Really, the best WordPress plugin ever?
YES! Do you have a Wordpres site? If you do, and you rely on it for anything, if you’d be sad if it just bent bye-bye, poof! then this one is a no-brainer.
It is a plugin called Backupbuddy. What does it do? It allows you to create backups of your site and it is easy. Super easy.
Backups are done with a click or two. You can automate the backups. You can have them save to a local directory, your Dropbox account, Amazon Web Services, and a few other places. You can run complete backups or just the database. I schedule daily database backups and weekly full backups of all my sites.
You can also, and this is really amazing, easily move a site from one host to another. Don’t like the web host you are on and can’t move the site because it is such a pain in the ass? No worries. Just this week, I moved a live and well-trafficked site from one terrible host to a more reliable home (Westhost) and it was easy for me and seamless to the users. It look about 20 minutes of my time. Before Buddypress, this process would have likely turned into a nightmare.
Another facet of the site migration function is that it also makes it really easy to create sandbox or development versions of an existing site. Just migrate the existing site to a new domain and turn off search engines under you WordPress Reading Settings.
The only drawback, and I don’t really consider it a drawback, is that unlike most WordPress plugins, it isn’t free. For what it does, it is cheap though. For the headaches and time it has saved me it is cheap. Prices range from $75 (2 sites) to $150 (unlimited). Why isn’t the cost a drawback? Well, I’ve found that there are a lot of great free plugins out there, I’d actually rather have the support and longevity of service that comes with a paid product.
So, if you have WordPress site, you can get by without Backupbuddy for sure. You can also get by without auto, home, health insurance, but why risk it? And unlike those kinds of insurance, this is a one-time cost.
