10 WordPress Backup Plugins You Should Know About

Via:MyTutorialGuru.com

In Our previous post we have discussed about The Best WordPress Plugins That You Should Use. Now we are going to discuss on some best premium and free Backup Plugins.

Everyone has a data loss horror story. “I was right in the middle of finishing that report when my computer crashed—I lost everything!” Or, more relevant to the WordPress using set, “I was installing plugin/theme/update X and it broke my site. Now I can’t get my old information back no matter how hard I try!”

A real problem to be sure. But it’s one that can be easily prevented. In fact, there are countless backup plugins available that make keeping a copy of your site’s data on hand extraordinarily simple. That’s what I’m going to talk about in detail today—the more than just a handful of plugins out there that make backing up your site and all of its related information as simple as “set it and forget it.”

What About Manual Backups?

Some people prefer to do manual backups and who am I to argue? In fact, they can be very useful, too, because you have direct control over what’s backed up and what isn’t. Many plugins let you toggle on and off the backing up of specific files or directories but the manual approach gives you total control.

It’s also a good way to absolutely ensure your backup solution is working. It’s never a bad idea to do a manual backup every once in a while and compare it to your most recent automated backup. Do they match? If not, your automated solution might have skipped a scheduled backup day and that would be a real problem if you’d just written the best-blog-post-ever and suddenly suffered data loss!

The WordPress Codex offers in-depth instructions for how to backup your site manually, so if that’s the route you want to take, I highly suggest you read them and get familiar with the process.

WordPress Backup Rules to Follow

No matter what kind of backup solution you use, there are a few rules you should abide by, no ifs, ands, or buts!

• Always backup your site’s database before you install a new upgrade.
• Adjust your backup schedule based on your site update and blogging frequency.
• As with backing up any data, keep three backups in three different forms and/or places. The WordPress Codex suggests keeping a database backup in your email account, on an external hard drive, and on a DVD.
• Only backup those plugins that contain value for your site. Spam filter and stat plugins add major bloat to your database and can enlarge the size of your backup files significantly.
• Perform a manual backup on occasion to act as a failsafe for any automated backup solution you’re using.

Following these rules to the letter will help ensure your backups are successful and that you never have to worry about losing your info again.

Now, without further adieu, here’s a healthy list of backup plugins to help you prevent losing information and to always keep your site up and live.

BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is a backup plugin made by iThemes that offers a comprehensive solution for WordPress site owners. It lets you back up to a variety of sources, not just your hard drive, including Stash, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Rackspace, FTP, and email. Backups are completed quickly and easily thanks to push button solutions. Just pick where you want your backups to be stored and how frequently you want them to occur and you’re good to go.

It is a premium plugin, however, so you will need to open your wallet for this one. You can expect to pay an annual fee of $80 to backup two sites, $100 to backup 10 sites, and $150 to backup an unlimited number of sites. There’s also BackupBuddy Gold, which lets you backup unlimited sites, receive a lifetime of updates, and a year of ticketed support for $297.

UpdraftPlus

Another good backup option—that’s also completely free—is UpdraftPlus. This plugin is very straightforward and doesn’t overwhelm you with a bunch of unnecessary features, which I like. Like BackupBuddy, it supports backups to Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, FTP, and email, but it also works with Google Drive, OpenStack, and several other storage solutions.

Beyond these features, it also offers database encryption for an added level of security. Plus, you can split very large sites into several archives to make backups quicker. And should you ever need to restore from a backup, this split archive method makes that process go faster as well.

UpdraftPlus is also available as a premium plugin, which includes all the features I already mentioned plus several add-on features like automatic backups, a site migrator, reporting, no advertisements, support for additional backup locations, and more. You also get a year of support and a year of updates. You can expect to pay between $60 and $125 for UpdraftPlus Premium.

BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is another very popular plugin that lets you back up your WordPress site automatically. It includes scheduling so you can create a different schedule for your files and your database. It’s easy to set up and user-friendly.

However, if you want to store your backups any place other than your hard drive or email, you’ll need to purchase an extension. BackUpWordPress offers extensions for individual cloud storage services including Google Drive and Dropbox. Or, you can buy the bundle and feel confident in knowing you can backup your site whenever and wherever you want to.

Duplicator

Though technically a site migration plugin, Duplicator also works as a backup solution. It’s not as straightforward as some of the other plugins I’ve mentioned here and it requires some technical knowledge to use properly.

