7 Best Free WordPress Backup Plugins in 2016

Backing up your website is the best way to prevent a disaster from ruining your website. When you administer an active website, it’s only a matter of time before you run into trouble. Creating regular backups for WordPress can give you the peace of mind knowing everything is there in case your site gets hacked or another problem arises.

You should always run your own backup even if this service is provided by your hosting provider. Most of the time your web host will provide limited backups of your database but you shouldn’t rely on them. There are numerous plugins for WordPress to help you automate your backups.

Below we will show you some of the best backup plugins for WordPress. Most of these are free with paid versions available for purchase. The paid versions offer more features and functionality.

VaultPress

VaultPress is the ultimate backup plugin. VaultPress is created by the owners of WordPress.com, Automattic.

It comes as a module of JetPack. Although JetPack is free, VaultPress is a paid subscription service. Starting at $5 per month, the plugin offers automated backups to the cloud.

Setting up your backup and restoring it only takes a few clicks. There are other VaultPress packages with addons like security scanning. This is a great solution for automated real-time backups. Remember that you need a subscriptions for each website you have. This may be costly if you run a large number of websites.

Dropbox Backup and Restore

Dropbox Backup and Restore is a free backup plugin for WordPress. This plugin will fully backup your website and save the backups to your Dropbox server. You can store as many sites as your Dropbox can hold and you have unlimited restores.

This free solution is a great option for website migration, backups, restore or copying a website. Dropbox Backup and Restore is an easy way to manage your backups without spending any money.

BackUpWordPress

This simple WordPress backup plugin offers automated scheduling for your backups. You can create a number of schedules for your database and website files. There is a free version and a paid version of this plugin.

The problem with the free version is that it doesn’t allow you to store your WordPress backups to the cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace etc.). If you want to store backups on a cloud server with this plugin, you will have to buy an extension. You can purchase the entire extension pack or just buy the one you need. This is a good plugin for low memory (shared hosting) websites.

UpdraftPlus

Here is another well-written plugin for WordPress backups. You can create full backups and store them to the cloud or your local machine. You can create scheduled backups for your database and files. Your database backups and site files backups can have separate schedules.

One issue I had with it is the somewhat busy user interface. It’s not laid out in the most intuitive way compared to the other plugins on this list. Despite this it still functions well. There is also a premium version of UpdraftPlus with more features.

Duplicator

With over 700,000 active installs, Duplicator is one of the most popular free backup plugins for WordPress. With the name Duplicator, you can quickly gather that it has some features for copying websites. The free version is great for moving websites. The paid version provides scheduling and cloud storage features.

Duplicator is mainly for copying sites so you can move them. You can create backups but only manually. You can automate the process by creating a backup schedule. Because of this it’s not the best plugin to use as your main backup solution. It does work great for copying your database and site files before you move to a new host. This plugin is free to download and use.

WP-DB-Backup

This another popular WordPress plugin. WP-DB-Backup is really simple and lightweight. It does just what you think it would – backs up your WordPress database.

This simple plugin is great if you only need to backup your database every once in a while. Remember it only backs up the database, not your site files. So make sure you have another way to backup any images, videos, posts etc.

WP-DB-Backup is an easy way to create scheduled backups of your database and restore them to your site. If you need to regularly backup the database this plugin is a handy tool. It’s especially helpful for users who don’t have access to phpMyAdmin.

Last Word

Each of these plugins has its own strengths and weaknesses. My favorite backup plugin on this list is VaultPress. It offers the most complete solution and it’s very easy to use. You can get automated incremental backups. This means a real-time backup of your site files and database is created every time there is an update to your site. This is perfect for large sites because you won’t be wasting any of your resources.

Instead of creating time scheduled backups, a backup will be created only when changes are made on the site. If you have a smaller website and/or you don’t want to pay any monthly fees, tryout some of the other plugins. Many have paid versions with more features and you only have to pay once. WordPress Backup & Clone Master is a great plugin that isn’t based on a subscription. Just pay a one-time fee and you are done.

Hopefully you can find a plugin that works for you. Get in to the habit of making regular backups because it can be a real life saver.