Looking for a wordpress plugin that can backup everything you need? UpdraftPlus is one of the trusted WordPress backup plugins. It allows you to easily back up, restore, and migrate your site with just a few clicks.
Whether you’re running a personal blog or managing multiple client websites, UpdraftPlus gives you peace of mind and securely backs up your site to the cloud and allows quick recovery in case something goes wrong.
It has more than 3 million active installations. It gives your site an incredibly powerful, feature-packed, and simple way to backup and restore your site. Also, it is not just about numbers but what makes this solution superior in addition to numbers, is the breadth, quality, and extendibility when you explore getting into the premium tier.
So, without any further delay, let us explore the reason developers and site admins continue to gravitate back to UpdraftPlus as a preferred choice in backup solution.
Table of Contents
- 1 What Core Backup and Scheduling Features Does UpdraftPlus Offer?
- 2 What Storage Destinations and Cloud Integrations Are Supported?
- 3 What Additional Capabilities Does Premium Unlock?
- 4 Can UpdraftPlus Handle Very Large Sites and Data?
- 5 Pros and Cons of Using UpdraftPlus
- 6 What Does UpdraftPlus Cost?
- 7 How to Install UpdraftPlus and Get Started?
- 8 Conclusion
- 9 FAQ’s
What Core Backup and Scheduling Features Does UpdraftPlus Offer?
UpdraftPlus helps you with two tasks, which are:
- Scheduled Backups: You can automate anywhere from file backups, database backups, or both, on daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly schedules.
- Manual Backups: You can manually start backups on demand with the click of a button before getting ready to make a big update or change a configuration.
Moreover, this plugin also helps you to break the backup into logical parts:
- WordPress database
- Themes
- Plugins
- Uploads
- Other files (for example, custom folders)
You can specify whether to include or exclude some, or none, of those parts. The modular approach is helpful when you’re only concerned about the database state. It also helps you when you want to exclude large media files from the backup rotation.
And even with the free version, UpdraftPlus provides logs and reports. Therefore, you always know the status of each backup whether it is successful, failed, or partially successful.
In technical teams, it is able to work with configurations that are fluidly changing. And, UpdraftPlus will work with multi-threaded processing. This allows the performance to hold under adverse conditions, such as poor front-end server performance.
What Storage Destinations and Cloud Integrations Are Supported?
UpdraftPlus stands out for its wide array of cloud integrations, even in the free version. Out of the box, it supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift, FTP / SFTP and Email.
Once authenticated, you can send backups directly to your chosen destination, avoiding the need for manual downloads.
The Premium version further expands this to include:
- Microsoft OneDrive
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Storage
- Backblaze B2
- S3-compatible (Wasabi, DigitalOcean Spaces)
- WebDAV
- SCP
Every remote storage option has its own configuration. The plugin applies its own encryption and compression when backups are stored. Therefore, as long as you have a secure remote storage provider, your backups are safe and streamlined.
Talking about technical benefits, UpdraftPlus handles a failure in the storage. Suppose if the destination becomes temporarily unavailable, you can configure the plugin to either retry the storage or have it fall back as per your settings. This level of strictness is important for maintaining a backup that has integrity over time.
What Additional Capabilities Does Premium Unlock?
UpdraftPlus Premium offers some real features for power users. While the free version can cover most basic scenarios, the premium version is designed to change your game in the hosting world.
Here is how it can help you:
- Incremental backups: If you have a large site or environmental limits of bandwidth, instead of backing up everything every time, you can back up only what has actually changed.
- Cloning & Migration: The UpdraftClone or manual migration tools help you move your sites between domains or between environments (with UpdraftClone or even manual migration tools).
- More Advanced Scheduling: You can schedule different components on separate schedules. For instance, you can schedule the files every week and the database every 4 hours.
- Database Encryption: You can encrypt the sensitive data before uploading backups to third-party storage.
- Multisite Support: You can back up an entire multisite network with granularity.
- Reporting & Monitoring: You can receive email or Slack notifications when your backups are successful or fail.
- Pre-update Backups: Automatically run a backup before plugin, theme, or core updates.
- Lock Settings: Restrict who can access backup settings in the WordPress admin.
These enhancements make it an enterprise-ready solution. This is something not many WordPress backup plugins can confidently claim.
Can UpdraftPlus Handle Very Large Sites and Data?
Yes, and this is where UpdraftPlus really sets itself apart.
For large sites (think: 5GB+ with heavy media libraries or WooCommerce product catalogs), most backup plugins either time out or consume excessive server resources.
UpdraftPlus avoids this through:
- Split Archives: You can define archive size chunks (default is 400MB). Files are split into parts so the server doesn’t choke.
- Resumable Backups: If a backup fails midway due to server timeout or limits, it can pick up from where it left off.
- Incremental Backups (Premium): As discussed, only new/changed files are backed up, reducing overhead drastically.
Additionally, this solution is compatible with command-line tools like WP-CLI and cron job scripting, so you can offload large-site backups to CLI environments for efficiency.
