Free Backup WordPress WebSite
Free Backup WordPress WebSite, Backing up your WordPress site is something that you’ll totally need to learn, to keep yourself from grievousness not too far off. In this article, we will make the subject of WordPress reinforcements as effortless as conceivable by covering all that you really want to know.
Figuring out how to back up a WordPress site is something or other that may feel like it isn’t critical… until something happens to your site, and it turns out to be amazingly pressing (however perhaps past the point of no return).
There’s not all that much or invigorating with regards to sponsorship up WordPress. However, something you’ll totally need to figure out is how to keep yourself from grievousness not too far off.
In this post, we will attempt to make the subject of WordPress reinforcements as easy as conceivable by covering all that you want to know in one spot:
- How frequently to back up WordPress
- The various sorts of WordPress content that you want to back up
- Where to store WordPress reinforcements
- The best WordPress reinforcement modules
- The most effective method to back up WordPress utilizing a free module
We should delve in.
WordPress Backups 101: Why They’re Important and How to Do Them
Ideally, backing up your WordPress site would be an exercise in futility and exertion since nothing at any point turns out badly.
Notwithstanding, your WordPress site doesn’t exist ideally – it exists in reality. What’s more in reality, there’s a great deal that can turn out badly with your WordPress site:
You can commit an error, as for all time erasing significant substance coincidentally, (for example, an Elementor plan that you’ve gone through hours chipping away at!).
- A malignant entertainer may get close enough to your site and infuse malware or in any case cause issues.
- Your host may have a disappointment that prompts lost information.
- A module or subject may crash your site.
- A recently applied update may abruptly cause an issue.
- In those circumstances, you’re managing the expected loss of all or a portion of your WordPress site.
Without a new reinforcement, any of those circumstances can be calamitous.
Nonetheless, in case you generally have a new reinforcement close by, the direst outcome imaginable is a minor bother – not a disaster.
Quick version, on the off chance that you have a WordPress site, you want to make reinforcements of your WordPress site.
The remainder of this segment is devoted to how, how frequently, and what to back up.
Do You Need to Back Up WordPress Yourself? Doesn’t Your Host Do It?
As a general rule, you ought not to depend on your facilitating organization to back up your WordPress site.
While the most web has do take some kind of reinforcement, there are no ensures with regards to the recurrence and culmination of those reinforcements. For your preparation, you should regard them as though they fundamentally don’t exist.
At most has, the best way to ensure that you have a full, ongoing reinforcement of your site is to do it without anyone’s help.
Nonetheless, there are a few exemptions here.
To be specific, in case you’re utilizing premium oversaw WordPress facilitating suppliers like Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel, and so forth
These kinds of oversaw WordPress has carried out solid programmed reinforcement strategies with off-site stockpiling — these comforts are one reason why overseen WordPress facilitating costs more.
How Often Should You Back Up Your WordPress Site?
How frequently you really want to reinforce WordPress relies upon how regularly your site changes.
For instance, in case you have a static portfolio site that never shows signs of change, you don’t actually have to back up each day. You may even approve of month-to-month reinforcements.
Then again, assuming that you have a blog where you distribute another blog entry consistently and your perusers leave heaps of remarks, then, at that point, you likely need to back up each day.
Also assuming you have a bustling WooCommerce store where orders are continually coming in, you presumably need a constant reinforcement arrangement that saves changes immediately so you never miss your significant request information.
To assist accompany increasing with a timetable that appears to be legit for your site, pose yourself this inquiry:
Assuming I lost the information from the last X days (or hours), would that adversely influence my site?
On the off chance that X equivalents one day for your site, you should run day-by-day reinforcements.
However, make sure to consider other substances past how frequently you personally make new substances. Reinforcements likewise catch client-created content, similar to local WordPress remarks.
For instance, in case you have a blog where you just post one time each week, yet your guests leave huge loads of significant remarks consistently, then, at that point, you would in any case probably need to go with an everyday reinforcement plan so you don’t pass up those remarks assuming you at any point need to reestablish your website.
At long last, assuming that you have a site with consistent movement, for example, a WooCommerce store, discussion, BuddyPress site, and so on then you’ll need to utilize a constant steady reinforcement arrangement — more on this beneath.
WordPress Backup Files vs Database
There are two parts to backing up your WordPress site:
- WordPress files
- WordPress database
Your site’s files are files such as:
- Theme/plugin files
- Image/media uploads in the wp-content/uploads folders
Your site’s database contains your actual content, such as:
- Blog post content
- Page content
- Elementor designs
- Comments
- Form submissions (if you store form submissions so that you can view them in your dashboard)
- Settings
When you back up your site, you need to back up both your files and your database.
Nonetheless, contingent upon how your site works, you may not really need/need to back up the two sections with a similar recurrence.
Therefore, the reinforcement modules that we’ll talk about beneath let you decide to back up explicit pieces of your site (for example simply your data set).
We should return to the case of a blog where you:
Post substance one time each week (counting transferring pictures for the new blog entry)
Get heaps of important peruser remarks consistently
In such a circumstance, you may decide to:
Back up your site’s documents one time each week. This would ensure you generally have the document transfers for your most recent blog entry.
Back up your site’s data set consistently. This would guarantee you generally have the most recent guest remarks, even on days where you don’t distribute another blog entry.
The benefit of this methodology is that you utilize fewer assets by keeping away from the need to back up a similar arrangement of records consistently when nothing changes. Indeed, even on an enormous site, your data set is generally tiny and simple to back up. Notwithstanding, an enormous site’s records can take up a gigantic measure of room.
A few instruments likewise offer a methodology called gradual reinforcements. With gradual reinforcements, you just back up your full site during the underlying reinforcement. Then, at that point, ensuing reinforcements just back up new changes that have been made to your site.
For instance, assuming you distribute another blog entry, the gradual reinforcement device would simply refresh the reinforcement to incorporate that new post, rather than taking a totally new reinforcement.
With this steady methodology, you additionally have the choice to take ongoing reinforcements of your site via naturally backing up each change when it occurs. Once more, this is significant for WooCommerce stores, discussions, and so forth where you will have steady changes to your site’s data set.
Where Should You Store WordPress Backups?
You ought not to store your site’s reinforcements on your WordPress site’s server, which some modules give you the choice to do.
In case you store your reinforcement on a similar server as your live WordPress site, that is as yet a weak link. It could help you in certain circumstances, as unintentionally breaking something on your site, however on the off chance that something turns out badly with your server, you would lose both your live site and your reinforcement.
There are two places that you can securely store WordPress reinforcements:
Your nearby PC – you download your reinforcement records onto your neighborhood hard drive.
Distributed storage – you have your reinforcements in the “cloud” utilizing administrations like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or others.
Assuming that you have a crucial WordPress site, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (just as numerous others) suggests the 3-2-1 reinforcement rule:
Keep three duplicates of your WordPress site: one essential (your live site) and two reinforcements
Keep the records on two unique media types
Store one duplicate offsite (for example outside your home or business office)
A straightforward method for carrying out this for a WordPress site is to utilize both your nearby PC and distributed storage. For instance, you could:
Download one reinforcement to your neighborhood hard drive.
Store one more reinforcement on Amazon S3.
Assembling It All
We covered many reinforcement hypotheses in this segment, so how about we sum up what we’ve realized.
Each WordPress site needs reinforcement. From botches that you commit to errors from others or assaults from malevolent entertainers, a ton can turn out badly. A solid reinforcement guarantees that those issues are not really destroying.
Assuming you have at a quality overseen WordPress have, your host may as of now have a solid, off-site reinforcement system set up.
Be that as it may, assuming you’re not utilizing one of these exceptional administrations, you shouldn’t depend on your host’s reinforcements to guard your site — you want to make your own reinforcement strategy.
The recurrence with which you back up your site relies upon how frequently you, or others, are changing its substance.
A more powerful methodology can be to back up your site’s documents and data set on various timetables. For instance, you can:
- Back up your site’s records one time each week
- Back up your site’s data set consistently
This limits the assets that your reinforcements use, while as yet letting you back up the main data consistently (which is put away in your site’s data set).
Three Best WordPress Backup Plugins
1. UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin. It’s active on over two million WordPress sites while maintaining an excellent 4.8-star rating on over 3,500 reviews.
In the next section, we’ll show you how you can use UpdraftPlus to back up your WordPress website.
UpdraftPlus lets you run manual or automatic backups for your WordPress site. If you opt for automatic backups, you can choose a custom schedule that works best for your website.
When you back up your site, you can choose to back up:
- Your entire site (files + database)
- Just your files
- Just your database
You can also automatically offload your backups to remote storage options such as:
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Amazon S3
- Backblaze
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- UpdraftVault (the developer’s own cloud storage service)
- …more
Finally, if you do need to restore from a backup, UpdraftPlus includes its own tool that makes that quite easy.
Most WordPress sites will only need the free version. However, the developer also sells a number of premium extensions that can help with:
- WordPress Multisite backups
- Scheduling backups at specific times of day (instead of just a rough schedule). For example, you can run your backups during low-traffic periods.
- Multiple off-site storage locations. For example, you can back up your site to both Google Drive and Amazon S3 at the same time.
