The Pros and Cons of the Best WordPress Backup Plugins

Content is one of the keys to a healthy and future-proofed blog or website. It’s going to be the one pulling in all your audience and subscribers, after all. When it comes to managing your website’s content in WordPress, treating it like treasure can go a long way. For that matter, ensuring that your content is secured is necessary with the help of some nifty paid WordPress backup plugins.

Of course, that’s depending on how well-off your blog is starting to become. Sure, you can always manage with an offline copy of the content on your computer or other forms of storage, but that will soon get tedious. Not to mention the formatting of the content is not always preserved when you save it manually.

So, save yourself the trouble and grab one of these seven WordPress backup plugins. We’ve compared some of the best of them – each with their own positives and negatives.

Duplicator

Duplicator lets you have the best of both worlds. Online or cloud WordPress backup plugins might be a bit too intimidating or daunting for you for some reason. This WordPress backup plugin lets you download the content in a zip form so you can store them offline in your own drives. No, it won’t ruin your website configuration or content formatting. Basically, it lets you download your whole website as a bundle so you can easily migrate it to another server.

Pros:

• One of the easiest ways to manually do server or host migrations or offline backups.
• It’s not messy.
• It’s free.

Cons:

• No automated scheduled backups, sadly.

UpdraftPlus

Updraft is currently the most popular WordPress backup plugin today. It has more than two million downloads and/or installations that are currently active. Hence, you can assume that the plugin’s reputation precedes it. UpdraftPlus prides itself on simplifying backups that give you peace of mind. According to their official page, you can even “set and forget” the automatic backups as it will do everything to keep your content safe and secure with some added security and backup features.

Pros:

• Free (though paid version costs $70/year).
• Easy operation and UI.
• More cloud options than other WordPress backup plugins.
• Also restores automatically apart from doing a backup.
• Has automatic scheduled backups.
• Wide site coverage and compatibility.

Cons:

• You’ll be missing out on quite a lot not going Premium (which isn’t that bad).

BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is a labor of love and was made by friends. It’s not as in-depth or as popular as UpdraftPlus. What it does make up for is in its flexibility; being open-source, it should have a problem working on Linux or Windows servers. It’s also quite competent on its own with a mostly clean outstanding rating on its official WordPress backup plugin page. To be fair, it only has a subscriber base of 200,000+. If you do find it wanting, you can actually help improve it as the developers themselves invite everyone for testing on GitHub.

Pros:

• Open-source.
• No setup required.
• You can opt for each of the backed up file to be emailed to you.
• Small and not resource-hungry.
• Free.

Cons:

• No support for cloud backups to Dropbox or Google Drive.
• Its paid version has the same features as UpdraftPlus’ free version.

BlogVault

Unlike the BackUpWordPress plugin, BlogVault gives you the capability to use cloud storages for your backups. This is quite handy if for some reason you choose to not use UpdraftPlus. BlogVault can be a good alternative since it also boasts other features in which it claims to be the best. Apparently, BlogVault has a 100 percent restore rate. With it, you can rest assured that your content will either get backed up or restored with certainty to the way it was before something went wrong.

Pros:

• They promise that nothing would go wrong with your migrations.
• Free One-click staging.
• 90 days of backup archives allowed.
• Offsite backups let you avoid overloading your server with the backups.

Cons:

• A bit pricey at $89/year for 1 site license only.

BackWPup – WordPress Backup Plugin

BackWPup is pretty similar to the ones we mentioned before but it allows you to create complete WordPress backups with the free version. You are then allowed to store it anywhere you want whether on cloud or offline. Even better, you can select multiple destinations per backup for an added security blanket. It’s quite popular too and is highly-rated.

Pros:

• Free.
• The free version is quite generous with its backup destinations.

Cons:

• Not as fast or as efficient as some of the other options in this list.

WP Time Capsule

Often, backing up your whole website or blog can get tedious and plenty of things can go wrong. That’s where WP Time Capsule comes in – it lets you back up in a smart manner. Time Capsule lets you be selective about which data or content to backup; you can even choose to backup only the most recent changes, which can make rollbacks easier or even safer. Oh, this option also lets you save a lot of space on your server, cloud, offline storage, or anywhere you decide to place the backup.

Pros:

• Lets you revert the most minuscule or recent of changes.
• Real-time backup.
• Has a free version.
• Offers encrypted backups for added protection.
• Has screenshot comparisons for backup states.

Cons:

• The free version is a 30-day trial only.
• Most affordable annual rate is $49/year for 2 sites (which is not that bad).

VaultPress (with Jetpack)

VaultPress is made by the same company who also made Jetpack. As such, Jetpack actually works in conjunction with VaultPress. You will also need a Jetpack subscription in order to be able to use VaultPress. Amazingly, enough, VaultPress is also open-source like BackUpWordPress; plenty of people have contributed to making it better. Like Time Capsule, VaultPress also offers real-time protection but for cloud storage only. Think of it more like a special add-on for your Jetpack subscription.

Pros:

• Comes with Jetpack, or rather, it Jetpack can come with it.
• Offers security scans for more expensive plans.
• Backup restoration is easy.

Cons:

• Each plan is for one website and can add up if you have many.
• You’ll have to avail of Jetpack’s $39/year plan.
• Costs an additional $3.50/year for the starting plan.