UpdraftPlus Review: Best WP Backup & Migration Plugin Full Review

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Losing a WordPress website – whether from a botched plugin update, a server crash, or a malicious attack – is one of those events that feels catastrophic in the moment and entirely preventable in hindsight. Backups are not glamorous. Nobody sets up a backup plugin and feels the adrenaline rush of launching a new feature. But when something goes wrong, that backup file becomes the most valuable thing on your server.

UpdraftPlus has, for well over a decade, been the plugin most WordPress site owners reach for when they need a backup solution. With more than 3 million active installations and more five-star reviews on the WordPress.org repository than any other backup plugin, it occupies a dominant position in its category. But market dominance is not the same as being the right choice for every situation – and given how critical backup software is, it deserves genuine scrutiny rather than surface-level praise.

This review is written independently and without any commercial relationship with UpdraftPlus or its parent company, TeamUpdraft. The goal is to give you an honest, in-depth assessment of what the plugin does well, where it falls short, who it’s genuinely suited for, and whether it still deserves its reputation as the best WordPress backup and migration plugin in 2026.

What Is UpdraftPlus?

UpdraftPlus is a WordPress plugin that handles backup, restoration, and migration of WordPress websites. Developed by TeamUpdraft (formerly UpdraftPlus.com), the plugin has been in active development since 2011. Its core promise is straightforward: back up your WordPress files and database, send those backups to a remote storage location, and restore them when needed – all from within the WordPress admin dashboard.

The plugin is available in a free version distributed via the WordPress.org plugin repository and a Premium version sold directly from the developer’s website. The free version is genuinely capable, covering the needs of most personal and small business sites. The Premium version unlocks a broader set of tools including incremental backups, site migration and cloning, multisite network support, wider remote storage options, WP-CLI integration, and more granular security controls.

UpdraftPlus sits in an interesting position within the WordPress ecosystem. It is not a security plugin – it does not scan for malware or provide firewall capabilities. It is not a performance plugin. It is a focused backup-and-restore tool that does one job and has refined that job over many years and millions of deployments.

Installation and Setup

The installation process for UpdraftPlus follows the standard WordPress plugin workflow. Navigate to Plugins > Add New, search for ‘UpdraftPlus’, install, and activate. The plugin adds its own top-level menu item in the WordPress admin sidebar – ‘UpdraftPlus Backups’ – and from that point, everything is managed within a single, tabbed interface.

The main dashboard presents four tabs: Backup/Restore, Migrate/Clone, Settings, and Advanced Tools. First-time users are immediately met with large, clearly labelled buttons for running a backup and configuring settings. There is no wizard-style onboarding, but the interface is intuitive enough that most users won’t need one.

Configuring remote storage – which is strongly recommended, since storing backups on the same server as your site defeats much of the purpose – requires connecting UpdraftPlus to a cloud storage provider. The process involves authorizing the plugin with your Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3 account, depending on your preference. This takes a few minutes and requires following authentication prompts in a browser tab. It is slightly fiddlier than more automated solutions but is a one-time setup step and is well-documented.

The Premium version has a different installation pathway: you purchase from the TeamUpdraft website, download the plugin ZIP file, upload it manually via Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin, and then authenticate your license key within the plugin’s settings. This is more steps than the free version and can feel slightly disjointed, especially for less technical users, but it is a common approach for premium WordPress plugins.

Features Deep Dive

1. Backup Scope and Granularity

UpdraftPlus gives you meaningful control over what gets backed up. When you initiate a backup – manually or via schedule – you can choose to back up files, the database, or both. Within files, the plugin separates your backup into logical components: the WordPress database, plugins, themes, the uploads folder, and any additional content you specify.

This separation is actually one of UpdraftPlus’s more useful and underappreciated design choices. Because each component is stored as a separate archive file, you can restore selectively. If a recent plugin installation corrupted your theme but your content is fine, you can restore only the themes archive rather than rolling back the entire site. This granularity gives site owners and developers a surgical option that full-site-archive tools like All-in-One WP Migration do not offer.

The free version covers the wp-content folder and the database. However, it does not back up the WordPress configuration file (wp-config.php), the .htaccess file, or WordPress core files. These exclusions matter in specific disaster-recovery scenarios. If your server suffers a total failure, a backup that omits wp-config.php means you’ll need to manually re-enter your database credentials and other configuration settings during restoration. The Premium version resolves this by allowing backup of files outside the wp-content directory.

