How to Schedule WordPress Backups

Backing up your WordPress site once is easy enough to remember. Remembering to do it every day, week or month is another matter. Scheduling your backups removes that responsibility by automatically creating regular recovery points, so you’re not relying on memory when something goes wrong.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to schedule WordPress backups using UpdraftPlus, including how to choose the right frequency for your files and database, set retention rules and store your backups remotely. We’ll also look at backup timing, WP-Cron, testing your backups and the common scheduling mistakes to avoid.

• Schedule WordPress backups based on how frequently your website changes
• Back up both your website files and WordPress database
• Consider backing up your database more frequently than your files on active sites
• Store at least one backup remotely rather than relying solely on your web server
• UpdraftPlus lets you automate separate backup schedules for your files and database
• Check that scheduled backups are completing successfully and test your recovery process
• Create an additional backup before making significant changes to your website

A WordPress backup scheduler is a tool or feature that automatically creates backups of your website at intervals you choose.

Instead of logging into WordPress every Friday and clicking a backup button, you can tell your backup solution to do it automatically. Depending on the tool, you might be able to schedule backups hourly, every few hours, daily, weekly or monthly.

The important distinction is between taking a backup and scheduling a backup.

A manual backup happens when you deliberately start the process. A scheduled backup is triggered automatically according to a predefined schedule.

For most WordPress sites, I recommend:

• Scheduled backups for routine protection
• Manual backups before significant changes
• Automatic backups before an update

That second point matters. If I were about to change a theme, install a major plugin, update PHP or make substantial code changes, I would still take a fresh backup immediately beforehand. An automatic backup that ran yesterday is useful, but a backup from five minutes before a risky change is much better.

Before choosing a backup schedule, it helps to understand what you are actually backing up.

WordPress backups generally have two main components:

1. Your website files
2. Your WordPress database

WordPress itself describes these as separate parts of a complete backup. Your files and database are stored separately, so backing up one does not automatically mean you have backed up the other.

Your files include things such as:

• WordPress core files
• