After getting visitors to your website, you would want to take a backup of your site on a daily or monthly basis. You can create an automatic backup using some plugins on WordPress.
Why you should take backup:
Suppose you make changes on your site on 1 April and on 3rd April your site crashed due to any reason. If you have a backup of your site one April, then you can simply restore that back up with a few clicks. Then your site will be similar like it was on 1 April. It is a better way to keep your work safe. No matter what happens to your site or server, you will have an option to fix it.
There are many plugins to create a backup on a WordPress website. It is recommended to use remote cloud storage like Google Drive one drive instead of keeping it to your server’s local storage. So that you can recover your site if anything happens to your server. Now I am going to demonstrate some best plugins for WordPress to take backup.
Updraft Plus
Updraft Plus is one of the best WordPress plugins to take backup. You can set a time to take backup automatically. For Backup storage, there are many options such as Google Drive, One Drive, and so much cloud storage. I recommend you to choose Google drive for backup. Because Google Drive is reliable and it has 15 GB of storage which is enough for a beginner-level site. After choosing Google right in the storage field, it will redirect you to connect your Google Drive account with your site. After connecting you will have to choose the frequency of taking backup. You can take weekly, monthly, daily, and hourly backups. If you make changes on a website on regular basis then you should select the daily backup option. If you do changes on monthly basis then a monthly basis or weekly basis backup is enough. Updraft will store backup not only in your cloud storage but also in your local server storage. This is a basic rule for backup to keep your data in two separate storage. Most of its core feature is free. You can also get its premium version if you want. In premium, you will get a site migration option and it will allow you to use multiple cloud storage for backup.
All in One WP
All in one Wp plugin is another plugin for backup. In its free version, you will have a basic backup option. Where you have to do the backup manually. There is also a limit in the free version while doing a restore of your backup it will limit you to 500MB. If your site is larger than 500 MB then you won’t be able to restore your backup on its free version. But if you buy its pro version, there are multiple features in its pro version. You have to buy a particular cloud storage plan for its pro version. I suggest you buy the Google Drive version. There you will get the option to take automatic backup according to daily monthly and weekly options. Another feature is you can migrate using these backups. Like if you are changing your domain, you can just simply use this plugin’s backup. It will automatically migrate your site from one domain to another domain without any kind of loss. If you buy multiple plans for cloud storage, you will be able to get back up to multiple cloud storage. The free version of this plugin is usually used for migrating sites. So if you want to migrate then the free version is enough.
Duplicator
A Duplicator plugin is usually used for migrating purposes. Suppose you want to change your hosting server then you can use duplicator. Using duplicator you can create an installable version of your website. Then you can download that installation file, and put it on your new server and your website is ready to install. Not only server you can also use the installation file to migrate from one domain to another domain. You can also use this installation file to keep a backup of your site in your local storage.
Things to look up while using the backup plugin:
As you know backup plugin uses too many server resources, especially the CPU. And if you are in a shared hosting platform will obviously face this issue. Whether you are in a dedicated server or shared server make sure you set the in nighttime or whenever your site gets low visitors for backup. This is how you can save your resources. If you are in a shared hosting platform, then you should consider doing a manual backup. So that you can control the process and do backup when your website has fewer visitors. You can also use monthly or weekly settings for this. This is how you can limit your resource usage. If any plugin uses too many resources then you should try other plugins and see which one works better with your site. But if you are in Dedicated Server or VPS, you can use the Daily backup setting. This won’t harm your resources. But make sure you are doing it when your website has fewer visitors. Now you should know when your website has fewer visitors usually it is nighttime. But it may vary from the website.
Some Pro Tips:
Always keep a backup on your local machine. If your site is daily updated you can keep a weekly backup on a local machine. Just to be safe 100%. If you ever face any kind of problem using these backup plugins, you can send a message to their support team. They will help you. If your website is low in size, you can just go with updraft plus with Google Drive cloud backup. If you are using any server panel like cPanel,aaPanel you can find the backup option there. You can also use those tools to take backup. But those backups are quite tricky, you must have to be technical. Using Updraft Plus you can choose a particular segment to take backup. If you want to only backup your post and uploads, There you can select the post and upload to keep backup of those. Other things like theme plugins will remain the same. Another thing if you are restoring a backup, this might take time according to your site size.