2. Scheduling and Automation

One of the most important qualities in a backup plugin is that it should require no thought after initial setup. UpdraftPlus delivers on this. The scheduling options cover most practical use cases: from twice daily to once every two weeks, with separate schedules for files and for the database. This separation is sensible – databases change far more frequently than theme or plugin files, so it may make sense to back up your database daily but your files only weekly.

You can also configure how many scheduled backups to retain, which determines how far back you can roll back your site. The default retention count of two is low for any site where data matters; raising this to five or seven daily backups provides a more comfortable safety net. The Premium version adds more advanced retention logic – for example, keeping daily backups for one week and switching to weekly archives thereafter – which is valuable for larger sites with regulatory or compliance considerations.

A Premium-exclusive feature worth highlighting is the ability to schedule backups automatically before WordPress core, plugin, or theme updates. This is a genuinely useful safety net for the scenario most WordPress administrators actually encounter: a plugin update that breaks something. With this setting enabled, UpdraftPlus creates a restore point immediately before applying updates, enabling instant rollback if something goes wrong.

3. Remote Storage Options

UpdraftPlus offers the broadest remote storage compatibility of any free WordPress backup plugin. The free version supports Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift, and email. The Premium version adds Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, SFTP, WebDAV, SCP, Backblaze B2, and pCloud, as well as the developer’s own UpdraftVault cloud storage service.

The practical significance of this breadth is that UpdraftPlus can fit into whatever cloud infrastructure a site owner already uses, rather than requiring them to adopt a new storage service. For agencies managing dozens of client sites across different hosting environments, this flexibility is genuinely valuable. The Premium version also allows you to store the same backup simultaneously in multiple destinations, providing redundancy that would otherwise require manual coordination.

UpdraftVault, TeamUpdraft’s own storage service, is included at 1GB per Premium license. Additional storage can be purchased separately in tiers from 5GB to 250GB. The pricing for UpdraftVault is not particularly competitive against standalone storage solutions like Backblaze B2 or Wasabi, and for sites with large media libraries, the cost of adequate Vault storage adds meaningfully to the total cost of the plugin. That said, the convenience of having backup storage integrated directly into the plugin interface has real value for users who don’t want to manage a separate storage service.

4. Restoration Process

A backup plugin that can’t reliably restore is worse than no backup at all – it gives false confidence. UpdraftPlus has a strong track record here, and the restoration process is one of its most tested and refined features. From the plugin’s main dashboard, existing backups are listed chronologically. Clicking ‘Restore’ on any backup entry opens a selection dialogue where you choose which components to restore (database, plugins, themes, uploads, and other files).

The restoration process runs within the WordPress admin, which means no FTP access or server command-line work is required for most scenarios. This is a meaningful advantage over older manual backup approaches and makes restoration accessible to site owners who are not technically advanced. The plugin displays a progress log during restoration and sends a summary email upon completion.

Where UpdraftPlus occasionally struggles is with very large sites – particularly WooCommerce stores with tens of thousands of products and associated images. On shared hosting environments with strict PHP memory limits and execution timeouts, large restorations can time out before completion. This is partly a hosting limitation rather than a plugin failure, but UpdraftPlus does not provide the kind of chunked, resumable restoration architecture that would make it immune to these constraints. Some users on budget hosting have reported failed restorations on larger sites, which is a real limitation to note.

5. Migration and Cloning

Migration – moving a site from one host or domain to another – is where the free and Premium versions diverge most significantly. With the free version, migration is possible but manual: you take a backup, set up WordPress on the destination server, install UpdraftPlus there, and restore the backup. The plugin does handle search-and-replace of the old domain name in the database during restoration, which removes one of the more tedious steps in manual migrations.

The Premium version adds a proper migration workflow via the Migrator addon, which allows direct site-to-site transfer without manually downloading and re-uploading backup archives. You connect the source and destination sites using a migration key, and UpdraftPlus handles the transfer directly. This is significantly faster and less error-prone than the manual method, especially for larger sites.

The cloning functionality (UpdraftClone) works somewhat differently – it creates a temporary staging environment hosted on TeamUpdraft’s own infrastructure. This is useful for testing changes before applying them to a live site, but it is a token-based system where each clone consumes credits, and additional tokens are purchased separately. For agencies that regularly create staging environments, this approach can become costly compared to hosts that provide staging environments natively or plugins like WP Staging that operate differently.

