9 Best WordPress Backup Plugins in 2022

Need a WordPress backup plugin for your website?

That’s awesome!

You’re taking the right decision – every website deserves a trusty sidekick to fall back on.

Trust. That’s one of the biggest buzzwords of the century.

How do you know whom to trust? 

We’ve been developing and offering a WordPress backup solution for nearly a decade now.

Over the ages, we’ve seen:

• People putting their faith in their web host, hoping that the very service that’s keeping their WordPress site alive would keep a backup of the same site for them.
• Believing that the WordPress backup plugin that they chose would keep their site safe and sound.
• Business owners who are confused as to what they should put their money on because there are so many solutions out there that it’s near impossible to know what is right for them.

That stops right now. 

A few of things that we’ve found out the hard way is that:

• Web hosting companies only take backups of your website for their own benefit. Not yours. In fact, some web hosts that do store a backup will hold you up for ransom when you need them to restore your site.
• Every other internet guru writing articles or creating videos on YouTube is incentivized to sell you a particular product to make a quick sales commission.
• You’d be surprised how many times people have come and told us that they had a backup or believed that they had one. But when they needed it the most, it was either corrupt or the restore process broke their site.

Honestly, most of them don’t even care about your site being down for long and you losing business every second for it.

We’re not going to tell you to believe us.

All we’re asking is, pour out a cup of coffee, sit back, and let us help you select a backup plugin that always has your back.

True story: We decided to create our own plugin and turbocharge it because that’s the only thing that we care about – you not losing money.

Why?

In 2012, way back when BlogVault was just getting started, we were perfectly happy with being just another WordPress backup plugin.

But we realized that we were losing customers more quickly than we were gaining them. Something was wrong.

Something was broken in our process.

You see, we were busy creating the exact same mediocre solution that everyone was creating. And we were incentivized to sell our product.

That’s when we decided that we had to be something more… something better.

We stopped focusing on sales.

That’s right!

Instead, we started to measure our business by the number of happy customers who genuinely loved our product.

Fast forward to today…

We have over 100,000 happy customers – customers who are not just happy to use our product but love hearing from us as well.

Now, we’re not the type that only cares about their own solution.

So, here’s a straight-up listicle of the 9 best WordPress backup plugins for 2021 to make you feel special.

You deserve backups that always work and plugins that you can trust with your business.

We’ve also included some of the parameters we’ve used while considering a mention on our list.

If you’d like to read that first, jump right ahead.

Or, you could just keep reading and go straight to the list.

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Disclaimer: The number allotted to each plugin on this list is not a rank. We are not claiming that some of these plugins are better than the other. This article is not about promotions. It’s about offering you the best choices so that you can decide for yourself which WordPress backup plugin you want to invest in.

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Best WordPress Backup Plugins in 2022

Time to check out the Best WP backup plugins in the market.

Let’s dive in:

BlogVault is the best WordPress backup plugin, for people who need 100% reliability and powerful backup capabilities that a normal plugin simply does not have.

UpdraftPlus is fine if you want a nice plugin for a simple, small website. DuplicatorPro and BackupBuddy come in at close runners up in that category.

Anyhow, let’s just get right into it.

1. BlogVault

BlogVault is our #1 pick for a bunch of reasons.

BlogVault is a Managed WordPress Backup Service. This means that if a normal WordPress backup plugin is Bruce Banner, BlogVault is the Incredible Hulk.

Biggest Advantages Over the Other Solutions:

• The plugin works on its own – You don’t have to stay present while the plugin backs up your WordPress site
• No timeouts and interrupted backups ever – You get 100% reliable backups for WordPress every time
• FREE staging site for Test Restores – You can test your backups before your restore your WP site
• 1-Click Restore – Never struggle with restoring your site ever again
• The History Page helps you label and find the right backup to restore from – You can even see granular changes in each backup version

What you get:

• Incremental backups
• Scheduled backups
• Automated backups
• Zero additional server load
• Inbuilt test and staging site option
• Easy migration to another hosting service
• Centralized dashboard to manage multiple tasks for multiple websites
• Complete backup to Google Drive and Dropbox accounts
• Customized backups 
• Real-time backups for WooCommerce websites
• Uptime monitoring

What stands out:

• You just need to click a button to restore your backup. This is by far the most promising feature of this plugin.
• The BlogVault plugin has an unlimited on-demand backup feature which means you can take a backup whenever you like.
• It extends great personalized customer support that makes using the service so much better.
• Storage is taken care of. Data is encrypted and stored securely on Amazon S3 servers. You get options to upload it to remote storages like Dropbox, Google Drive or download database and files to your local system.
• The premium WordPress backup plugin includes website security through MalCare security integration as well.
• Our favorite feature would be that once you request for a complete backup, you can exit the page and carry on with your other work. The backup will still continue to run. You’ll get an email notification once it’s done.

