Many WordPress users have shared painful experiences of data loss, website hacking, and not having reliable backups when they needed them most.
We get it. The thought of losing all your hard work can be scary, and the technical jargon surrounding backups can be overwhelming.
After running WPBeginner for over a decade, we’ve found some reliable and effective ways to backup your website, even if you don’t have the funds. One of them is using Google Drive.
In this tutorial, we'll show you a free and easy way to protect your website. This way, you can take advantage of the 15GB of free cloud storage that already exists in your Google Account.
Why Back Up Your WordPress Site to Google Drive ?
Backing up your WordPress site on Google Drive is very important as it keeps a safe copy of your site. If something goes wrong, like a hacker or you accidentally delete something, you can easily fix it by restoring your backup.
It's like having a backup key for your website. If the main key fails, you can use the backup key to get everything back to normal.
People also make backups before making major changes to their site, such as editing their WordPress homepage or installing a new theme. This way, if something goes wrong, they can revert to the original state.
Putting your backups on Google Drive is a smart move because it means that even if a hacker attacks your main website or computer, your backup is safe on the cloud storage. Plus, it won’t take up space on your WordPress hosting plan.
Create a Google Account and get 15GB of free space for backups and other files. If you need more space, get 100GB for just $1.99 per month.
With that in mind, let’s look at how to back up your website to Google Drive. You can navigate through this tutorial using the quick links below:
- How to Automatically Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive
- How to Manually Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive
- How to Restore a WordPress Backup from Google Drive
**How to **Automatically Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive
WordPress doesn’t come with a built-in backup solution. However, there are some great WordPress backup plugins that make it easy to backup and restore your site.
UpdraftPlus is one of the best backup plugins for WordPress. This free plugin allows you to create scheduled backups to automatically back up your WordPress site to Google Drive.
Alternatives: If you’re looking for a quality solution with advanced features, we highly recommend Duplicator Pro .
In addition to Google Drive backups, you also get restore points to quickly roll back to a previous version of your site, and easily import your site via a URL.
Step 1: Set up UpdraftPlus and connect it with Google Drive
First, you need to install and activate the UpdraftPlus plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on WordPress plugin installation .
After activating UpdraftPlus, you can configure backup settings and select Google Drive as the storage destination.
To do this, go to UpdraftPlus Backup in your WordPress dashboard . Then, just click on the Settings tab.
UpdraftPlus can easily save your backups to different online storage services, including Dropbox, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, and more.
Since you want to back up your WordPress site to Google Drive, go ahead and click on “Google Drive” in the section titled “Select your remote storage”.
After selecting Google Drive as the storage location, you need to grant UpdraftPlus access to your Google account.
To get started, click the "Sign in with Google" button.
Now follow the on-screen instructions to grant UpdraftPlus access to your Google account.
After reading the disclaimer, if you’re happy to proceed and authorize UpdraftPlus to access your Google Drive, you can click “Finish setup.”
Once completed, UpdraftPlus will take you back to the main settings page in your WordPress dashboard.
Step 2: Create an automatic WordPress backup plan
Once you've selected Google Drive as your storage location, you can create an automatic backup schedule.
Still in the Settings tab, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Save Changes button. UpdraftPlus will now automatically back up your website according to your schedule.
UpdraftPlus divides WordPress backups into two parts: files and database.
Let’s start with your files. As part of your backup, UpdraftPlus will create a copy of your site’s code files, plugin and theme files, and images.
To get started, simply open the “File backup schedule” drop-down menu and select how often you want UpdraftPlus to back up your WordPress site.
You can choose once a month or once every 2 hours.
When creating a backup plan, consider how often you update or add new content to your site. For example, if you publish two blog posts per week, you may want to back up your WordPress blog weekly rather than daily.
If you update your site more frequently, then you will need to back up more frequently.
Especially if you run an online store, it’s usually necessary to back up your website as often as possible. This way, you can avoid losing important information, such as new orders or payment details from customers.
After selecting the backup frequency, you need to choose the number of different backups UpdraftPlus should keep. This will help you optimize the use of storage space.
You can do this by entering that number in the text field next to "...Keep this many scheduled backups."
You can change these settings at any time, so if you’re not sure then you can start with a higher number and then reduce it if the backup is using too much space.
Once UpdraftPlus reaches the number you set, the plugin will replace the oldest copy with the newer WordPress backup.
Next, you need to create a backup plan for your WordPress database in the “Database Backup Schedule” section.
WordPress stores all of its posts and pages, comments, links, and site settings in a database, so it’s just as important to back up your database regularly as it is to back up your files.
You can follow the same process described above to tell UpdraftPlus how often your databases should be backed up, and how many databases should be kept.
Step 3: Choose what to back up on Google Drive
By default, UpdraftPlus will include all your WordPress plugins, themes, and uploads in your Google Drive backup.