6. Security Features

UpdraftPlus is first and foremost a backup tool, not a security platform, and its security features reflect that focus. The most practically useful security feature is database encryption in the Premium version: backups can be encrypted with a passphrase before being stored remotely. This matters if you are backing up to a shared cloud storage account or if you store backups containing customer personal data subject to GDPR or CCPA regulations.

The Premium version also includes a data anonymization feature that strips personally identifiable information from database backups before storage. This is a useful compliance tool, though it does mean the backup cannot be used to restore a fully operational site – it is more suited to data archival or testing environments where live customer data should not be present.

The Settings Lock feature, available in Premium, allows administrators to password-protect the UpdraftPlus settings panel. This prevents other WordPress administrators (such as client site admins) from modifying backup schedules or storage locations – a useful control for agencies handing off sites to clients.

7. Reporting and Logging

UpdraftPlus generates detailed logs for every backup operation, accessible from within the plugin dashboard. These logs record each step of the backup process, including any warnings or errors, which is genuinely useful for diagnosing failed backups. The free version sends basic email notifications upon backup completion. The Premium version adds more granular reporting options, including Slack notifications and detailed status reports sent to any email address – useful for agencies that want to monitor backup health across multiple client sites without logging into each one individually.

8. WP-CLI Support

For developers and system administrators who manage WordPress installations from the command line, UpdraftPlus Premium includes WP-CLI integration. This allows backups to be triggered, listed, and restored from the command line – useful for scripting backup processes into deployment workflows or scheduled server jobs. This is a feature that primarily serves technical users but is a meaningful differentiator for those who need it.

Pricing

UpdraftPlus follows a freemium model. The free version is available without limitation from the WordPress.org repository. Premium plans are annual subscriptions with the following approximate pricing:

Plan	Price/Year	Licenses	Best For
Free	$0	1 site	Bloggers, small personal sites
Personal	~$70	2 sites	Freelancers, hobby site owners
Business	~$95	10 sites	Small agencies, multi-site managers
Agency	~$145	35 sites	Mid-size agencies, client work
Enterprise	~$195	Unlimited	Large agencies, developers
Gold	~$399	Unlimited + extras	Power users, extra Vault storage

All Premium plans include the full suite of premium features and add-ons, one year of premium support, and one year of updates. After the subscription period expires, the plugin continues to work but no longer receives premium support or new feature updates. There is a renewal discount (approximately 40%) that reduces the cost in subsequent years.

Individual add-ons are also sold separately for users who want a specific premium feature without the full subscription. Pricing for individual add-ons ranges roughly from $10 to $30 per year. For users who only need one or two specific Premium features – such as the Migrator or WP-CLI support – this can be a more economical option than a full plan.

The 1GB of UpdraftVault storage included with Premium plans is sufficient only for very small sites. Larger sites will need to either use a third-party storage service or purchase additional Vault storage. The additional Vault pricing ranges from $10 per quarter for 5GB up to $125 per quarter for 250GB – costs that can add meaningfully to the total plugin cost for content-heavy sites.

Refunds are discretionary and evaluated on a case-by-case basis, generally within 10 days of purchase when a verified technical issue exists that support cannot resolve. There is no automatic money-back guarantee, which is a more restrictive refund policy than some competitors offer and is worth factoring into purchasing decisions.

Performance Impact

One legitimate concern with backup plugins is the server load they generate during backup operations. UpdraftPlus is designed to run backups in the background, breaking the process into smaller chunks to minimize the impact on active server resources. In practice, on modern shared hosting or VPS environments, scheduled backups running during low-traffic periods have negligible impact on site performance for visitors.

The situation can differ on budget shared hosting with very tight PHP memory limits or short execution time limits, particularly for larger sites. Sites with large upload directories – WooCommerce product catalogues with thousands of high-resolution images, for example – can generate backup archives that strain resource-constrained environments. In these cases, incremental backups (a Premium feature) significantly reduce the server impact after the first full backup, since subsequent runs only process changed files rather than the entire directory.

UpdraftPlus does not load any assets on the frontend of your site – all plugin code is admin-only. It will not affect your page load speeds or Core Web Vitals scores for visitors.