Duplicator offers the most basic backup options and you can’t schedule automatic backups in advance, which is a real drawback in my opinion. Still, if you want to migrate your site, this might serve as a dual-purpose solution in the interim.

VaultPress

We’ve covered VaultPress here at Elegant Themes quite extensively in the past, so I’m not going to get into too much detail here. However, I will say that since it’s a backup solution that was developed by the folks behind WordPress—Automattic—it carries some significant clout. And for good reason. You can set it up to perform automatic backups of your site each day. You can also restore from these backups easily and download them whenever you want.  Pricing starts at $5 per month.

BackWPup

A freebie plugin that’s worth taking note of is BackWPup, which makes it pretty straightforward to backup your WordPress site without having to shell out a penny. It can backup to your hard drive, FTP, or email but it also works with cloud storage like Dropbox and Rackspace.

You can schedule automatic backups, restore from backups, and you can even upgrade to BackWPup Pro if you wish to get further support, Google Drive support, and a few other bells and whistles.

WP-DB-Backup

If you ever find yourself only needing to backup your WordPress database, then WP-DB-Backup is the perfect plugin solution for you. For starters, it’s free. Plus, it has a pretty solid reputation, having seen over two million downloads since its initial launch.

This can be a good option for those who don’t update their sites very often or who don’t use images in their blog posts. You can schedule database backups, restore from backups, and it even offers a way to perform a manual database backup just in case you can’t get into phpMyAdmin.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Another free plugin you might want to try is WordPress Backup for Dropbox. This is obviously only a solution for those that currently or would like to use Dropbox but it performs this function pretty flawlessly. You can schedule backups to automatically upload to your Dropbox account. You can backup your database and files. A few premium extensions are available too but none offer a restore from backup feature, unfortunately.

Online Backup for WordPress

If you want to make sure your backups are safe and secure, Online Backup for WordPress is still another free plugin option. It actually encrypts your backup data so that it is secure when being transferred during uploads and downloads. It maintains a backup of your database and files that can be sent to either your email, a folder on your site’s server, or one of Backup Technology’s data centers, which offer 100MB of free storage space.

You can set up daily or weekly backups, download these backups via zip file whenever you want, select which files you specifically want to backup, exclude spam comments from backups, and more.

Snapshot

The last plugin I’ll mention here today is Snapshot. Described as “Time Machine for your WordPress site,” this plugin lets you take quick snapshots of any aspect of your site to save for later and store them wherever you want.

When you decide you want to save a version of your site, just press the “Create a Snapshot” button. This will capture your site as it is at that particular moment and should you want to restore from this version you can with the press of a single button. You can schedule these backups if you want and you can save your files to Dropbox, Amazon S3, or SFTP.

This plugin costs $40 by itself or $19.60 per month as a part of a WPMU DEV membership.

Wrapping Up

Backing up your site regularly is important. Actually, backing up all of your data is important. I mean, we should all be backing up our phones, our hard drives, and our email accounts, as well. Hopefully, you’re already doing all of that. And with the right plugin to handle the job for you automatically, you can get your WordPress site squared away, too.

How do you backup your site? Do you take the manual approach? Do you use one of the plugins mentioned here? Something else? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Via: elegantthemes.com

The Best WordPress Plugins That You Should Use

Via:MyTutorialGuru.com

With over thirty thousand WordPress plugins listed in the official WordPress plugin directory alone, it is no surprise that WordPress users are a little unsure about what plugins they should be using. There are just so many to choose from; which explains why there are so many plugin top lists online.

Most plugin lists focus on which plugins are the best, though the plugins which are listed as the best usually have the most features. Today, I would like to share with you a collection of plugins that are not necessarily The Best. This is more of a collection of what could be considered essential plugins, and not plugins that offer the most features.

For the most part, these plugins address issues that are inherent in the core version of WordPress.

Essential Functionality

Everyone uses WordPress in different ways. That is why the developers of WordPress have made the core version of their platform so lightweight. This allows users to add features and customize WordPress in their own way using plugins.

However, I do feel that there are a lot of ways in which the core version of WordPress can be improved. The following plugins add functionality that I feel is missing from WordPress.

WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Future Posts

If you use WordPress to develop blogs, you will know that blog posts do not always publish at the times they were scheduled. This problem rears its ugly head every now and then, and unfortunately, WordPress does not email you to let you know that a scheduled post has not been published. You will only see that a post has missed its schedule publication time when you log in and see an error about the post missing its schedule.

One way to fix this problem is to install the aptly named WP Missed Schedule Fix Failed Future Posts. The plugin creates a cron that searches for scheduled posts that missed publication and then ensures they are published. It works well and does not affect your server’s performance.

Widget Logic

Widgets can be used to place content in a variety of places such as your sidebar, header, footer, and home page. By default, a widget will show in a widget zone in all areas of your website. This is not always ideal. You may want widgets to only be displayed on certain areas of your website.

For example, let’s say you have a basic HTML widget that displays at the top of your sidebar. This widget would display a photograph of yourself and an invitation to readers to visit your about page and learn more about you. There would be no need to display this widget on the about page itself. You can therefore stop the widget from being displayed by using conditional tags (i.e. !is_page( ‘about’)). You could also use it to remove advertisements from your member area and remove recent posts from pages.

Editorial Calendar

Scheduling posts in advance is essential if you want to run a successful blog. Sadly, the default post area in WordPress is not practical for doing this.

With Editorial Calendar, I can easily view the upcoming posts for that month. If something urgent comes up that I need to cover, I can simply drag and drop one of the scheduled posts into another day or week. It also lets you quickly edit titles, change content, change scheduled times, and more.

PC Hide Pages

WordPress does not have any built-in functionality for hiding pages. This can be a problem as there are certain pages that you do not want to appear when someone searches your website, searches your archives, or searches your website through a search engine.

PC Hide Pages can be used to hide pages that you do not want indexed. I use it to hide the “Thanks for Subscribing” message that is shown to new newsletter subscribers. I also use it to hide my eBook download page so that it is not indexed by Google.

User Role Editor or Members

WordPress does not allow you to modify existing user roles and capabilities. This means that you cannot allow contributors to upload images to posts or allow authors to publish pages. It greatly limits what you can do with WordPress.

User Role Editor is a fantastic plugin that I looked at closely in January. It gives you complete control over what users can see and do. It also lets you create custom user groups. This is very useful if you have have a lot of authors or members.Members offers the same functionality as User Role Editor. The plugin can also be used to create a member website as it allows you to restrict content.

Enhanced Text Widget

The test widget that comes with WordPress is very useful, however it can only be used for text and HTML. The Enhanced Text Widget allows you to use additional languages such as CSS, Javascript, Flash, and PHP. It even allows you to use WordPress shortcodes.

Relevanssi

WordPress is not known for having great search functionality. Results are frequently irrelevant and out of date; which makes it difficult for readers to find the articles they are searching for.

In my article “Replace The Default WordPress Search Engine With Something Better“, I looked at ten solutions that you can use to replace WordPress’s default search functionality. Relevanssi is arguably the best solution available.

The plugin ensures search results are ordered by relevance and offers many great features for visitors such as highlighting search terms, searching through comments, and searching with phrases. It is an effective way of resolving the limitations of WordPress’s limited search functionality.

Spam & Security

Two battles that all WordPress users need to contend with on a daily basis are spam and website security. Even if your website has low traffic, you will still face spambots and hackers.

Protecting your website is not something that you can afford to be complacent about, therefore I recommend being proactive and strengthening your security from day one.

Akismet

Along with the irrelevant Hello Dolly, Akismet is the only plugin that comes packaged with every single version of WordPress. It is not a full proof solution for combatting spam, however it will block the majority of spam that your website attracts.

The plugin will check all of your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam. It sometimes get things wrong, so you need to check your spam folder regularly to be sure that legitimate comments are not being marked as spam (which can frustrate real commenters).

Better WordPress reCAPTCHA or Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

Activating Akismet and configuring your comment settings correctly should eliminate most of the comment spam your website receives.

Unfortunately, it is not always enough. If you find that Akismet is still letting a lot of spam through, you may want to install a plugin such as Better WordPress reCAPTCHA or Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin to make it more difficult for spammers.

Better WordPress reCAPTCHA uses Google’s anti-spam solution reCAPTCHA to display an image that spambots cannot decipher. It integrates with Akismet and Contact Form 7 too. If you do not want to inconvenience your commenters by asking them to complete a reCAPTCHA image, you may want to consider Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. The plugin will add a checkbox to the comment area that asks them to confirm they are not a spammer. Simple, yet effective.

