Backup and Restore Your WordPress Website Using UpdraftPlus

July 4th, 2017 | by Ravi Chahar || 5 Comments |

It’s always recommended to be prepared even for the worst times. You should know how to backup and restore your WordPress website using UpdraftPlus.

Due to the technical aspects of WordPress, most of the people don’t like to follow the manual way to backup a WordPress website.

Apart from that, everyone looks for a backup plugin. UpdraftPlus is considered as one of the best plugins. The free version is enough to backup and restores your WordPress website.

To every WordPress user, it’s advised to do the daily backups.

Many websites get hacked every year and no one likes that. Most of the people make the mistake of not backing up their websites.

In this article, I am going to walk you through a simple process.

Backing up Your WordPress Website

No doubt that WordPress plugins are the saviors for many.

Most of the people are depending on the thousands of plugins available in the WordPress directory.

Install and the activate the UpdraftPlus plugin and go to Settings>>UpdraftPlus.

Step 1: – On its dashboard, you can easily see a button to backup the website. Click on the “Backup Now” button and it will start compressing the files and folders in a ZIP file.

A popup will appear, you will see the checkboxes to check. By default, it will backup the whole website, you just need to click on the backup now button.

You can see the process goes on.

Step 2: – Once the backup is finished, you will see it on the dashboard. To download the backup file, click on the “Existing Backups” tab.

Click on the “Others” button for the backup you just did. It will show you the date.

With a few more options, you will see the buttons to download the backup to your computer, the web server etc.

Click on the “Download to your computer” and the download will start. Depending on the size of your website, it will get finished.

You have successfully backed up your website.

You can also setup the automatic backups using the settings of this plugin. It provides many options.

It allows its users to have the backup directly to Dropbox, Google Drive and more. You can set it to daily or whatever you feel like.

But for now, it’s not enough, you should also know how to restore this backup. It can be used if you migrate to any new web hosting, change the domain name, move to any other folder etc.

Start Restoring the Backup Safely

At some point, you may need to do this. It’s not necessary that you restore the backup only when your website gets hacked.

As mentioned earlier, you would require to follow it when you want to move your blog from one web hosting to another.

You can also restore the backup using the FTP. But here, I am going to show you the use of the UpdraftPlus plugin.

Step 1: – Just like before, open the dashboard of the plugin and click on the “Restore” button.

It will automatically send you to the “Existing Backups” tab. You will see a link to upload backup files. Click on that and you will see a button to choose the file from your computer.

Step 2: – Once you choose the ZIP file you have downloaded in the earlier section or any other backup you want, click on the “Restore” button.

A popup will appear to let you know that all the changes will be made according to the data available in the backup file.

Click on the “Restore” button and the restore process will begin.

It will get finished as per the internet speed and the size of the file. Once it gets completed, you can start making the necessary settings.

To make it work, you have to edit the database credentials from the wp-config.php file.

It’s because, in the new place, you will create a new database with a new WordPress installation for which the database username, password, and many other credentials would be different.

If you don’t fix this, you would get “Error establishing a database connection” on your website.

There are many other basic settings required.

I Hope You Can Easily Backup and Restore Your WordPress Website Using UpdraftPlus

Using a WordPress plugin is always easy. And when you think about the security of your website, you should always be ready to handle some technical things.

I don’t think you can face any problem during this process. You can easily backup and restore your WordPress website using UpdraftPlus.

You may feel like if something can go wrong. Well, if you follow this step by step tutorial, everything will be perfect.

You may also like to read the WordPress security guide to add multiple layers to your website. Website security is always a sensitive issue to look for.

If you face any problem, you can contact us or drop a comment here.

You can also connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.