According to WordPress Vulnerability Statistics, there have been so far more than 2300 unique WordPress vulnerabilities, with 26 added just this month alone. This isn’t really surprising, given the fact that WordPress is the most used content management system (CMS) in the world. Hackers have plenty of reasons to try and find new ways how they could exploit it for profit or with the intention to cause damage. There’s a lot that you can do to secure your website, but it’s important to have a solid emergency plan, in case something goes wrong. By far the most important thing to do is to have a backup of your WordPress site that you can use later to restore everything to its original condition.
The Best Premium Plugin: VaultPress
VaultPress is a real-time backup plugin designed for people who want to focus on what matters the most and not have to spend hours learning a new piece of technology just to back up their site. It comes with a beautiful dashboard that will instantly appear to all visually-oriented people. From there, you can easily monitor the plugin activity in real-time, configure automatic backups, and more.
The only downside is that all this convenience costs money. More specifically, $9 per month for the basic version and $29 per month for the premium one. The upside is that the plugin supports multisite installations and allows you to manage everything from a single place.
The Best Free Plugin: UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is the most popular backup plugin for WordPress. What stands behind this success? A compelling set of free features and many available add-ons that you can buy to enhance the functionality of this plugin. The free version available for download on WordPress.Org will let you backup all your files and databases, restore your backups, and even backup to remote storage solutions, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, and email.
If you want more features, including database encryption, personal support, and remote backup storage, you can either purchase the all-in-one package at a discounted price or only buy those features that you need the most. Everything is fairly easy to setup, but you have to be prepared that things will get more complex as you purchase and activate more extras.
The Best Lightweight Plugin: WP-DB-Backup
Created by Austin Matzko and downloaded by more millions of users, WP-DB-Backup is a great example of how simplicity can often be the best way how to go about things. Unlike the other two backup plugins on our list, WP-DB-Backup can only backup your core WordPress database tables and other tables in the same database. As such, it’s perfect for simpler sites comprised mostly of text posts.
You can either download the database via your web browser and store it locally on your system, or you can configure WP-DB-Backup to automatically send it to your email address. It’s really that simple, and you are guaranteed to have everything configured in a few minutes.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that no backup solution will be worth anything if you don’t spend the necessary time it takes to configure it. You should ideally keep multiple versions of your website, so that you can go as far back as you need to restore everything. These backups are best kept on a separate server, away from your website. The backup plugin is then just a tool how to accomplish these goals. SkyeCom hosting plans include website backups, so if you find yourself in a situation where a backup is needed, we are just a support ticket away.