- Incremental backups.
- A WordPress migrator tool.
- More options for backing up your database.
Price: Free. You can purchase individual add-ons or get a bundle of all add-ons for $70. The bundles also include storage in the UpdraftVault.
2. Jetpack Backup
Jetpack Backup, formerly known as VaultPress, is an automatic backup service that’s part of the all-in-one Jetpack plugin from Automattic, the same folks behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce.
Jetpack Backup offers two types of backups, depending on your plan.
With Jetpack Personal, the entry-level backup plan, you get daily backups to a secure off-site location. Jetpack will store all of your backups for 30 days, and you can restore from any backup with a single click.
With Jetpack Professional, you get real-time, incremental backups.
Jetpack will still back up your full site every 24 hours to its off-site storage. However, it also uses hooks to automatically update smaller changes to your website in real-time.
These real-time incremental backups include:
- WordPress core database changes – e.g., publishing a new blog post, editing Elementor, new comments.
- WooCommerce database tables – e.g., new orders.
- Any associated file changes – e.g., uploading an image to a blog post.
For other changes, such as installing a plugin, you’d need to wait for the next daily backup.
Jetpack Professional also stores unlimited backups (vs. 30 days for Personal) and lets you restore from any backup.
Overall, if you’re running something like a WooCommerce store, forum, membership site, etc. then you’ll probably want to use this real-time incremental approach.
Price: While the Jetpack plugin is available for free at WordPress.org, Jetpack Backup is only available on the paid subscriptions. The Personal plan costs $3.50 per month or $39 per year.
The Professional plan, which enables real-time incremental backups, costs $29 per month or $299 per year.
3. BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy is a premium WordPress backup plugin from iThemes.
It lets you back up all or some of your WordPress site on your own custom schedule. For example, you can choose to back up some/all of the following types of content:
- Database
- Themes
- Plugins
- Media
You can set your backups to run automatically on a schedule ranging from hourly all the way up to monthly (or more).
To securely store your backups, iThemes offers its own cloud storage location called BackupBuddyStash. Or, you can connect to other storage locations such as:
- Amazon S3
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
If you need to restore from a backup, you have options to restore all or just some of your site. For example, if you don’t need a full site restore, you could just roll back your database instead.
Other useful tools include options for site migration and cloning WordPress, including a deployment feature that helps you create your own WordPress staging site.
Price: BackupBuddy starts at $80 for use on a single site. That plan also includes 1 GB of BackupBuddyStashcloud storage. You can purchase additional storage starting at $35 per year for 5 GB extra.
How to Back Up WordPress Site: With or Without Plugins
In this section, we’ll show you step-by-step how to back up your WordPress site…
- Using the free UpdraftPlus plugin
- Manually
We recommend that most people use UpdraftPlus (or another plugin from the list above), as it’s much simpler than trying to manually back up WordPress.
How to Back Up WordPress Site With UpdraftPlus
As we covered above, UpdraftPlus is the most popular free WordPress backup plugin.
In this section, we’ll show you how you can use the free UpdraftPlus plugin to back up your WordPress site. We’ll also show you how to set up your own automatic backup schedule and store your backups remotely.
How to Take Your First Backup
To get started, install and activate the UpdraftPlus plugin from WordPress.org. Then, visit Settings → UpdraftPlusBackups in your WordPress dashboard
To create your first backup, all you need to do is click that big blue Backup Now button:
This will open a popup where you can choose what content to backup. Again, you can choose between your site’s files, database, or both.
Since this is your first backup, select both boxes. Then, click the Backup Now button:
This will start the backup process, which might take some time depending on the size of your site.
Once the backup finishes, you’ll see it listed in the Existing backups section.
To download the backup files to your local computer, you can click the five buttons under Backup data.
Make sure to download all five pieces of data so that you have a full backup of your site.
How to Set Up Remote Storage
When you created your backup in the previous section, UpdraftPlus stored those files on your WordPress site’s server.
While this is better than nothing, it’s still not ideal because you have a single point of failure (your server).
Instead, you should configure UpdraftPlus so that it automatically stores your backups on an external storage service such as:
- Google Drive
- Dropbox
- Amazon S3
- Etc.
To set up a remote storage destination, go to the Settings tab and click on the icon for the service that you want to connect to. Then, you’ll see instructions appear below the list of icons to help you connect that service.
For this example, we’ll use Google Drive.
For Google Drive, you need to:
- Save your changes.
- Click the authorization link in the popup that appears after you save your changes.