Drawbacks:

There is no free version.

What it costs:

Plans start at just $7.4 a month.

It offers three levels – Basic, Plus, and Advanced plans. It also has plans for agencies and web developers.

2. UpdraftPlus

The Updraft Plus is a widely popular backup plugin in the WordPress community. It offers free as well as a pro version. With the free plugin, you can take full manual backups, schedule automatic backups, and restore them as well.

They offer a number of cloud storage options as well. But you’re limited to that. If you opt for the paid versions of UpdraftPlus, it offers a lot more.

What you get:

• Customized and scheduled backups
• Manage WordPress multisite network
• Easy backups and restoration
• Supports multiple cloud storage options
• Clone your site and test out changes
• Migrate your cloned site to a new domain or host

What stands out:

• This is the only WordPress backup plugin that offers a good free version for backups and restores.
• A UpdraftPlus backup also includes customer support. But this is available only with premium version.

Drawbacks:

• It doesn’t work for large sites and might not work well with an old WordPress version.
• The process is not optimized and can overload your site.
• The independent centralized dashboard costs are extra under UpdraftCentral.

What it costs:

Updraftplus premium version plans start at $6 per month for 2 sites.

3. JetPack Backups (Formerly VaultPress)

Now, VaultPress is just one element of a much larger sphere – JetPack. Built and maintained by Automattic, JetPack backup enables you to back up your site, keep it secure, enhance speed, and helps you reach a bigger audience. We’ve listed out only the backup features here.

What you get:

• One-click automatic WordPress backup restoration
• You can download the full backup or select individual files
• Daily backups with a 30-day archive
• No limit on storage disk space
• The independent dashboard that lets you manage everything from one place

What stands out:

The free backup solution gives you access to a number of WordPress security features and uptime monitoring.

Drawbacks:

• JetPack doesn’t give you an option to provide HTTP authentication, so the password-protected WordPress site poses a problem here.
• The restore process can sometimes be finicky.
• The main drawback is that you have to take a JetPack subscription to get access to the full backup feature.

VaultPress makes sense if you’d like to have an all-in-one free backup solution. At the same time, you may end up with a lot of other heavy-loading functionalities that you don’t need.

What it costs:

The pricing for this plugin starts at $39 per year for a personal site and goes up to $299 for professional sites.

4. BackupBuddy

The BackupBuddy WordPress backup plugin has been around since 2010, protecting around half a million WordPress website clients and counting. It’s really easy to set up. But the free version of the plugin will only get you so far. You need to upgrade to access more features.

What you get:

• Automatic backup facilities
• Option to choose specific WordPress database files for backup
• WordPress database Repair and optimization
• Supports many offsite storage options
• Site Migration
• Quick and easy to restore your site

What stands out:

• A major plus to this plugin is that you get access to 1 year Stash Live – Backup Buddy’s own cloud storage solution
• By default, it stores 5 daily, 2 weekly, and 1 monthly database backups and 1 daily, 1 weekly, and 1 monthly full backup as zip files
• Email notifications when your backups are ready for download
• The process is very smooth

Drawbacks:

• No option for on-demand backups
• No option to try out the product first
• Again, there’s no option to provide HTTP authentication, so if you have a password-protected WordPress site, it’s a dead end.
• It fails to work on large WordPress sites

What it costs:

Plans start at $80 per year for 1 site.

5. BackWPUp

Another best WordPress backup plugin to consider for backups, BackWPUp has over 600,000 active installations. It’s relatively easy to use. It has a free version with minimal features.

