2.1 WordPress Backup Plugin Options

Hello, and welcome back to this tuts plus course on essential WordPress plugins. In this part of the course, we're gonna get started by installing a backup plugin. And there's a really good reason that I'm doing that first. And that's because anything you do from this point on code crash, you could have problems your site might go down, you might get hacked. And if you've got a backup plugin in place, you can fix it and you can restore it. So it's really important to set up your backup plugin before you do anything else. Before you add any content, before you install any more plugins, before you change your settings, anything. A backup plugin to my mind is one of the most essential in fact, let's not say one of the most, the most essential plugin you can install. Because in my experience, your site never goes down or is happy at a time that's convenient to you. It happened to me once when I was on a camping holiday. I woke up in a tent, got a text from a colleague saying your site has been hacked. It had more han black and red writing. And stuff all over it, it looked really awful. And because I had a backup plugin installed, I was able to leave the campsite, go and find a handy Starbucks with WiFi and restore my site from a backup, quite quickly. Now if I didn't have that backup plugin, I would have had to either rebuild my site from scratch using backups I taken manually or I would have been stuck. I would have lost all of my content. So it's really important to set up a backup plugin earlier on. So before we get into the ins and outs of actually installing and configuring your backup plugin, let's have a look at some of the options. So the first option that you've got is to use a free plugin. And that's what we're going to be doing in this course. So if you go into the WordPress plugin directory and you search for backup as I have done here, you can see there are a whole bunch of free backup plugins. Now some of these aren't really backup Backup plugins they might include backing up as some of their functionality. So for example, jetpack. Jetpack is one of the plugins I'm gonna be looking at in this course. But if you want to use it for backups, you have to pay extra. You can only get that with a Premium wordpress.com plan, so it's not really a free backup plugin. And some of these other plugins all designed really for migrating or duplicating sites rather than taking regular backups. What you want from any backup plugin that you install are two things. You want regular automated backups. So that your site can be backed up as often as you need it to be. Now that frequency will depend on how often you're making changes to your site. And those changes could include making changes to the settings, something in the backend or the code, or they could include adding new content or updating existing content. So the content is probably the thing you're gonna be updating the most certainly should be if your site is gonna be successful. So if you're gonna be updating your site once a week, you need to schedule a backup once a week. If you're gonna be updating your content every day Day, schedule a backup every day. And a backup plugin will let you do that in the middle of the night. So it's not gonna be running while you're active on your site. And it's also not gonna be slowing your site down at a time when your audience is likely to be accessing your site or you're likely to be working on your site. So that's the first thing you need to backup plugins have. The second one, and this is something it's really easy to overlook is a simple restore process. Ideally, you should look for a plugin that's got a big button you can click for easy restore. Now what you'll generally find is when it comes to restoring, and when it comes to options for backing up, a premium plugin is generally superior to a free plugin. And if you're running any kind of business site, I would really recommend paying the money for a good premium plugin. Now I'm gonna show you a plugin that is free, but that you can upgrade to premium features and that will be Updraft Plus which is the first one that comes up here. So there are other backup plugins that are entirely free. They can involve a little bit more work restoring your site. And restoring your site is going to be something that you do under pressure. Your site has just been hacked or it's gone down. It never happens at a time when you want it to and when you've got plenty of time to fix it, it's always at a time that's not convenient for you. Another time I had a problem with this, a client's site crashing was on a Saturday morning. Now this client happened to run a campsite and this was Saturday morning in May, one of his busiest times of the year. And he knew he had a lot traffic to the site that weekend. So I had to draw up everything despite the fact it was my weekend. I had to drop everything and restore your site. Luckily, I could do that in ten minutes. In fact, if I'd spotted that it crashed, I could have done it before he even noticed but he'd had a customer tell him. So this is why restoring has to be easy. You're not gonna be thinking straight and you're not gonna have a lot of time. So let's take a look at some of the premium options. So on our sister site code Canyon, there are some backup plugins here. So the biggest difference you get with a premium plugin is the ability to use these third party services. So it gives you more flexibility when it comes to backing up. You don't want to save your backups to the server where your website is stored, or at least you don't want to uniquely do that. You can save it there, but you should also always save it somewhere else. Because if that server is compromised in any way, you need to be able to access those backups from somewhere else. So here you've got options to upload to Dropbox, Google Drive S3 and WordPress, and other options. So you might wanna take a look at these plugins for backups. There are also some very well known premium plugins that are available from third party sources. So probably the best known here is backup buddy for my themes. I've used this on some client sites, and it's a really easy to use flexible plugin, and it allows you to restore very easily. The downside for me with this is because I use WordPress multi-site. A BackupBuddy isn't really multi-site compatible it will backup your entire network as one backup, and it won't backup individual sites on a network, which can sometimes be really useful. I tend to use a solution that includes backing up the entire site, the entire network using a free plugin. And then I use a premium plugin that's multi site compatible to backup the individual sites in the network. And that premium plugin, I use it Snapshot Pro. Now, this one Is designed to be compatible with WordPress multi sites. If you're running a multi site network, Snapshot Pro for my money is the one that makes it easier to restore in particular. And then another one is Vaultpress. Now this is provided by wordpress.com. So if you go for jetpack and you get that premium plan, this is essentially what you're getting. Now, Vaultpress is probably the most powerful backup plugin. It's incredibly reliable because it comes from Word Press and it gives you lots of options and you can back up different aspects of your site at different frequencies and that kind of thing. It is quite expensive though. But if your site is crucial to your business, and you want to make sure you've got the most reliable way of backing up your site, you might want to check out VaultPress. But in this course, we're gonna be looking at free plugins, because I always like to show you how you can do things with free plugins, because otherwise I'll be excluding anybody who can't afford to pay for a premium plugin. So we're gonna use the Updraft Plus plugin, which you can install as a free plugin. And then if you want additional services from it, you can upgrade that to the premium version. So in the next part of the course, we're going to install the plugin and configure it. See you next time, and thanks for watching.