You’ll then go through the standard Google authorization process. Once you do that, UpdraftPlus will ask you to click a button to complete the setup process:
Now, you’ll be able to back up your site to your remote destination by checking the box to Send this backup to remote storage (after clicking Backup Now):
How to Create an Automatic Backup Schedule
To make it easier to maintain recent backups, UpdraftPlus lets you create your own automatic backup schedule.
To create your schedule, go back to the Settings tab and look for two drop-downs at the top:
- Files backup schedule
- Database back schedule
You can use the drop-down to set your preferred frequency for each type of data. You can also choose how many backup copies to retain.
For example, if you retain two backups, UpdraftPlus will store the last two copies of your backup (and then overwrite the oldest copy when it needs to make a new backup).
Again, the optimal backup schedule depends on your site. However, a good starting point that should work for most WordPress sites is the following:
- Files backup schedule – Weekly
- Database backup schedule – Daily
How to Restore a Backup With UpdraftPlus
If you need to restore from one of your backups, UpdraftPlus also makes that easy.
To restore a backup, go to the Existing backups section and click the Restore button:
That will open a popup where you can choose what content to restore. For example, you could opt to only restore your database.
To restore everything, check all five boxes. Then, click Next to finalize the process and restore your site:
If you want to manually upload a set of backup files to restore, such as files from your local hard drive, you can click Upload backup files next to More tasks in the Existing backups section.
How to Manually Back Up WordPress Site
For most people, using a WordPress backup plugin is a much better approach.
However, you might find yourself in a situation where you need to manually back up your WordPress site.
As you learned above, there are two “parts” to backing up a WordPress site:
- Files
- Database
To manually back up WordPress, you’ll need to:
- Download all of your site’s files using FTP*
- Export your database using phpMyAdmin (or an equivalent tool at your host)
*Note – you don’t technically need to back up the core WordPress files as you can always download the latest version from WordPress.org. However, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just have you download all the files in the tutorial below.
How to Download WordPress Files
To back up your WordPress site’s files, you’ll need to connect to your WordPress site’s server via FTP or cPanel File Manager. For FTP, you can use FileZilla to connect and you can get your FTP credentials from your host.
From there, download all of your site’s files to your local computer:
How to Export WordPress Database with phpMyAdmin
To back up your site’s database, you can use phpMyAdmin, which most WordPress hosts should offer.
In phpMyAdmin:
- Open your WordPress site’s database
- Go to the Export tab
- Select the Quick method
- Choose SQL for the Format
- Click Go
How to Restore a Manual WordPress Backup
To restore from a manual backup, you just reverse the process:
- Upload all of your files to your server
- Use the Import tool in phpMyAdmin to import your database backup*
*To make things simpler, you can create a new database to import your backup. You would then need to update your wp-config.php file to reflect the credentials for this new database.
How to Back Up WordPress Multisite
If you need to back up a WordPress Multisite network, we recommend using UpdraftPlus because it includes dedicated Multisite support. To enable Multisite support, you’ll need to purchase the Network / Multisite add-on, which costs $25.
With the add-on, you’ll be able to back up your entire network. You cannot back up individual network sites.
However, it does include a useful feature that lets you import a backup of a single site WordPress install as a network site in your Multisite network.
Jetpack Backup does not support Multisite networks. BackupBuddy has an experimental mode for Multisite, but it’s not officially supported.
How to Back Up Multiple WordPress Sites From One Spot
So far, everything that we’ve focused on above is how to easily backup your own WordPress site.
However, what if you’re using Elementor to create websites for clients and you’re hosting those websites? Or, maybe you just have your own large network of sites and need a more convenient way to keep their data safe.
In either situation, there are tools that can help you back up all of your WordPress sites from one spot.
Some of the best options are:
- MainWP – you can still use your preferred backup plugin, such as UpdraftPlus.
- ManageWP – includes its own backup tool. You can run it anywhere from monthly to real-time with options to automatically store backups on remote cloud storage.
- iThemes Sync – has an integration with the BackupBuddy plugin from above.
Final Thoughts
If you have a WordPress site, you need to have a regular backup strategy in place.
If you host with a premium managed WordPress host, your host might already have a solid off-site website backup policy for you. However, most “regular” hosts do not offer reliable backups, which means that you’re responsible for backing up your WordPress site.
To safely back up a WordPress site, you’ll want to store your backups in an off-site location, such as remote cloud storage or your local computer (ideally both).
How often you back up your site depends on how frequently its content changes. A good starting point for most WordPress sites is to back up files once per week and the database every day.
To automatically back up your site, you can use a WordPress backup plugin. Three of your best options are:
To start taking automatic, off-site backups for free, you can use UpdraftPlus and follow the tutorial from this post.