Our post on WordPress backups covered the overall strategy of what to back up and how often. This one is the step-by-step setup for daily, automatic, off-site backups using free tools, the kind of setup you configure once and then genuinely forget about. If you want the broader planning side of this, including retention policy and full disaster recovery, see this guide to WordPress backups and disaster recovery as well. After the setup below is done, you can stop thinking about backups entirely, until the day you actually need one.

UpdraftPlus dashboard showing scheduled backups and remote storage configuration

Step 1: Install UpdraftPlus

Go to Plugins, then Add New, and search for “UpdraftPlus.” Click Install Now, then Activate once it finishes.

The free version covers everything most blogs actually need. The premium tier, currently around $70 per year according to UpdraftPlus’s own site, adds incremental backups, more storage destinations, and easier site migrations.

Step 2: Connect remote storage

Go to Settings, then UpdraftPlus Backups, then open the Settings tab.

Pick a remote storage location from the available options:

  • Google Drive, free up to 15 GB on most existing accounts.
  • Dropbox, free up to 2 GB.
  • Microsoft OneDrive.
  • Amazon S3, which is cheap and billed pay-as-you-go.
  • Backblaze B2, generally the cheapest option at scale.
  • FTP or SFTP, which works with any server that supports it.

For most bloggers, Google Drive is the easiest choice to set up. The free tier holds many months of backups for a typical blog without needing to think about it further.

Connecting Google Drive

  1. Click “Google Drive” in the remote storage list.
  2. Save your changes.
  3. UpdraftPlus will prompt you to authorize the connection. Click the link it gives you.
  4. Sign in with your Google account.
  5. Grant UpdraftPlus access when asked.
  6. You’ll be redirected back to your WordPress site, and the connection will now be active.

Step 3: Set the backup schedule

Still inside the Settings tab, you’ll configure two separate schedules, one for files and one for the database. The recommended setup looks like this:

  • Files backup schedule: daily, retaining the last 30 backups.
  • Database backup schedule: daily, also retaining the last 30 backups.

If your site has an especially high update volume, such as publishing multiple posts a day with heavy comment activity, a shorter schedule is worth considering. For most blogs, though, daily backups are more than sufficient.

Step 4: Select what to back up

Scroll down to “Include in files backup” and make sure everything is checked:

  • Plugins
  • Themes
  • Uploads
  • Any other directories under wp-content

Don’t exclude any of these categories. Each one contributes to a genuinely complete restore if you ever need one.

Step 5: Set up email notifications

Scroll to the “Email” setting and add your email address there. UpdraftPlus will email you whenever a backup completes, or more importantly, whenever one fails. Failure notifications are the ones that actually matter, since they tell you something needs fixing before it becomes a real problem.

Step 6: Save your changes

Click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the settings page to lock everything in.

Step 7: Run a manual backup to test

Go to the “Backup / Restore” tab and click “Backup Now.”

UpdraftPlus will run a full backup immediately. Watch it complete, which usually takes anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes depending on the size of your site.

Then check your Google Drive directly to confirm the backup files actually appeared there.

Google Drive folder showing UpdraftPlus backup files including database, themes, plugins, and uploads

Step 8: Test the restore

Tip: A backup you’ve never restored is really just an assumption. Treat the restore test below as a mandatory part of setup, not an optional extra step you can skip until later.

This is the step almost everyone skips. Don’t be one of them.

The best way to test is to restore your backup into a staging environment rather than your live site:

  1. Set up a staging copy of your site. Most managed hosts include this feature already.
  2. Install UpdraftPlus on that staging copy.
  3. From the Backup/Restore tab on staging, restore from the same Google Drive account you connected earlier.
  4. Verify the staging site comes up looking exactly like your real site.

If you don’t have a staging environment available, you can run this same test on a local WordPress install instead, using a free tool like Local by Flywheel.

Once the restore test succeeds a single time, you know your backups are genuinely reliable. You only need to retest annually, or after major changes to your hosting setup.

Step 9: Forget about it

From here, the backup runs daily on its own. UpdraftPlus only emails you on failure. You don’t need to think about backups again until something actually goes wrong.

Common issues and fixes

Backup runs out of memory

Large sites can exceed PHP memory limits during a backup run. Fix this inside UpdraftPlus settings under “Expert settings” by reducing the chunk size, or ask your host to increase your site’s PHP memory limit directly.

Google Drive authorization expires

This happens occasionally and is nothing to worry about. UpdraftPlus emails you when it does, and you simply re-authorize the connection from the settings page.

Backup files too large for free Google Drive

If your site has accumulated a large media library of images or video files, the free 15 GB tier can fill up faster than expected. A few options here:

  • Reduce retention to 7 days instead of 30.
  • Pay for additional Google Drive storage, which currently runs around $1.99 a month for 100 GB.
  • Switch to Amazon S3 or Backblaze B2 instead.

Backups complete but don’t appear in remote storage

This is usually an authorization issue under the hood. Re-test the connection from inside UpdraftPlus settings to confirm it’s still active.

Should you also use your host’s backups?

Yes, absolutely. Most managed WordPress hosts run their own daily backups automatically in the background. Using both together gives you real redundancy:

  • Host backups offer a fast restore path when your host’s infrastructure itself is fine.
  • UpdraftPlus’s off-site backup survives even if your entire host has serious problems.

Think of it as belt and suspenders. The redundancy is the entire point of running both at once.

Alternative: BlogVault

If you want something more polished than UpdraftPlus, BlogVault is the leading premium option, currently starting around $149 per year according to BlogVault’s official pricing page. Its advantages include the following:

  • Backups run entirely off-site, stored on BlogVault’s own servers rather than yours.
  • Faster restores compared to plugin-based tools.
  • Easier migration between different hosts.
  • Built-in malware scanning included with the service.

Worth the cost for monetized blogs where downtime carries real financial risk. Likely overkill for a hobby blog just getting started.

What about the WordPress.org built-in export?

Tools, then Export, gives you an XML file of your posts, pages, and comments. It’s useful as a quick “save the content” snapshot, but it isn’t a real backup, since it doesn’t include your theme, plugins, settings, or media uploads.

Treat it as a supplement to a proper backup system, never as your primary one.

Backup retention strategy

30 days is the standard recommendation across most backup tools, for a few good reasons:

  • Some problems, like a slow content corruption issue, aren’t noticed for weeks.
  • 30 days gives you enough room to go back further if something surfaces late.
  • Older backups can always be deleted afterward to free up storage.

If you have effectively unlimited storage, feel free to keep backups even longer. If storage is genuinely tight, 14 days is the absolute minimum worth keeping.

The monthly check

Once a month, run through this short checklist:

  • Visit Settings, then UpdraftPlus Backups, then the Existing Backups tab.
  • Verify recent backups are actually present in the list.
  • Verify backup file sizes look reasonable, not zero and not suspiciously small compared to previous runs.
  • Check Google Drive, or wherever your remote storage lives, to confirm the files uploaded successfully.

This takes about 5 minutes a month and catches the rare cases where backups silently fail without triggering an email.

If your site runs on the Aurora theme, backing up regularly also protects the Customizer settings and layout choices you’ve made, since those live in the database alongside your posts and get swept up in the same backup automatically.

A setup you configure once and rarely think about again

Install UpdraftPlus. Connect Google Drive. Set daily backups with 30-day retention. Test a restore once. Check monthly that backups are running. This is a 30-minute setup that protects you forever from data loss. The single highest-leverage thing you can do for site resilience.