What you get:

• Backup WordPress files
• Database backup processes
• Supports multisite network
• Complete automatic backup and restore
• Supports various storage options
• Gives you access to log files

What stands out:

• It has a dedicated app for emergency restores
• It has a premium personalized customer support

Drawbacks:

May need a bit of technical knowledge to handle the operations.

What it costs:

Plans start at $69 per year with renewals at $39 thereafter. They have 5 levels of plans – Standard, Business, Developer, Supreme, and Agency.

6. Duplicator Pro

Duplicator is quite possibly one of the simplest backup plugins in the market. It has two basic functions:

• Create backups in the form of a zip file
• Create migrate-ready clones

One of the best features here is the fact that we can clone a website along with custom settings so that it’s a one-click install. The features are pretty minimal, but they are powerful enough to compensate for that lack.

The free version is rather limited in terms of usage as well. You have a limit in terms of the size of the backup.

What you get:

• Backup WordPress files
• Scheduled Backups
• Backup Log
• Incremental Backup
• Continuous Backup
• Web Access / Restoration
• Compressed backup files
• Options for Cloud Storage
• Auto-database creation
• Email Notifications

What stands out:

• Comes with an installation wizard
• Seems to take customer feedback very seriously

Drawbacks:

• Very little effort put into the onboarding process
• Difficult to use migration settings for larger websites

What it costs:

Duplicator Pro plans start at $59 per year. They have 4 levels of plans – Personal, Freelancer, Business, and Gold.

7. WP Time Capsule

WP Time Capsule is perfect if you want to take a backup of only your latest files instead of your entire WordPress site. Like most other WordPress backup plugins, WP Time Capsule offers options to back up files on cloud storage sites such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3.

What you get:

• Incremental Backups
• Scheduled Backups
• Staging area included
• Merge with Live site included
• Email notifications
• Offers White-Label Agency Solutions

What stands out:

• Seems to be the go-to solution for incremental backups
• Consumes very little server resources because it does not compress backup files
• The tool is fairly easy to use with almost no requirement of technical knowledge
• Offers a lifetime package
• Test updates and restores in the staging area

Drawbacks:

• Not an ideal solution for full website backups
• Has a known bug that exposed 300,000+ sites to malware attacks

What it costs:

WP Time Capsule starts its pricing from $49 per year. They have 3 simple plans and out of all the backup plugins on our list, WP Time Capsule offers the simplest pricing structure.

8. All-In-One WP Migration

All-In-One WP Migration is more a WordPress site migration plugin than a backup plugin. Still, it does come with some pretty nifty backup features.

What you get:

• One-click backups
• Multiple cloud storage options
• Easy Import/Export of .wpress files
• Simple, one-click restore options

What stands out:

• The plugin’s simplicity is really amazing to use
• Drag and Drop import options
• Seems to be a good option for websites of any size
• No technical knowledge needed at all

Drawbacks:

• Not an ideal solution for e-commerce websites
• The plugin is not a dedicated backup solution
• They have overwhelming issues in customer service
• The free version of the plugin limits the size of the backup to 512 MB only

What it costs:

All-In-One WP Migration prices itself from $59 per year. Considering how fast and simple the plugin is to use, the price seems fairly worth it.

9. WPvivid

WPvivid offers a completely free backup, restore, and migration solution for WordPress websites. Of course, they have a pro version that offers a lot more features such as staging and merging.

The best part is that they offer lifetime deals!

What you get:

• Easy Migrations
• Backup Uploads
• Automatic Backup
• Manual Backups
• Backup to Localhost
• One-Click Restore
• Multiple Cloud Storage options
• Instant Email Report
• Log Files

What stands out:

• Filter large files from a backup to speed things up
• Large database backup support for full website backups
• Live progress monitoring feature
• Lock your backups to keep it safe from auto-deletion
• The pro version extends cloud storage support for Wasabi and pCloud
• Lifetime deals that are quite affordable

Drawbacks:

• Supports only Elementor, Beaver Builder, and SiteOrigin builders
• To get full access to the most powerful features such as staging and incremental backups, you will need to buy a premium version
• Not every premium package offers the same features, so you may have to buy the highest package to make the most of the plugin

What it costs:

WPvivid prices itself at $99-$299 for a lifetime purchase. Considering the fact this is a lifetime deal, the price seems more than worth it. However, for agency-grade utility, you will have to purchase their highest package.

