Backing up any data you care about is a super-important procedure. You just never know when your hard drive (or SSD) will suddenly stop working, either from normal failure or from a freak accident. And while you should trust that your web host has your back on data backups for your website, a second line of defense is always a good idea. That’s where UpdraftPlus comes it—it provides a relatively easy and totally free WordPress backup.

It’s not super hard to set up UpdraftPlus. It’s a backup plugin that will quickly and easily connect to a number of cloud-data-storage systems like Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox. In this video I show off backing up a WordPress site with UpdraftPlus. I’m using it to push a backup of LowKeyCoffeeSnobs.com to Dropbox:

And if you prefer to read, here’s the procedure that I used to back up with UpdraftPlus…

6 Steps to a Free WordPress Backup with UpdraftPlus

1. First thing you need to do is to go to your WordPress admin area and click on “Plugins > Add New”.
2. Search for the “UpdraftPlus” WordPress plugin. Click the “Install Now” and “Activate” to get the backup plugin running on your WordPress site.
3. Once you have UpdraftPlus running, you’ll need to set it up fully to do the free WordPress backup. You’ll find that screen under “Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups” in the left-sidebar of your WordPress admin area.
4. From that page, you’ll click on the “Settings” tab along the top of the screen. This is where you can set a schedule and place that you want your backups to go.
5. For Dropbox (or basically any of the “cloud” storage you can connect to), you’ll need to authenticate–tell Dropbox that you want it to connect to this WordPress site–which’ll need you log in there (if you haven’t already), and click “Allow.”
6. Then you’ll want to make sure you set the schedule for those backups, for me that was “Daily.” You’ll find those boxes on the same “Settings” screen, above the provider list. In the video I forgot to turn on the database backup. In the user interface for UpdraftPlus, you’ll need to set each of the two (files and database) to “Daily” or whatever value you prefer.

And with that you can sleep easier knowing that UpdraftPlus is managing your WordPress database backup while you do more valuable things.