So when is the last time you backed up your website? Yesterday? Last week? Never?
Don’t wait until it’s too late and you’ve lost all those blog posts you’ve written and gotten excellent comments on.
If you don’t have a plan, it’s time to get one and set it in place!
You can set up a backup schedule so your website will backup automatically at specified intervals and you can also manually back it up as needed. For instance, about to update a plugin or two or a new version of WordPress? Backup first. Adding a new plugin? Backup first. Just added a new post and/or images to your site? Backup after.
Here are a few plugins for you to consider:
BackupBuddy
This is what I use on all of my websites. You can schedule daily, weekly or monthly backups – either full backups or database. They can be automatically sent off-site to either Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP or their own storage location, BackupBuddy Stash. They’ll even let you email it to yourself. You can even use BackupBuddy to move your website to a new hosting service. Plans start at $80/year and includes 1GB of BackupBuddy Stash storage space.
UpdraftPlus
This one has both a free and a paid version. Both versions will backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP and email, or to their own Vault storage. The paid version will give you more options, such as One Drive and Google Cloud Storage. Like BackupBuddy, you can schedule daily, weekly or monthly backups. You can choose which add-ons you would like (starting at $10.00 each) or go for the Premium package, which includes all add-ons, upgrades and support for one year, starting at $70.00.
VaultPress
VaultPress has different packages, starting with their Lite for $5/month or $55/year, which gives you daily backups and a 30-day backup archive. Basic offers real-time backups and a full backup archive for $15/month or $165 year. You can add spam protection (Akismet) and security scanning to these packages for their top price of $29/month or $299/year.
BackUpWordPress
BackUpwordPress has a free version that allows you to schedule your backups, which can then be emailed to you if you choose. If you would like to have the backups uploaded automatically to a remote destination you must purchase a Developer’s license, starting at $24 per destination.
For all my maintenance clients I also do another backup with MainWP, which is the service I use to manage all my WordPress websites. What is your choice for backing up your website? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
That’s scary, I’m pretty sure I have never backed mine up.
Oh, no, Sonya – I hope you are going to back it up now.
Thanks for the tips on who to use to back up websites. It would be such a pain to lose everything!
Yes, that would be terrible! So much hard work goes into one’s website.
I love the idea of a backup buddy. I have never thought about making sure this is done on my website. It would be dreadful to lose all that hard work.
It would be dreadful, Christy! Please make sure you are all set for backups.
You’ve been in contact with me already on this as WordPress did an upgrade recently. I looked for the back up plugin and couldn’t find it. Something is wrong there. Hmmm. This blog is very timely! Thank you and I see I have some backing up to do to get up to date again with! Thanks!
Yes, go back up, Cheryl! Please let me know if you need any assistance.
valuable information, great advice, thank you for the reminder
Thank you, Caroline. I’m happy it is helpful to you.
Aiieee! Your headline gave me the shivers! Yes, of COURSE you need to back up your website. Thanks for laying out the options, Good stuff!
You’re funny, Jackie! Thanks for reading and your feedback! 🙂
Love this and want to do this for my site.. which do you think I should go with… that I can do? Message me please. 😉
Will do, Kristen! We’ll get you set up!
Thank goodness my web developer does all this for me. I had no idea!
Yes, thank goodness you have someone taking care of this for you!
This was a great reminder. I “think” mine backs up weekly but I’m going to definitely check!
Great, yes, please make sure – and make sure the backups are going to an off-site location!
Thank goodness my web developer does this & more for me. Whenever I read about technical things that should be done, I am so grateful I hired hers years ago & still work closely with her.
Yes, so wonderful that you have her!
Thanks so much for the reminder! These are great tools – I’ll have to check them out and then back up my website!
That’s great, Stacey! Make sure you back it up frequently!
You said it! The best advice for any website owner. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Ron! 🙂
This is a great list! I learned the importance of having a current backup the hard way. Now I use Backup Buddy and I have it set to backup automatically once a month minimum. If I make major changes I do a manual backup.
Thank you for the feedback, Shannon! I am sorry you had to learn the hard way but glad that you now have it set to backup automatically. Do you have the backups going off-site?