Keeping your WordPress site backed up is essential. Imagine how you'd feel if your website was gone one day and there was no way to get it back.
While there are many ways to back up your WordPress site, choosing the right one can be difficult. Each option has its own features and user experience.
This guide covers the important features to look for in a backup tool. It also looks at some of the best backup tools available and includes a quick walkthrough of how to back up a WordPress site.
What are WordPress backups?
A WordPress backup is a copy of your website's files and database. The backup lets you restore the whole site if something goes wrong. There are two types of backups:
- A full backup restores the entire site to the state it was in when the backup file was created.
- An incremental backup only restores new or recently modified items, such as updated pages, new plugin settings, or altered media files.
While the WordPress editor autosaves your posts and pages, giving you a way to restore earlier versions of your content, this isn't the same as backing up an entire WordPress site, including its files and database.
- A database backup includes your site's content, such as all posts and pages, the site settings, user information, and comments.
- A file backup typically includes the themes, plugins, media uploads, and core WordPress files of your site.
- A partial backup only includes some files or parts of the database and its tables.
Partial backups
If you want to restore the site's content, without overwriting any changes you've made to the site's files since the backup was created, you can make a partial backup.
For example, maybe you want to restore a deleted blog post, but you've changed your site's theme since the post was deleted. Restoring just the database will restore the post (and other database contents) without affecting the site's files.
Manual vs. automatic backups
Backups can be created manually or automatically, depending on the features of your backup tool.
Basic WordPress backup solutions often don't back up your site in real time, necessitating a manual backup prior to changing your site. While a manual backup offers more control, the downsides include:
- Not always knowing when to make a backup
- Having to remember when you should make a backup
- Role-based restrictions on who can make the backup
Automatic backups happen on a regular schedule, such as once per day, or as changes are made to your site. Due to the importance of having a recent backup, it's a good idea to choose a solution that automatically creates backups.
Why WordPress backups are important
Reasons you might need to use a backup to restore your site include:
- Hacking or malware: Although WordPress is a secure platform, a clean backup allows you to quickly recover your site if it gets hacked or infected.
- Server crashes or hosting failures: If your host loses data or has a server error, a backup can help you get your site online again quickly.
- Accidental data loss or deletion: We all make mistakes, and whether you've accidentally edited a blog post, deleted an image file, or changed a key setting, a recent backup lets you undo those changes.
- Plugin or theme conflicts: Installing or updating a plugin or theme may introduce errors to your site or cause a conflict. A backup enables you to return your site to how it was before the issue arose.
- WordPress software updates: New WordPress releases are thoroughly tested, but you might need to roll back to a previous version due to a conflict or introduction of a new feature you're not ready for.
To mitigate against the above situations, backups must have been recently created, safely stored, and be easy to restore.
Some websites need more robust backup solutions than others. For example, if you have a site that rarely changes, making a manual backup on a daily or weekly cadence should suffice.
However, you'll need a more feature-rich, automatic backup solution if you're regularly making changes to your site, such as frequently publishing new blog posts, or you often receive comments or messages via your site's forms.
Those selling items or subscriptions through their WordPress site will also need robust backup solutions to prevent the loss of orders and other key data.
Additionally, if you have multiple users working on your site, there's a higher chance of mistakes being made. This means you'll need to create backups more frequently than once daily.
What to look for in a WordPress backup tool
Your main options as a WordPress site owner are using the backup service provided by your web host or a plugin.
The quality of the available plugins and options provided by hosts vary considerably. Some solutions are very robust, feature-rich, and comprehensive, while others are basic and challenging to use.
Some key points to consider when choosing a way to back up your WordPress site include:
- Automation: Can backups be automatically created on a set schedule, such as daily, or in real-time whenever a change is made?
- Frequency: How often are automatic backups created, and can backups be created manually on demand?
- Breadth: Is your entire site backed up, including the files, database, and email provision?
- Restoration options: Can you restore part of the backup, such as the database or a specific post, or do you have to restore and overwrite your entire site each time?
- E-commerce-friendly: Is the solution compatible with online stores and does it give you the option of keeping order details while restoring other parts of your store?
- Storage: Are the backups stored separately from your website, such as on another server or in your cloud storage? Can you download the backups to your computer? Are multiple copies of the backup files created for redundancy, and how long are they available?
- Security features: Are the backups encrypted and stored securely?
- Ease of use: How easy is it to access and restore the backups? Is the interface user-friendly?.
Use your host's backup solution
Most web hosts provide a backup solution. However, the functionality of the system varies significantly between hosts. Some might have a powerful in-house tool, while others rely on the cPanel backup functionality.
If your host provides a backup solution, try it out and see how easy it is to restore your site. Check its features and how useful they'd be if there's a problem. If your host's backup solution isn't good enough, you should be able to switch to a plugin.
Use a WordPress backup plugin
There are many backup plugins for WordPress. The best options automatically back up your site on a custom schedule or in real time.
