your behalf. You can even send the backup files to any offline storage destination automatically by scheduling it.
Another important feature of this plugin is the ability to restore the website. You can restore the backup easily to get your site up and running in no-time. If you’re considering of moving to another domain or host, you can do it easily with this plugin.
If you are a developer, it can save you time and cost with the ability to move sites from local development environment to the client’s live site in a snap.
Though BackupBuddy is a premium WordPress plugin, the features packed within the plugin are worth the price.
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UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is second on our list and basically is an all-in-one backup and restore plugin for WordPress. It comes with useful features that makes the website backup and restoration an easy job – likely in just few clicks. You can fully automate the backups by scheduling them on daily / weekly / monthly basis. The plugin also supports one-click restoration feature so you can restore your website at any point of time.
Apart from backup and restore services, it has fully-featured clone and migration capabilities that means you can restore a previous backup in the time of emergency or clone the entire website to a different location, all from the admin dashboard.
Like BackupBuddy, this plugin also has the facility to copy backups to external storage like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive and Rackspace, FTP and many more. In addition, you can keep your backups on the hosting platform or even email them to your mailbox.
The plugin is actively used on over 30,000,000 websites worldwide which indicates that it is the #1 choice for daily WordPress backup jobs.
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BackWPup
BackWPup is a free WordPress backup plugin that helps you back up your WordPress file system, which includes the wp-content folder as well as the database. The plugin can automate backup of your complete WordPress site and store them to an external storage service like DropBox, S3, FTP, Microsoft Azure and many more.
In case of emergency, you have two options to restore your WordPress website from a previously created backup. The first and easiest option is to run the automatic restore process from within the admin panel. But this option is available only in BackWPup Pro. The second option involves manual restoration of website and the complete process is explained here.
Apart from the backup and restore services, the plugin also helps you optimize the database to enhance the website performance as well as repair the database in case of any damage. If your website is down due to a broken database, you can run this repair database process and once it is done, your site should be fixed and back to normal.
The plugin provides a minimal admin interface to manage your backups and schedule jobs. When setting up a new job, you can choose what to include in the backup such as a database backup only or a complete website backup including databases, files to restore your website easily and accurately.
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Duplicator – WordPress Migration Plugin
Duplicate is another great backup plugin that makes it super easy to backup and restore your WordPress site. It creates a package that bundles all the site’s themes, plugins, upload content, database and core WordPress files into a single zip file.
Apart from this, it also allows you to clone, move or transfer an entire WordPress site from one location to another. Whether you want to go live with your website running in a local sandbox or migrate an entire WordPress site to a new host, Duplicator plugin has everything you need to accomplish this job. You can also move your site to a new domain, across the servers or any other location in few easy steps.
With Duplicate Pro, you get additional benefits like easy drag and drop archive to restore your website as well schedule the jobs for period automatic backups. Move your backups to cloud-based storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3 and FTP/SFTP.
The plugin is quite powerful and no matter how big your website is, Duplicator is designed with the ability to support multi-threading so that you can clone or migrate even large websites and databases with zero downtime.
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WP SuperBackup
WP SuperBackup is a powerful backup plugin that requires almost zero configuration for your WordPress site to setup automatic backups. It allows you to migrate your site to another host using the saved snapshots of your WordPress website.
It has an intuitive interface for website administrators that allows them to monitor the progress of running backup tasks as well as look back in history to track all your backups. With an instance migration feature, you can import any backups you’ve already taken and use it to migrate to a new WordPress website in a few easy steps. You have complete control over which files are to be migrated. Meaning, before you run the migration, you can set which files are to be migrated as part of the migration process.
The plugin also supports the features for secure data migration, replication and synchronization with popular third-party cloud storage services. Whether you need to
Plus, a self-diagnostics tool that comes with this plugin can help you check for any potential problems before you perform any backup. Note, you don’t always need to run this check, but it’s a handy tool for troubleshooting any issues you may encounter during a backup process.
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JetPack
JetPack is another popular backup plugin that not just provides backup and restore services but it also scans your entire WordPress site for security threats. You can perform or schedule the backups in several ways – full, incremental and differential backups – everything in real-time.
The plugin was designed with woocommerce in mind. Often, specially for online stores, backing up data is crucial. You can restore your ecommerce website to any past state while still keeping all the latest orders and products. Plus, if you are concerned about the increasing backup size. Don’t worry then. With JetPack Pro, you get unlimited cloud storage for your backups – at no extra cost.
The other important benefit of this plugin is that it protects your customer data so that you do not violate GDPR rules as well as protect your website from malicious cyber attacks or exploitation by hackers. You can configure to run a daily scan of your site for any potentially dangerous files, as well as for any suspicious changes to your WordPress site.
You can also use their mobile application which lets you run backup and restore jobs anytime anywhere, without having to carry your desk.
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BackUpWordPress
BackupWordPress is an open-source project and is completely free backup plugin for WordPress. You can back up your entire website including your database and all your files at the time scheduled.
It’s simple & easy-to-use and requires zero setup. The backups are placed on your hosting server. You can schedule multiple backups and excludes files and folder from your backups. Like other few and premium plugins, BackupWordPress gives you an option to have each backup file emailed to you once the backup process is completed successfully. By default, it stores the last 10 backups for you but this limit can be changed from the admin panel.
Sometimes, you might want to ignore certain files and folders from backup. Luckily, this plugin also has an option to exclude some files and folder from the backup. This is a great thing as it can help you maintain the size of the backup.
Unlike the other popular backup plugins listed above, BackupWordPress does not provide the facility to copy your backups to cloud storage like Dropbox, Google Drive or any other storage service providers.
Plus, since the plugin is totally free, you get free lifetime support. For any assistance, you can contact them via support page on WordPress.org site.
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Database Backup for WordPress
We discussed some of the popular plugins available to back up an entire WordPress website, including database, core WordPress files and upload folders. However, in some scenarios, the requirement may be limited to backup databases only. Database Backup for WordPress is a simple and light-weight plugin that makes it easy to back up your core WordPress database.
By default, this plugin only backups your core WordPress database tables however you can configure to backup other tables in the same database.
Database Backup for WordPress plugin does not support the feature for restore the backup database. However, and as recommended by this plugin author, you can use phpMyAdmin which is included with most hosting control panels. For more information, read this guide on how to restore your database from backup.
This plugin also gives you the option to clean up backups after they are downloaded or copied to external sources such as mailboxes.
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Conclusion
Needless to say, taking regular backup of a website is an important task. We have listed above top 10 WordPress backup plugins that will make this task effortlessly easy for you. Moreover, automation of the entire process will let you focus on other value-added aspects of your business.
You must have heard the saying “Knowledge shared is knowledge acquired”. We would love to know how was your overall experience reading this article and if you found any other useful plugin, please share it in our comment section below.
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