Pros and Cons

Where UpdraftPlus Excels

Best free backup plugin available: The free version of UpdraftPlus offers capabilities that many paid backup solutions charge for – most notably, cloud storage integration and in-admin restoration. For personal sites and small blogs, the free version is entirely sufficient and represents excellent value.
Exceptional storage flexibility: With 15+ supported remote storage providers across free and Premium tiers, UpdraftPlus integrates with virtually any cloud storage environment. Few competitors come close to this breadth.
Granular component backups: The separation of backups into discrete components (database, plugins, themes, uploads) allows selective restoration that full-archive tools cannot offer. This is a meaningful practical advantage for debugging and partial rollbacks.
Proven reliability at scale: Over 3 million active installations across enormously diverse server environments constitutes a meaningful reliability signal. The plugin has been battle-tested in ways that newer entrants have not.
Backup before updates: The Premium feature that automatically creates a restore point before WordPress core, plugin, or theme updates is one of the most practically useful safety features available in any backup plugin.
Strong community and documentation: Extensive official documentation, active WordPress.org support forums, and a large community of users mean that answers to most configuration questions are readily available.
Non-invasive UI: UpdraftPlus is one of the less aggressive freemium plugins when it comes to upsell prompts. The free version is usable without constant pressure to upgrade.

Where UpdraftPlus Falls Short

No real-time backups: UpdraftPlus operates on scheduled intervals, with the minimum frequency being hourly (Premium). For high-volume WooCommerce stores where orders and customer data change by the minute, this means a backup window during which data changes are unprotected. Solutions like BlogVault offer continuous, near-real-time backups that UpdraftPlus cannot match.
Free version misses critical files: The exclusion of wp-config.php, .htaccess, and core WordPress files from free-version backups means that a full site recovery from a complete server failure requires manual steps that many site owners are not equipped to handle without support.
Large-site restoration issues: On shared hosting with tight PHP execution limits and memory caps, restoring very large sites can time out mid-process. While this is partly a hosting constraint, UpdraftPlus does not offer a chunked, resumable restoration process that would make it robust against these limitations.
Dated interface design: The plugin’s UI has not kept pace with the visual design standards of newer WordPress tools. It is functional and clear, but compared to more polished alternatives, it feels somewhat utilitarian – a minor issue but one that becomes relevant when handing off sites to non-technical clients.
Backup labeling is inflexible: Backups are identified only by date and time. There is no mechanism for adding notes or labels to individual backups (e.g., ‘Pre-redesign’, ‘Before WooCommerce upgrade’), which makes managing a large backup history more cumbersome than it needs to be.
UpdraftClone costs add up: The token-based staging clone system means that regular use of staging environments generates ongoing costs beyond the base subscription, which can surprise users expecting unlimited staging functionality.
Limited refund guarantee: The 10-day, case-by-case refund policy is less consumer-friendly than the 30-day money-back guarantees offered by many competitors. This is a meaningful consideration before purchasing.

How UpdraftPlus Compares to Alternatives

Understanding where UpdraftPlus sits relative to competing plugins helps frame the decision for different user types.

Feature	UpdraftPlus	Duplicator	BackupBuddy	BlogVault
Scheduled Backups	✓ Free	✓ Free	✓ Free	✓ Free
Cloud Storage Options	7 (Free) / 15+ (Premium)	4 (Free) / 8+ (Premium)	Limited (Free)	Cloud-native
One-Click Restore	✓ Free	✓	✓	✓
Incremental Backups	Premium only	✗	Premium only	✓
Real-Time Backups	✗	✗	✗	✓
Migration / Cloning	Premium	✓ Free	Premium	✓
Multisite Support	Premium	✗ Free	✗ Free	Premium
WP-CLI Support	Premium	✗	✗	✗
Free Version Quality	★★★★★	★★★★☆	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆
Free Plan Starting Price	$0 / $70 yr	$0 / $69 one-time	$0 / $99 yr	$0 / $9 mo

Duplicator is UpdraftPlus’s closest free-tier competitor and excels specifically at site migration, offering a cleaner migration workflow in its free version than UpdraftPlus. However, Duplicator’s backup scheduling and cloud storage options are more limited in the free tier. For straightforward one-time site moves, Duplicator is worth considering; for ongoing backup management, UpdraftPlus has the advantage.

BackupBuddy is a premium-only plugin (no free version) that has a longer history even than UpdraftPlus. It offers a similarly comprehensive feature set but at a higher starting price point, with a different licensing model. BackupBuddy’s restoration via ImportBuddy works slightly differently and some users find it more reliable for complex environments. However, UpdraftPlus’s free tier provides a genuine on-ramp that BackupBuddy cannot.