What Should You Look For In A WordPress Backup Plugin?

So, if you’re still here, that means you actually care a LOT about how you invest your money.

We can respect that.

Hopefully, this list of features will help you understand why we prefer certain plugins over the others.

1. A Reliable WordPress Backup that Works

Your backup file cannot be incomplete, corrupt, damaged, or of the wrong format. That would be catastrophic. You need backups that always work. The biggest problem with most plugins is that they are very prone to timeout errors.

That’s right. Backup plugins can fail.

What this means is that the plugin stops working halfway through the backup. Since it’s really difficult to test the backup, you never know if you have the full backup or not.

2. The Option to Test Your Backup

This is a continuation of the previous idea. How do you know for sure that your backup works? Simple – test it out on a staging website. Good backup plugins will give you that option.

Now, a staging site is a dummy site. It can be used as a test site that lets you test out changes to your website. This way, your live site doesn’t get affected and you can restore your backup with full confidence.

But the reality is that no backup plugin gives you a free staging site. That’s why you need a managed backup service.

3. Easy to Use WordPress Backup Plugin

We believe that the process involved in taking the best WordPress backup should be extremely easy. If possible backups, restores, and migrations should be one-click functions that require no technical skill at all.

The majority of plugins can be difficult to set up. You have to synchronize your cloud accounts in some cases and that’s not an easy thing. So, we consider ease of use to be a major point of consideration in our list.

4. Quick Restore Process

If things go wrong, you won’t have time to spare before you fix things. You need to restore your WordPress website pronto. Preferably, you should be able to do it right from your WordPress dashboard.

Now, the way that most backup plugins work is that it gives you a zip file to download. While this seems like a very good idea, it’s really not. Restoring a site manually is a horrible idea and can result in some severe issues – especially with the database.

5. Flexible Frequency

Whether you need daily backups or monthly – that should be your choice. The idea of flexibility extends to what kind of backup you want as well.

Not everyone needs incremental backups but if you want them, you should be able to schedule one any time. Also, if you are responsible for managing the website, then you may want to take manual backups every time you change something on the site.

Without a flexible schedule, you don’t get a real advantage.

6. Minimal Load on the Website 

Look for a plugin that uses its own servers. This shifts the load to their servers instead of slowing down your server. Your website’s speed and performance will never be affected by the backup process.

The way most plugins work is to fetch all the files and databases on the site, collate them into one folder, and compress it all. This consumes significant server resources and can lead to some serious billing issues with your hosting provider.

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Pro Tip: Look for incremental backup options that ensure your backup is done in small chunks that don’t overload your server. After the first full WordPress backup, only the changes made to your site are backed up so the amount of data copied and stored each time is minimal.

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7. Backup Stored securely offsite

Your backup needs remote storage that’s independent of your website server. That way, it won’t hog your server resources. These are called offsite backups.

The idea is to preserve a copy of the website backup even if your server goes down. A common way to do this is to sync the site backups with your cloud account.

But this is a very bad idea if you have a large site. You will run out of storage space soon and this process will result in higher overheads.

8. Options to customize WordPress backups 

Every website has different needs, which is why a customizable WordPress backup is important. Of course, for each backup, you need to have a copy of your files and database.

But there will always be files that you won’t want to back up. Having the option to select the items you want to copy will give you greater control over your backups.

As your site grows, you need to have the option to get:

• A regular backup;
• A scheduled backup;
• A daily backup;
• Change frequencies for your backup service;

You should be able to choose what components of your site you want to backup. For instance, you may want to do only a WordPress database backup. Have more than one storage option if you can. But truth be told, you are never going to get that much flexibility from a free backup plugin.

As a matter of fact, we only recommend using WordPress backup plugins if you have a small site with no dynamic components.

If you have a WooCommerce site or a large site that generates a significant income for you, the best choice is a managed backup service such as BlogVault.

What Next?

Trust us when we say it:

Knowing you have a working WordPress backup gives you peace of mind that you can’t buy. You’ll never lose your entire WordPress site.

This list of the best backup plugin for WordPress was our way of taking action and helping people just like you decide on the right plugin.

It’s your turn now. Pick a plugin from our list and back up your WordPress website as an insurance policy for your website. You can thank us later!