WordPress Backup is the best thing you can do for your website security. Backups give you peace of mind and can save you in catastrophic situations such as when your site gets hacked or you accidentally lock yourself out.
There are several free WordPress backup plugins and most of them are fairly easy to use. In this article, we will share the 5 best free backup plugins for WordPress.
1. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin available on the internet. It is used by more than 2 million websites. UpdraftPlus allows you to create a complete backup of your WordPress site and store it on the cloud or download it to your computer.
This plugin supports scheduled backups as well as on-demand backups. You also have the option to choose which files you want to backup. It can automatically upload your backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email, and several other cloud storage services (see step by step guide on how to backup & restore your WordPress site with UpdraftPlus).
UpdraftPlus also has a premium version with add-ons to migrate or clone websites, database search and replace, multisite support, and several other features. The premium version also gets you access to priority support.
2. BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins used by over half a million WordPress sites. It allows you to easily schedule daily, weekly, and monthly backups.
With BackupBuddy, you can automatically store your backups in cloud storage services like Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, Stash (their cloud service), and even email it to yourself.
3. BlogVault
BlogVault is another popular WordPress backup service for WordPress. It’s a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution rather than just a WordPress plugin. It creates offsite backups independently on BlogVault servers, so there will be a zero load on your server.
BlogVault creates an automatic backup of your website on a daily basis and also allows you to manually create unlimited on-demand backups. It features smart incremental backups that sync only incremental changes for minimal server load. This ensures optimal performance for your site.
4. BackWPup
BackWPup is a free plugin that allows you to create complete WordPress backups for free and store it on the cloud (Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace, etc), FTP, email, or on your computer. It is extremely easy to use and allows you to schedule automatic backups according to your site’s update frequency.
Restoring a WordPress site from backup is also very simple. The BackWPup Pro version comes with priority support, ability to store backups on Google Drive, and some other cool features.
5. Duplicator
As the name suggests, Duplicator is a popular WordPress plugin used to migrate WordPress sites. However it also has backup features. It does not allow you to create automated scheduled backups which makes it less than ideal primary WordPress backup solution for a regularly maintained site.
Duplicator lets you create manual backups of your WordPress site easily. If your web host creates regular backups, you can use this plugin to create backups to use on staging environment. It’s a great site migration plugin.
Final Thoughts
Each WordPress backup plugin in the list has their pros and cons, but all of them offer complete WordPress file backup as well as full database backup features.
We use UpdraftPlus for two main reasons. It is extremely easy to use, and it offers real-time incremental backups.
Free WordPress Backup Plugins
