How to Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive (Free and Easy)

As a WordPress developer with over 10 years of experience, I highly recommend backing up your WordPress site regularly. Over the past decade helping clients recover from disasters like hacks, crashed servers, and accidentally deleted content, I‘ve seen firsthand how crippling data loss can be.

Trust me, you should be backing up your site. The good news is it’s easy…

In this ultimate guide, I’ll share step-by-step how to leverage Google Drive to automatically backup your WordPress site for free.

Why You Absolutely Must Backup Your WordPress Site

Before we get into the how-to, it’s important to understand what’s at stake if you don‘t backup your site.

While WordPress itself offers rock-solid reliability and security, data loss disasters still happen:

• Failed hardware – Hard drives crash and servers fail. Without backups, this causes permanent data loss.
• Hacked sites – In 2021 over 4 million sites were hacked. Often hackers will delete sites or hold them for ransom once in.
• Accidental actions – Well meaning users can accidentally delete key site content, plugins, images, pages, or posts that are difficult to recover without a backup.

I‘ve personally rescued client sites from all three above scenarios because we had recent backups available.

But when backups aren‘t available? Complete site data loss.

The impact depends on your site, but for most businesses losing their site – even temporarily – would be catastrophic. The financial damages alone for lost traffic, sales, leads and brand reputation adds up fast.

Simply put: Not backing up your site is reckless risk taking. Don’t be that person.

Now let’s talk about how to properly backup your site…

Backup Your WordPress Site to Google Drive

The good news is that with the right WordPress backup approach, protecting your site is easy and reliable.

For backing up WordPress, I recommend leveraging Google Drive for a few reasons:

• Free storage – All Google accounts get 15GB free space – enough room for most site’s backups.
• Reliable – Data redundant across Google’s global network of data centers.
• Secure – Encrypted storage protects backups even if your Google account is compromised.
• Accessible – Backup data available from any device by logging into your Google Drive.
• Simple imports – Google Drive integrates smoothly with UpdraftPlus backup plugin.

Let’s look at how to setup UpdraftPlus for automated Google Drive backups of your WordPress site…

Step 1: Install and Activate UpdraftPlus Plugin

UpdraftPlus is the most popular WordPress backup plugin with over 3 million active installs. It’s also 100% free.

Installing UpdraftPlus is simple:

1. In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins > Add New
2. Search for "UpdraftPlus" then click Install
3. Finally, click Activate to enable the plugin

This will add a new “UpdraftPlus” menu to your WP dashboard.

Step 2: Connect Google Drive Storage

Next, you need to connect your Google Drive storage to UpdraftPlus. Here’s how:

1. Go to Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups
2. On the Settings tab, under Remote Storage click Google Drive
3. Click blue Connect with Google Drive button
4. Login with your Google account credentials
5. Authorize UpdraftPlus’ access

Once connected, UpdraftPlus will store backups in a new folder in your Google Drive.

Easy enough so far!

Step 3: Configure Your Backup Schedule

Now it’s time to setup your automated backup schedule.

Think about how often your site content changes, then choose a backup frequency that matches your needs:

Adjust as needed, but remember: the more backups the better!

Here‘s how to configure your automated UpdraftPlus schedule:

1. Still on Settings tab, under Backup Schedule
2. Set:
   • File backup frequency
   • Database backup frequency
3. Under Remote storage select Google Drive
4. Click Save Changes

UpdraftPlus will now backup your WordPress site on the schedule you set.

Easy!

Step 4: Backup Your Site Manually

I recommend occasionally creating additional one-off manual backups before major site changes.

Here’s how to manually backup WordPress:

1. Go to UpdraftPlus Backups in your dashboard
2. On the Backup/Restore tab click Backup Now
3. Once complete, you’ll get an email confirmation

Step 5: Test Restoring Backups

The final crucial step is to test actually restoring your WordPress site from backup.

This may sound tedious but it‘s vital: If you can’t successfully restore from a backup then it wasn’t working properly in the first place!

Here’s how to test restore your WP site backups:

1. Create a test site – Install WordPress locally or on a staging site
2. On your test site, install and activate UpdraftPlus
3. Connect UpdraftPlus to your Google Drive storage
4. Navigate to Backup/Restore tab and find your backup
5. Choose backup then click Restore
6. Choose file and DB components to restore
7. Click Restore and wait
8. Verify test site restored properly in dashboard and front-end

By testing your full site restore process on a staging site and verifying it works, you know your backup system is solid.

Top tip: Schedule restore tests every few months to catch any potential issues.

Going Beyond the Basics

We’ve covered the basics of backing up your WordPress site to Google Drive automatically. Here’s a bit more detail on exclusions, Migrations and other neat features…

Excluding Files from Backups

By default UpdraftPlus backs up everything, including plugins, themes, and uploads.

To save space you can exclude files like backups of other plugins.

Here’s how to exclude files from your UpdraftPlus backups:

1. On the Settings tab expand File Exclusions
2. Check boxes to exclude Plugin files, Themes files or Uploads
3. To exclude more, click Add exclusion rule
4. Enter exclusion criteria like file type or path

Just be cautious of excluding content, plugins or tools you may need to restore your site properly.

Migrating Sites with Backups

Once you have a solid UpdraftPlus backup setup on your current site, migrating to any new host, domain or platform is incredibly simple:

On your new site:

1. Install WordPress fresh
2. Install and activate UpdraftPlus
3. Connect UpdraftPlus to your Google Drive storage
4. On Backup/Restore tab find the backup file you want
5. Click Restore and migrate!

Much easier than complicated exports and imports.

This make hosting changes, domain migrations or WordPress upgrades easy anytime.

Wrapping Up

I hope this guide has convinced you both of the importance of backing up your WordPress site and given you actional steps to implement automated Google Drive backups.

Please drop any questions you still have in the comments below!