Other good anti-spam solutions to try include Spam Free WordPress, NO CAPTCHA Anti-Spam, and Anti-spam by CleanTalk.

Login LockDown

Accessing your admin area by guessing your administrator username and password remains a popular way for hackers to infiltrate your website. One way to discourage unauthorized users from logging into your website is Login LockDown.

The plugin will block repeated attempts from a given IP range and lock them out for a defined period of time. This will effectively stop hackers from accessing your website with brute force password discovery.

Lockdown WP Admin

Lockdown WP Admin helps you hide the admin area and the WordPress login page. Anyone who tries to view these pages will be presented with a 404 page error message. It also lets you rename the login URL.

Activating this plugin makes it very difficult for any unauthorized people from accessing your admin area. You will still be able to login yourself using your unique login URL.

Additional Website Security

There are advanced security plugins available for WordPress that can strengthen your website in a number of ways. They can scan files and scan your database for unauthorized injections, address common WordPress vulnerabilities, and monitor your website on a daily basis.

Below is a list of four of the best advanced security plugins for WordPress. To ensure that your website performance is not affected, it is normally best to use only one of these plugins. However, it may be worth activating each one and checking whether the plugin finds a security concern that the others may not. You can then leave one activated to perform security scans on a regular basis.

• Sucuri Security – Sucuri Security is a malware scanner that detects malware, spam injections, website errors, and more. It can prevent phishing attempts, PHP mailing scripts, IP cloaking, malicious iframes and malicious redirects. The plugin can also harden the configuration of your website. It can remove the WordPress version, protect the uploads directory, disable the plugin and theme editor, and restrict access to the wp-contents and wp-includes directories.
• Acunetix WP Security – Acunetix WP Security can address security concerns that are caused in the core version of WordPress, such as the removal of update information for non-admins, disabling of error reporting, and the protection of your admin area.
• iThemes Security – Recently renamed from Better WP Security, iThemes Security can address a lot of common WordPress security vulnerabilities such as renaming the admin account, changing the database prefix from wp_, and changing the user id for admin from 1. It can also monitor your website files for unauthorized changes and enforce strong passwords on all users.
• BulletProof Security – BulletProof Security can protect your website from code injections of XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, and SQL. It also enhances login security and will monitor your website for security issues. It primarily uses the .htaccess file to harden your website security.

Backing Up WordPress

It is vital that you back up WordPress on a regular basis. Hosting companies tend to keep their backup servers in the same datacenter as their main servers, therefore you need to ensure that you make additional backups yourself.

There are many great backup plugins available for WordPress. Below you will find four of the best:

• VaultPress – VaultPress is a premium backup service from Automattic (the developers of WordPress). From only $5 per month, they will back up your website on a daily basis. The service features one click backups and restores; and you can download backup files at any time. I use VaultPress to backup all my websites as it is cheap, reliable, and only takes a minute to configure. Check out my review of VaultPress for more information about the service.
• BackupBuddy – Developed by iThemes, BackUpBuddy is a premium backup plugin that allows you to back up to Amazon, Dropbox, Rackspace, FTP, and more. Backups and restores are straight forward. The plugin costs a one off fee of $80 for two websites, $100 for ten websites, or $150 for unlimited websites. While I do love VaultPress, there is no getting away from the fact that BackupBuddy is a more cost effective solution in the long term.
• UpdraftPlus – An easy to use free backup solution that has a simple backup and restoration process. It supports backups to Dropbox, Amazon, Rackspace, Google Drive, FTP, email, and more. It has some cool features such as encrypting your database for additional security and the option of splitting large websites into multiple archives.
• WordPress Backup to Dropbox – A free plugin that lets you schedule regular backups to your Dropbox account. It will backup all website files and your website database. A couple of extensions are available for between $9-$19 that offer additional functionality; however the free plugin works well on its own. Unfortunately, it does not have any restore functionality.

Speed & Performance

A slow web page can drive visitors away and hurt your search engine rankings. The following plugins will help you reduce the size of your web pages and make pages load quicker for visitors.

WP Defer Loading

WP Defer Loading will defer the loading of Javascript on your website and improve the speed of web pages. You should see your website page loading time drop after activating it.