Make sure you closely check out the features and test any plugin you install to see if it works as expected, especially the free options.
Top WordPress backup plugins
Here's a quick overview of some popular free and paid plugins you can use to back up your WordPress site:
Jetpack VaultPress Backup
Jetpack VaultPress Backup is a paid service available as a stand-alone WordPress plugin or as part of the WordPress.com Business and Commerce hosting plans, at no extra cost.
The service includes key backup-related features such as real-time backups, full and partial restoration, and an activity log that makes it easy to undo site changes.
Jetpack VaultPress Backup has good support for WooCommerce, so you can safely restore your site to any past state while keeping all order and product data.
UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is a very popular plugin available in free and paid options.
The free version covers all the essentials, including automatically creating backups, saving them to cloud storage, and the ability to easily restore them. However, incremental backups, automatic backup creation before installing WordPress updates, and database encryption are paid features.
Using UpdraftPlus is straightforward, but like most other WordPress backup plugins, it lacks the useful Activity Log feature of Jetpack VaultPress Backup.
BackWPup
BackWPup is another popular plugin with free and paid versions.
The free version lets you choose exactly what parts of your site to back up. Backups can be automatically created as frequently as every hour. Saving backups to a selection of cloud storage services is another free feature.
However, restoring backups with the free version isn't as user-friendly as UpdraftPlus and JetPack VaultPress Backup.
BlogVault WordPress Backup Plugin
The BlogVault WordPress Backup Plugin connects your site to the BlogVault backup service rather than integrating a backup tool into your WordPress dashboard.
Once set up, all backup and restore actions take place in your account area on the BlogVault website.
The free version allows you to create backups, but you can only restore them with the relatively expensive paid plans.
Which WordPress backup plugin should you choose?
Out of the above options, the free version of UpdraftPlus is an excellent choice. Frequent automatic backups are included, and you can restore them without upgrading to a paid plan.
If you'd like a more robust backup solution and don't mind paying for it, the ease of use and Activity Log feature of Jetpack VaultPress Backup make it an appealing option.
Whichever one you choose, be sure to thoroughly test the backup and restore functionality now, rather than waiting until it's needed.
How WordPress.com handles backups
If you host your site with WordPress.com and choose the Business or Commerce plan, you have access to real-time backups powered by Jetpack VaultPress Backup.
Once you've signed up for either the Business or Commerce plan, Jetpack VaultPress Backup automatically starts backing up your site in real time. Manually creating a backup at any time is possible, too.
Backups are available for up to six months while you're subscribed to an eligible plan. They're also kept for 30 days after your subscription expires.
Let's walk through how to use Jetpack VaultPress Backup with WordPress.com hosting.
Accessing your backups
You can view your backups from your WordPress dashboard.
Once logged in, go to Jetpack → VaultPress via the sidebar menu.
The last time a backup was created is shown on the Jetpack VaultPress Backup page.
Restoring a WordPress backup
You can restore a backup from your WordPress dashboard or download the file for safekeeping.
You can also view and restore the individual components of the backup, for example if you need to restore an image file that was accidentally deleted.
You can also use the staging site feature available on the Business and Commerce plans to handle more complicated restoration of a backup.
This is handy if, for instance, you created many blog posts after your last backup, and don't want to lose those blog posts. You can restore the backup to the staging site, then restore the specific content to the live site.
Although the above is an advanced aspect of Jetpack VaultPress Backup, you never know when you might need it.
Using the Jetpack Activity Log
The Jetpack Activity Log is another way to access your backups. The log displays a detailed list of activities on your site from the past 30 days.
You can undo a change or restore your site to a specific point in the log, if needed.
Jetpack also has a mobile app so you can easily access the Activity Log and restore backups on the go.
As you can see, backing up and restoring your WordPress site can be very straightforward, depending on the tool you choose.
WordPress site backup best practices
To get the most out of your WordPress site backups, consider the following:
- Frequency: Set a frequency that covers the important changes to your site, such as form submissions, content publication, and customer orders. Even better, opt for real-time backups.
- Storage: Make sure the backups are securely stored and not on the same server as your website.
- Retention: Ensure enough backups are retained for long enough that you can recover a specific version of your site, rather than only being able to restore to when it was last backed up.
- Test restoring backups: Test your backups occasionally to ensure they are easy to restore when needed.
If you follow the above advice, you'll never have to lose sleep over whether or not your WordPress site is backed up sufficiently.
Is your WordPress site backed up?
You don't want to wait until you need a backup to find out whether or not your site is backed up.
If your site is being backed up, make sure everything is functioning as expected and that you can successfully restore a backup. If you're not backing up your site, now is the time to choose a solution.
If you don't yet have a website, WordPress.com's managed hosting makes it easy to start one. Depending on your chosen plan, you get access to feature-rich backups, premium themes, and a fast, secure hosting environment. Ready to bring your site home? Start your site migration to WordPress.com here.
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