How to back up your WordPress website

A website built with WordPress consists of a database and multiple files. These include the WordPress core, plugins, themes, and all the images or videos you’ve uploaded. It’s a web of data that together makes your site work.

All of this is stored on a server (usually provided by your hosting company), so you depend on that server working and being secure to avoid problems with your site.

Having a backup system in place that lets you recover all these files—and therefore, your site—quickly and with little effort can save you a huge amount of time if an error affects the site’s functionality.

This plan should include backups in different locations. Don’t rely only on your website’s server. And make them regular. Your site changes over time; the version from 6 months ago may not be useful if you need to restore it because of a technical issue. In fact, even the one from 6 days ago might not help if you have a very dynamic site like an ecommerce.

What a backup is and when to do it

A backup is a process that involves collecting all the data that makes up your website and storing it in the cloud, on physical servers, on your computer, or even on an external hard drive.

All of this is done so you can restore the content in case there’s a problem.

And if you’re here, you’re probably wondering when you should do this process, right?

The truth is you should always have the most recent backup possible, as we’ve already mentioned.

It’s recommended to do them consistently, especially if you have a dynamic website with lots of content changes.

If your site breaks after a plugin update, being able to roll back to a version from, say, just a day ago will let you fix it without overthinking and save you hours of hunting down the error.

However, if the last backup is so old that many things have changed, it won’t be a viable option because getting the content up to date will take as much time as finding and fixing the error.

Benefits of a backup

As you’ve seen, making backups is a basic task that should be part of good website maintenance.

If the benefits still aren’t clear, here’s a quick recap:

• You’ll have peace of mind knowing that no matter what happens, your site is safe and can be restored at any time.
• You’ll store data instantly with the relevant date and time.
• The backup itself will help you clone or migrate your site to another hosting provider.

How to make a backup using plugins in WordPress

If you’re familiar with WordPress, you’ve probably already seen how many plugins it offers. If you can use plugins to add other functionality, do you think there wouldn’t be any to make backups much more easily?

There are several plugin options to do this, but there are also different types, depending on whether the backup is full (i.e., a copy of the entire site) or incremental (i.e., only copying changes since the previous backup).

With that said, let’s look at the most commonly used plugins so you can make your backups without any difficulty.

Plugins for backups

Modular DS – All your site’s maintenance in one place

Modular DS is a tool for professionals to improve website maintenance processes and client relationships. And of course, backup functionality couldn’t be missing.

With Modular DS’s backup feature you can:

• Automate monthly, weekly, or daily cloud backups (AWS servers in Europe to comply with GDPR).
• Back up exactly what you want, excluding files, specific database tables, etc.
• Restore backups with one click if there’s a problem on your site.
• Create instant backups before an update.
• Download backups as .zip files to your computer.
• Choose how long to keep your cloud backups and even save certain key backups forever.

And the best part: most of these features are included in the free plan.

What’s more, unlike some of the other plugins we’ll discuss, Modular DS offers other features like Uptime Monitoring, global updates of all your sites from a single dashboard, and client reporting. It includes performance analysis and statistics thanks to integrations with Google Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed, and WooCommerce.

If you want to try it, you can sign up for free at this link and connect up to 5 sites.

All-in-One WP Migration

It’s one of the most widely used by WordPress professionals for making backups. All the information collected during the process is stored in a file with the .wpress extension, so if you want to restore the data on another site, it will need to be a WordPress site with this plugin installed.

This plugin has no limit when exporting data. In fact, you can do it easily from the plugin’s own menu.

And now for another key point: importing.

Do you need to restore the information on another WordPress site? You can also import the data from the plugin options, as long as the files don’t exceed 128 MB. However, if you install a free extension of the plugin, you can increase it to 512 MB.

UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin

A favorite among the WordPress expert community, it’s especially useful because you can back up exactly what you need at any given moment—plugins, files, database, etc.

What does this mean? Exactly what you’re thinking: you can restore them independently.

Once you activate it, it won’t appear directly in the WordPress menu; you’ll need to go to Settings to start using it.

It has other very interesting configuration options, like setting the frequency and the number of backups you want to keep.

Heads up: this plugin will create the backup on your own web server. But don’t worry—settings can fix anything. You can configure it to deposit data in external repositories like your Google Drive or Dropbox account. That’s always recommended.

In this case, the files generated when making the backup are .zip files.

JetBackup for WordPress

JetBackup is a solution that’s gaining popularity among WordPress users for its ease of managing backups and restores. Originally designed for cPanel, it now has a native WordPress version. Some key features include:

• Automatic backups: You can schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backups without hassle.
• Compatibility with multiple cloud storage providers like Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox.
• Granular restores: Restore specific items, such as databases, files, or folders, without needing a full restore.
• Incremental backups: Only saves changes since the last backup, which saves space and reduces backup time.
• Intuitive interface: The plugin’s interface is designed to be easy to use, even for beginners.

This plugin is ideal for dynamic websites because it gives you detailed control over your backups and restores, making it an excellent choice for those seeking more flexibility.

Backup Guard – WordPress Backup and Migrate Plugin

This plugin has a free version and a paid one. For example, the free version lets you make backups but doesn’t allow migrations. That’s only available in the paid version.

As with the previous ones, Backup Guard lets you perform backups manually or automatically, as well as store them in external tools.

As we saw with All-in-One WP Migration, this tool will also appear directly in the WordPress menu, making it very intuitive.

It will always offer the option to make a full or custom backup and store it in the cloud.

When restoring, you can do it directly or by importing the .sgdp backup file it generates.

XClonerWp

Another well-known option. A free plugin that lets you send backups from your site via SFTP, Dropbox, Amazon, Google Drive, Backblaze, and other external locations.

XCloner lets you generate custom backups of any WordPress site and then easily restore it elsewhere with the automatic restore script provided by the plugin itself.

It uses open-source standards like TAR, MySQL, and CSV, making it easier to restore backups in various ways, which provides greater flexibility and full control.

3 tricks for making WordPress backups if you’re a beginner

Are you just getting started setting up backups for your WordPress sites? Don’t worry—we’ve all been there.

We’re sharing 4 tips so your backups are, as the name suggests, safe.

Choose the right plugin

We’ve seen that plugins can be a good alternative for making backups, but be careful—it’s essential to choose the right one.

So, do your research and make sure it meets your needs. And most importantly, that it allows you to perform both backups and restores.

Make frequent backups

We’ve already mentioned this, but if you’re a beginner it’s much easier to overlook.

That’s why we remind you it’s important to make a backup almost daily.

At the beginning it’s much easier to break something on the site, so keeping a daily backup will be essential.

Store backups in an external location

It’s important that all those backups are stored in different external locations. Your local machine, USB drives, external hard drives, or—our recommendation—the cloud all work.

This way, if you lose one copy, you can recover it from another source.

As you’ve seen, most plugins also let you create backups directly to these services.

Keep in mind that if you store backups on the same server where the website lives and that server fails or gets hacked, you’ll most likely have to rebuild the site from scratch. And that’s exactly what we don’t want, right?

Conclusion

If you’re still not making backups for the websites you manage, now’s the time to start.

They’re low-cost, automatic, and if they save you from rebuilding a site or spending hours fixing a broken update even once, they’ll be worth it.

You’ve seen you can use different plugins to make backups easily.

And of course, if you want to combine backups with a ton of features focused on improving your website maintenance processes, we recommend trying our Modular DS tool. Create a free account and start optimizing the management of your sites.