WP-Optimize or Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions

WP-Optimize is a great little plugin that can help reduce the size of your database and make your website run more efficiently by removing post revisions, auto draft posts, and comments, that are older than two weeks.

Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions works in a similar way. I used the plugin to reduce the size of my blog by a whopping 59%.

WP Smush.It

WP Smush.It utilizes Yahoo’s Smush.it API to optimize your images in a number of ways. It will strip meta data from JPEG images, optimize JPEG compression, convert some GIF images to PNGs, and remove unused colours from indexed images. Be warned, however, that the plugin can put strain on your server CPU when it is optimizing a backlog of images.

W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache

Installing a cache plugin will make the biggest difference to your website speed. The two leading cache plugins for WordPress are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. They allow you to create static HTML copies of your pages that are displayed to visitors, which drastically reduces the time it takes to load a page.

Both of these plugins allow you to optimize your website in additional ways. They support browser caching and minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and feeds. They can also be used in conjunction with a Content Delivery Network (CDN), such as MaxCDN, to reduce the page loading time of your pages even further.

W3 Total Cache can improve page loading times significantly. Lighter web pages will help improve your search engine rankings and reduce your bandwidth costs.

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress SEO by Yoast or All In One SEO Pack

Both WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack will improve your website’s search engine presence.

I recently looked at which plugin was best for SEO. A few Elegant Themes blog readers were unhappy that I did not choose a winner; however the truth is that there is not much between these plugins when it comes to adding essential SEO functionality to your website.

They both allow you to configure meta information for posts, pages, and social media services. They also allow you to create XML sitemaps. WordPress SEO by Yoast has many other tools such as breadcrumbs, RSS editing, and bulk title and description editors. Some of these additional features are included in the premium version of All In One SEO Pack, some are not. Though I believe your decision on which one to use still comes down to which interface you like best.

You will not be disappointed with either plugin as they both add SEO functionality that is missing from the core version of WordPress.Both WordPress SEO and All in One SEO Pack allow you to modify page titles and meta information.

Google XML Sitemaps

WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack can be used to create an XML sitemap for your website. However, if you want full control over what is contained with your sitemap, I recommend using Google XML Sitemaps.

The plugin allows you to choose exactly which parts of your website are included in your sitemap. Indexing frequencies and priorities can be specified. It also allows you to add additional pages that were not created using WordPress.Google XML Sitemaps gives you complete control over what is listed in your website sitemap.

More Great Plugins to Consider

My original list of plugins for this article was longer, though many plugins cannot unfortunately be considered as essential. You will, however, find them useful.

Here is a quick look at some great plugins that nearly made the list:

• Contact Form 7 or Gravity Forms – Two of the best plugin solutions available for adding a contact form to your website. They have advanced features such as file uploads, eCommerce integration, and spam protection.
• Subscribe To Comments Reloaded – Allows commenters to be updated of new comments. A fantastic plugin for those of you who are not using an alternative comment system.
• WP-PageNavi – Replaces the older posts and newer posts links with a more user-friendly paging navigational interface.
• Optin Forms – A great way of integrating beautiful newsletter sign up forms into your website.
• Smart Layers – I shared with you all the best social media sharing plugins for WordPress last month. Yet the most common question I receive from Elegant Themes blog readers is ‘What social media plugin is powering the floating bar on Elegant Themes?’. The answer is: Smart Layers by AddThis.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Allows you to track a lot of additional information on Google Analytics. For example, it can use custom variables to display traffic for authors, posts and pages, specific categories, and more.
• SEO Smart Links – Allows you to automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments to other posts and pages from your website.
• Pretty Link – An essential tool for affiliate marketers. It allows you to mask ugly affiliate URL’s and track the number of clicks to links.
• Jetpack by WordPress.com – A whopping thirty two modules and counting. Jetpack adds a lot of functionality to your website including social media sharing, comments, related posts, and spelling and grammar correcting.
• Types – A tool for managing custom post types, custom taxonomy, and custom fields.
• Comprehensive Google Map Plugin – Let’s you insert Google maps into your website using widgets or shortcodes.

I hope you have enjoyed this list of top WordPress plugins. With tens of thousands of WordPress plugins available online, it can be difficult to curate a list that includes everyone’s favorite essential plugins.

Via: elegantthemes.com