In the Settings tab, scroll down to the Include in file backup section. Here you can choose whether to include your WordPress themes, plugins, or uploads in the backup.
To create a complete clone of your WordPress site, you need to leave the default 3 checkboxes checked.
If you don't need to include plugins, themes, or uploads in your backup, simply uncheck the box next to that setting. This will reduce the size of your backup and take up less space on your Google Drive.
If you check the "Uploads" box, then you can create some rules about the types of uploads that UpdraftPlus will exclude from its backups.
The plugin already has some exclusion rules set up. For example, the plugin excludes all files containing "backup" in their name by default. To create more rules about UpdraftPlus excluding content types, just click "Add exclusion rule".
You can then follow the on-screen instructions to create an exclusion rule.
For example, if you want UpdraftPlus to ignore all PDF files, you would first click "All files with this extension" and then type "PDF" in the field that appears.
By default, UpdraftPlus also excludes some files from the wp-content folder.
You can view all of UpdraftPlus' default exclusions in the "Any other directory in wp-content" section.
Do you need UpdraftPlus to exclude more content from the wp-content folder? Simply click “Add Exclusion Rule” in this section and repeat the same process above.
If you're not sure what to exclude, we recommend that you use the default settings. These settings are appropriate for most sites.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button at the top to store your changes.
How do I know if the UpdraftPlus backup to Google Drive was successful?
Each time UpdraftPlus successfully creates a backup, an email notification will be sent to your website's administrator email address to confirm that the backup was completed. If the backup fails, you will not receive an email.
In the Settings tab, scroll to the Email section. You can now enable these notifications by ticking the box in this section.
Now, every time UpdraftPlus creates a backup, it will send you an email notification.
Once you’re all done, click “Save Changes.” UpdraftPlus will now automatically back up your site to Google Drive.
If you don’t receive any emails from UpdraftPlus, then it’s best to check if the plugin has successfully created a backup in your Google Drive.
If you are using the free version of UpdraftPlus, then you should find a new “UpdraftPlus” folder in your Google account. Simply open this folder to see if it contains any WordPress backups.
In the picture below, you can see an example of some backups in a Google Drive account.
If UpdraftPlus successfully created the backup but you did not receive an email notification, then there is most likely a problem with the email configuration on your WordPress site.
To fix this problem, you can install the WP Mail SMTP plugin, which has solved WordPress email deliverability issues for over 3 million websites.
How to Manually Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive
Automatic backups are a great way to protect your website. However, even if you create an automatic backup schedule, there may still be times when you need to back up manually.
It’s a good idea to create a manual backup before making any major changes, such as updating your WordPress version. You can also create a manual backup after publishing a lot of new content.
To manually create a backup of your WordPress site on Google Drive, go to UpdraftPlus Backups . Then, all you have to do is click on the “Backup/Restore” tab.
To create a manual backup immediately, just click on the “Backup Now” button. UpdraftPlus will display some basic settings that you can use to configure manual backups of your Google Drive.
Like automatic backups, UpdraftPlus backs up all your files and your WordPress database by default. It will also use the same remote storage location you use for automatic backups. For us, this location is Google Drive.
The default settings are good enough for most websites, so when you’re ready, click the “Back Up Now” button.
How to Restore a WordPress Backup from Google Drive
Creating backups with UpdraftPlus is easy, but the really useful part is being able to restore a backup from Google Drive just as easily.
If your WordPress site has been hacked or you just want to start over, the first step is to delete all of your content and reinstall WordPress .
Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to reinstall and activate the UpdraftPlus plugin on your new WordPress site. If you need help, see our WordPress plugin installation guide .
Upon activation, go to Settings » UpdraftPlus Backup page and click on the Settings tab.
In the "Choose your remote storage" section, click Google Drive.
Now you can follow the on-screen instructions to grant UpdraftPlus access to your Google account where you save all your website backups in Drive.
After connecting UpdraftPlus to your Google account, click on the "Backup/Restore" tab.
UpdraftPlus will now scan your Google Drive and list all the backups it finds. Once it’s done, all you have to do is find the backup you want to restore and click “Restore.”
After that, select the components you want to restore. If you are restoring to a fresh WordPress installation, it is best to check all the boxes.
After selecting the components, go ahead and click on the Next button.
UpdraftPlus will now fetch all the files needed to restore your WordPress backup from your Google Drive.
Once you have successfully imported all the desired files, just click on the Restore button. UpdraftPlus will restore your backup from Google Drive.
This may take several minutes, depending on the size of your backup and the speed of your internet connection.
Once completed, you will see a "Restore Successful" message at the end of the activity log. At this point, you can click the "Return to UpdraftPlus Configuration" button to return to the setup and complete the operation.
That’s it! You have now successfully restored your WordPress site from Google Drive.
We hope this article helped you learn how to backup your WordPress site to Google Drive. You can also read our guide on the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them .
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