How To Take Automatic Backup In WordPress For Free

In this article, you will learn how you can take an Automatic daily backup of your Wordpress website for FREE. You don’t need to purchase any paid tools or plugins for that.

After following this tutorial, you can easily store your backup to your cloud storage devices like Google Drive or one drive and easily restore your website without downloading and uploading the backup file manually.

So, let’s start the article.

Why do you Need a Daily Backup of your Wordpress website?

WordPress is a powerful Content Management System (CMS), but it is not completely immune to errors or threats. Here are the top reasons why automated backups are essential for every website owner:

Peace of Mind: Automated schedules ensure your site is backed up continuously without you having to remember to do it manually.

Plugin & Theme Conflicts: Installing a faulty plugin or updating your theme can break your layout or result in the dreaded “White Screen of Death.”

Malware & Cyber Attacks: If your site gets hacked, reverting to a clean, uncorrupted backup is often the fastest and safest recovery method.

Database Errors: Accidental deletions or corrupted database tables can wipe out posts, pages, or user comments.

The best part is you can restore individual parts of the website like posts, comments, media files, database, themes & plugins.

Steps for Automatic Backup in WordPress

For this tutorial, We are going to use a Free plugin called Updraft Plus, which allows us to take automatic backup of our Wordpress website for Free.

Just install and activate Updraft plus plugin on your Wordpress website. Just Go to plugins > Add new and search for this plugin. It has currently 3M+ active installation.

After installation, you need to enter your Email address and then go to settings. And then add the backup time to daily in both “Files backup schedule” and “Database backup schedule” option.

Now click on Google drive icon and authorise for it’s access.

Your site is now configured to automatically back up its database, themes, plugins, and media uploads to the cloud on your chosen schedule!

Storing backups on your server is risky because if your server crashes, you lose both your site and your backup files.

Here, in the above image we are storing backup for the last 7 days and it will automatically delete previous backups. In this way you can safeguard your Wordpress content easily.

No. WordPress core does not include an automatic backup feature. You must use a backup plugin or rely on automated backup tools provided by your hosting company.

You can take manual backup to your computer using a plugin called All-in-One WP Migration. It’s a Free to use Plugin that works best for manual backup.

I recommend you to take a daily or weekly backup of your Wordpress website which is very important for safeguarding the content.

UpdraftPlus is widely considered the best free WordPress backup plugin due to its ease of use, direct cloud integration (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive), and reliable one-click restore functionality. Other popular options include BlogVault and All-in-One WP Migration.

I use updraft plus to take automated backups and you can also use your hosting providers to take automated backups.

You can back up your WordPress site manually without plugins through your hosting control panel (cPanel or phpMyAdmin):

File Backup: Log into cPanel > File Manager, select the public_html directory, compress it into a .zip file, and download it to your computer using FTP or File Manager.

Database Backup: Open phpMyAdmin, select your WordPress database, click the Export tab, choose the Quick export method, and download the .sql file.

Conclusion

Setting up automatic WordPress backups takes less than five minutes and saves you from potential loss of data and money down the road. By combining a free plugin like UpdraftPlus with free cloud storage like Google Drive, your website’s content, database, and media will always be safe and easily restorable.

You can also check our blog post on “How to restore permanently deleted webpages in wordpress“.