Pros and Cons of Using UpdraftPlus
Pros
- Easy to install and configure
- Offers both manual and scheduled backups
- Cloud setup (e.g., Google Drive) requires API setup steps.Supports a wide range of cloud storage options
- Incremental backups reduce server load (Premium)
- Multisite and WP-CLI suppo
- Excellent documentation and support
- Built-in site migration tools
- Excellent documentation and support
- Built-in site migration tools
- Full backup component control
- Automatic pre-update backups (Premium)
Cons
- Incremental backups and multisite support require Premium.
- interface may feel basic compared to SaaS-based dashboards.
- Real-time backups are not available.
- Cloud setup (e.g., Google Drive) requires API setup steps.
- UpdraftVault storage is limited unless upgraded.
What Does UpdraftPlus Cost?
UpdraftPlus works in both a free & premium model. The core plugin is free and already comes with many of the basic features. It includes manual and scheduled backups, restoration, remote storage options (like Google Drive and Dropbox), and logging. For small blogs or most business sites, this may be all you need.
However, the real features of UpdraftPlus all come in the Premium plans – enterprise-level backup control, advanced scheduling, cloud flexibility, and automation.
Here is a thorough breakdown of what the plans are and what’s included:
Personal Plan – $70/year for 2 Sites
The Personal Plan is designed for individuals or freelancers working on a small number of websites – usually their own blog, business website, or a client job. The cost is $70 per year for a license that covers 2 WordPress installations.
This Plan could be ideal for you if you are handling mission-critical websites. It also helps if you want the added automation and resiliency in your backups without taking on more than two installations.
Business Plan – $95/year for 10 Sites
The Business plan raises the licensing limit to 10 WordPress sites priced at $95 per year – this plan would be useful for small agencies or developers managing a reasonable amount of client projects.
This plan includes everything offered in the Personal Plan but has all features unlocked and adds the ability to:
- Manage and automate backups on 10 separate sites
- Get access to multisite network support
- Use site settings locks
Luckily, if you’re a developer or a team that maintains multiple installations of WordPress, whether staging, testing, or production, this Plan is terrific value and provides scalable automation.
Agency Plan – $145/year for 35 Sites
The Agency plan is designed for mid-sized to large digital agencies or WordPress professionals managing a lot of websites. At $145 a year, it allows up to 35 WordPress sites.
You get all the features in the Business plan, with even more flexibility for:
- Managing backups for large portfolios,
- remote backup, reporting, and monitoring system
- Options for white-labeling
This plan is great for WordPress services providers that provide care plans/ongoing site maintenance plans to their clients, as it gives them both convenience and professional control.
Enterprise Plan – $195/year for Unlimited Sites
The Enterprise plan is designed for scale. At $195 per year, it gives you unlimited site license, making it perfect for WordPress hosting companies, large organisations, SaaS providers, and enterprise-level teams managing hundreds of environments.
- This plan includes all UpdraftPlus premium features like:
- Unlimited installations across staging, dev, test, and production environments
- Network-wide multi site backups
- Easy integration into DevOps pipelines using WP-CLI support
- Priority support
For those who require automated, robust, and secure backup coverage across a large digital infrastructure, the Enterprise plan offers unmatched flexibility.
How to Install UpdraftPlus and Get Started?
UpdraftPlus is an outstanding WordPress plugin designed to make backups and restore your website easily. It allows you to back up your site manually or automatically to remote cloud storage.
Further, it also helps you easily restore your files or database if you ever have that unfortunate experience of losing your data or having a failure.
However, getting started with UpdraftPlus is simple and has a very low learning curve, even if you have never set up a backup system before.
The free version can be installed through the WordPress plugin directory and the Premium plans needs to be purchased directly from the official website. You can visit the site & explore the different premium plans based on your website needs. It can be either a single site or multiple. At last, complete the checkout process.
Once the plugin is installed, it adds a default area in the admin interface to the Settings – UpdraftPlus Backups section. The interface is clean and easy to navigate. Even important settings, like Backup Now, Restore, Clone/Migrate, and Settings, are all presented and accessible right out of the gate.
Technically, it never requires you to touch the terminal or configure any cron jobs, unless you want to. The solution uses the built-in WP-Cron to schedule your backups. This means UpdraftPlus will work out of the box and will work perfectly fine in any standard hosting environment.
Moreover, if you are deploying this across multiple client sites, you can also see that this solution supports WP-CLI commands. Lastly, it allows for easy bulk automation as a part of their developer workflow.
Conclusion
In a messed up WordPress ecosystem filled with backup plugins that tend to overpromise and underdeliver, UpdraftPlus sits firmly in the geeky, scalable functionality camp.
UpdraftPlus is not a plugin that is reliant on creative wording, light treatments, and generic dashboards. But, it has a reliable and consistent performance with an enormous range of use cases.
So, if you are looking for technical reliability, flexibility, and peace of mind from your backup solution, then UpdraftPlus is your solution.
OVERALL VERDICT
Price: $70/yr
FAQ’s
Premium includes incremental backups, multisite support, advanced scheduling, database encryption, cloning/migration tools, and priority support. All these things are not available in the free version.
Yes, you can configure multiple remote storage destinations. However, simultaneous backup to multiple locations is only available in Premium.
Yes, but only in the Premium version. It lets you backup and restore the entire multisite network or individual subsites with granularity.
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