Backup your Membership Website Guide

Backing up your membership website is a task you should have preformed a long time ago. If you treat your membership website as business (like you should), you’ve got to have a good backup strategy.

WordPress websites, like any other website, can be hacked or even stop working without any obvious reason, or in the worse case, it can even totally crash.

There are many reasons why your membership website could stop working or get hacked, and sometimes even one faulty plugin can do a lot of mess.

Although websites do not crash on a daily basis, an up to date backup copy is a must have because when something will happen you will regret you haven’t thought about it before.

If you already have a backup solution for your website and you want to find out if there is other or better options, or even if you don’t use any backup solutions at all, you should read this guide and choose the right solution for your needs.

Because we are dealing with WordPress websites, all the solutions that we will cover on this guide will be WordPress plugins.

Some plugins are free to download and some are paid plugins.

One thing that you need to pay attention to, before you think about the cost of the plugin, you should realise that your membership website is making you money, and any down time of your website will  involve in money loss, and in many cases it could cause your members to cancel their subscriptions.

Before we begin reviewing the available solutions for backing up your WordPress website, let’s take a look at what you need to search in a good backup solution.

Every good backup plugin should at least perform the following things:

Now, after we know what we are looking in a backup plugin, let’s see what are the available backup plugins you should consider.

Backup Plugins  – The Free Solution

You can find many free backup plugins on the WordPress plugin directory, but most of them are not even worth the download time.

When it comes to choosing a free backup plugin for your website, you should choose very carefully.

Most of the free backup plugins fall in one aspect and that is the restoration process.

Many free plugins can backup your entire website, but when you will need to use the backup and restore your website you will encounter many strange problem.

Some of the free plugin don’t support any built-in restoration process and the ones that do, have to many problems in that area.

Although this problem can be seen as a minor one, you need to know that if the restoration part is not complete, you don’t know what settings haven’t been restored, and setting them manually after the restoration can take a lot of time.

If you’re really out of budget, you should consider these plugins, but as mentioned before, your membership website should make you money and you shouldn’t leave it without the ultimate backup solution you can find.

So if you are serious regarding your website and want to protect your asset, you should check these two plugins below.

Backup Creator – The Economic Budget Solution

BackupCreator is a very simple yet very powerful plugin for backing up your WordPress website.

BackupCreator Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict on BackupCreator

BackupCreator is a great plugin if you have a low budget for a backup plugin.

This plugin will create a full backup of your website and the restoration process is very easy to perform.

But, BackupCreator is lack of 2 important features:

1. Backing-up your website to a remote server
2. Setting scheduled backups tasks

If you have a static membership website that doesn’t update all the time, then BackupCreator is definitely the right plugin for the job.

If you want you can check BackupCreator official website here for more information.

BackupBuddy – The Ultimate Backup Solution for WordPress

BackupBuddy is definitely the BEST backup plugin created for WordPress websites.

This plugin can do it all, and if you have a website that is constantly updating and you want to keep your backup files safe, BackupBuddy is the right tool for the job.

BackupBuddy Features

BackupBuddy includes many options you can use in order to customize your backup. You can set:

Cons

Well, we really can’t find any real cons, we are using BackupBuddy on all of our websites and all we can say is that this plugin ROCKS!!!

If you insist on finding cons, we can say that the BackupBuddy price is the only one.

BackupBuddy is a little bit more expensive than BackupCreator, but as we always say… some things never meant to be cheap.  The price of BackupBuddy starts from $75 for a 2 websites license and go up to $150 for an unlimited websites license.

BackupBuddy Screenshots

Here are few screenshots that will give you a taste of what you can expect to find in BackupBuddy:

BackupBuddy Main Screen

BackupBuddy Settings Page

Our Verdict on BackupBuddy

As we see it, BackupBuddy is the ultimate backup solution that you can find. Although this plugin is not cheap, when it comes to protect your investment, you should not take the risk.

BackupBuddy includes all the features that a backup plugin needs, and if you set the scheduled backup tasks, this plugin will do the job automatically.

 The remote server support for storing your backup files is a feature that we use on all of our websites.

If you have a dynamic membership website that makes you monthly income, you should not save on the most important plugin you will ever buy.

For more information on BackupBuddy you should check:

http://BackupBuddy.com

If you are familiar with other good backup plugins for WordPress or you just want to express your opinion, feel free to write in your comments below.

To your Success

Jen

You May Find These Posts Interesting:

Backup Creator and Backup Creator Ultimate Review

BackupBuddy Review

Backup your Membership Website

Plugin Dashboard Review

What WordPress Plugins We Use on This Website?

prev next