BlogVault is a cloud-based backup service rather than a self-hosted plugin, and it takes a fundamentally different architectural approach – backups are stored on BlogVault’s own infrastructure, and the service offers near-real-time backup cadence that scheduled plugins cannot match. For high-volume eCommerce sites or any site where losing more than an hour of data would be costly, BlogVault’s model is worth the premium pricing. For most WordPress sites, UpdraftPlus’s approach is entirely adequate.

Who Should Use UpdraftPlus?

UpdraftPlus Free is the right choice if you are:

Running a personal blog, portfolio, or brochure site where a few hours of data loss would be inconvenient but not damaging
On a tight budget and need reliable scheduled backups with cloud storage without paying anything
Technically comfortable enough to handle occasional backup troubleshooting via support forums
Running a small site under 1–2GB in total size, where backups complete reliably on your hosting environment

UpdraftPlus Premium is a good fit if you are:

A freelancer or small agency managing multiple client sites who needs centralized backup management and the ability to send backups to multiple cloud destinations
Running a WooCommerce store where data changes frequently and you want incremental backups and pre-update restore points
Working with WordPress Multisite networks, which require Premium’s multisite support
A developer who wants WP-CLI backup management integrated into deployment workflows
Running a site where GDPR or CCPA compliance requirements make database encryption and data anonymization important

You should consider alternatives if you are:

Running a high-volume eCommerce site where orders and customer data change constantly – BlogVault’s real-time backup architecture is better suited to this
Doing a one-time site migration and don’t need ongoing backup management – Duplicator’s free tier handles this workflow more smoothly
On a heavily resource-constrained hosting environment with a very large site – restoration failures on limited PHP environments are a real risk to account for

Scoring Summary

The following scores reflect our assessment across key evaluation criteria for WordPress backup plugins:

Category	Score	Notes
Ease of Use	9/10	Very beginner-friendly once past initial setup
Backup Reliability	9/10	Proven track record on millions of sites
Free Version Value	9/10	Best free backup plugin available
Premium Value	7.5/10	Solid but pricey per individual add-ons
Storage Flexibility	9/10	15+ integrations, most in the market
Migration Tools	7/10	Good in Premium; basic in Free
Support Quality	8/10	Responsive premium support; free forum-based
Performance Impact	8.5/10	Low overhead, background processing
Documentation	8/10	Thorough, though can be dense for beginners
Overall Score	8.5/10	Industry-leading free plugin, competitive premium

Final Verdict

UpdraftPlus occupies its dominant market position for good reasons. Its free version is the best in its category – genuinely functional, not artificially crippled, and capable of handling the backup needs of the vast majority of personal and small business WordPress sites. The cloud storage breadth, granular component selection, and in-admin restoration capability would be noteworthy features in a paid plugin; in a free one, they are exceptional.

The Premium version is a solid product but requires more careful evaluation. At the entry level ($70/year for two sites), it is reasonably priced for what it delivers. As you move up to agency and enterprise tiers, and factor in the potential cost of additional UpdraftVault storage, the total cost of ownership can increase to the point where cloud-based alternatives deserve consideration. The lack of real-time backup capability and the limitations around very large site restorations are genuine constraints for specific use cases.

For most WordPress site owners – bloggers, content publishers, small businesses, freelancers, and smaller agencies – UpdraftPlus (free or Premium) is a defensible first choice and possibly the best available choice in its price range. It is not perfect, and it is not the right tool for every scenario, but for what it is – a mature, battle-tested, feature-rich WordPress backup plugin – it has earned its reputation.

If you need a backup plugin and you’re not running a real-time-data-sensitive eCommerce site on budget shared hosting with severe resource limits, UpdraftPlus is very likely to serve you well.

Bottom Line

UpdraftPlus is the best free WordPress backup plugin available, with a Premium tier that covers most professional backup and migration needs. Its primary limitations are the absence of real-time backup capability, occasional difficulty with large-site restorations on constrained hosting, and a refund policy that requires careful consideration before purchasing. For most WordPress sites, it remains the benchmark against which other backup plugins are measured.

Disclosure & Methodology: This review was conducted independently. No payment, product access, or other compensation was received from UpdraftPlus, TeamUpdraft, or any affiliated party. Ratings and assessments are based on publicly available information, feature analysis, community feedback aggregated from WordPress.org, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and Reddit, and independent research. Pricing figures cited reflect rates at time of writing and may change.