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Do you need a better website backup plan? Are you tired of manually backing up your WordPress website (or sites) using a complex database interface? There are some easy solutions to save you the time and hassle it takes to stay on top of this critical piece of running a website.
Installing a WordPress backup plugin allows you to make a backup (and restore) within the WordPress dashboard, and also ensure your site is being backed up on a regular basis via automated scheduling. The best WordPress backup plugins can give you the peace of mind that you’re not going to lose crucial site content.
Article Overview
- Best WordPress Backup Plugin Reviews
- Unranked Reviews
- How To Backup Your WordPress Site
- Choosing A WordPress Plugin
Best WordPress Backup Plugin
There’s a lot of WordPress backup plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. We’ve chosen our winners based on several factors, including ease of use, reliability, backup customization capabilities, advanced features, pricing and more.
UpdraftPlus Review
[logotable rank=1]
UpdraftPlus is the most popular and highest-ranked backup plugin — and for good reasons. There’s not much you can’t do with this WordPress database backup plugin. You get a lot of bang for no bucks with UpdraftPlus’ free version — multiple backup locations to the cloud or your computer, single-click backup restore, scheduled and on-demand backups and more.
The premium version gives you easy cloning and migration capabilities, multisite backup tools, database encryption, access to priority support and a host of other advanced security and backup features. We highly recommend UpdraftPlus, our top pick for best WordPress backup plugin. We like it so much, that we use it (and pay for it) across all our brands, including We Rock Your Web.
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Pricing
UpdraftPlus offers a free version in addition to its premium plugin. You must renew the license each year to continue getting free upgrades and new add-ons, free 1G storage and free priority support.
| Personal | Business | Agency | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price for License | $70 | $95 | $145 | $195 |
| Number of Websites | 2 | 10 | 35 | Unlimited |
BackWPup Review
[logotable rank=2]
The free version of BackWPup doesn’t quite match what you can get from UpDraft’s free plugin, but it’s still a powerful tool to backup your WordPress site and gets good user reviews. BackWPup’s free plugin gives you good scheduling options, the ability to manage separate file and database backups, and storage to your computer, email, FTP and multiple cloud options.
BackWPup Pro gives you multisite backup management, Google Drive backup and a few other bells and whistles. What’s missing? You can’t clone or migrate your site with BackWPup. And BackWPup Pro’s pricing is higher than average once you get into the higher pricing/more websites levels.
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Pricing
BackWPup offers a free version in addition to the following Pro pricing levels. You must renew every year if you want updates and priority support to continue, but they do offer significant discounts on renewal pricing.
| Standard | Business | Developer | Supreme | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price for License | $69 | $119 | $199 | $279 | $349 |
| Number of Domains | 1 | 5 | 10 | 25 | 100 |
| Annual Renewal Price | $39 | $59 | $99 | $149 | $199 |
BackupBuddy Review
[logotable rank=3]
BackupBuddy rounds out our top three picks for the best WordPress backup. BackupBuddy is a premium plugin offered by ithemes. This popular plugin is loaded with features, including multiple remote storage locations, plenty of scheduling options, multisite management and more.
BackupBuddy, however, doesn’t offer a free version, and we found several user reviews reporting unreliable backups, a complicated restore process and problems with timeouts during the backup process.
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Pricing
All pricing tiers except the Gold version include a year of updates, customer support and 1G storage. Lifetime Gold gives you a lifetime of updates and priority support.
| Blogger | Freelancer | Gold | |
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| Price for License | $80 | $127 | $199 |
| Number of Websites | 1 | 10 | Unlimited |
Other Best WordPress Backup Plugins Reviewed
The following two WordPress backup plugins don’t pack quite the punch our top three winners give you. But we’ve included them in our reviews because both are worth consideration, depending on your needs.
BlogVault | Duplicator | VaultPress
BlogVault Review
BlogVault can prevent crashes as well as security problems with your website. However, it’s a little different in that it’s not really a WordPress plugin, it’s actually a cloud service that conducts backups, migrations and security solutions for your WordPress site.
BlogVault has some great features, but they come at a higher price. We added this company to this article outside of our regular auditing schedule, so we did not consider it in our rankings. But perhaps you will see it in our top 3 in the future.
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Pricing
| Backup | Backup + Security | Real Time Backup | |
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| Price for Personal License for 1 Website | $89/year | $149/year | $249/year |
| Price for Business License for up to 5 Websites | $199/year | $359/year | $549/year |
| Price for Developer License for up to 20 Websites | $49/month | $79/month | $149/month |
| Price for Agency License for up to 100 Websites | $99/month | $199/month | $799/month |
Duplicator Review
The real strength of the free Duplicator plugin is in cloning and migration. Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t give you many useful backup features (i.e., no scheduling). Duplicator Pro, while still best for site migration, does have better backup features, including scheduling and FTP and cloud storage capability.
Overall, Duplicator Pro is an underwhelming backup plugin. The free Duplicator plugin, however, gets high scores from wordpress.org users for site migration.
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Pricing
Duplicator Pro comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. Like other WordPress plugins, you must renew each year to continue getting updates and support (except the Gold package, which gives you lifetime updates). You’ll get a 40% discount on renewals.
| Personal | Freelancer | Business | Gold | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price for License | $59 | $79 | $129 | $359 |
| Number of Websites | 3 | 15 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
VaultPress Review
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and his team at Automattic developed VaultPress, so this WordPress backup plugin comes with some clout. Now VaultPress is part of the plugin Jetpack, which requires a subscription starting at $3.50 per month ($39 annually). If you’re running one or two sites, the pricing is competitive.
Once you get into multiple sites, you’ll end up paying a lot. While VaultPress lacks some of the backup customization features other plugins offer, they do provide unlimited storage space, brute force attack protection, uptime monitoring and spam protection for comments and pingbacks. Their higher priced plans give you daily security scanning.
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Pricing
VaultPress comes with a 30-day money back guarantee, unlimited storage space and priority customer support.
Personal
- $3.50 per month; $39 per year
Premium
- $9 per month; $99 per year
- 30-day backup archive
- Daily security scanning
- Manual resolution
Professional
- $29 per month; $299 per year
- Unlimited backup archive
- Daily and on-demand security scanning
- Automated resolution
- SEO tools & Google Analytics integration
How To Backup Your WordPress Site
Watch the video below to see how UpdraftPlus helps you easily backup your WordPress site.
What Are Our Final Thoughts?
UpdraftPlus won our best WordPress backup plugin showdown, in no small part for its competitive pricing, robust features, customization capabilities, and, most important, reliability. But every backup WordPress plugin has its pros and cons, and we hope we’ve given you the necessary information to help you choose which plugin is best for your individual site and budget needs. If you are looking for more WordPress plugins, check out our all-inclusive guide.
What backup tips would you give to other WordPress users?
Tagged With: Reviews, WordPress
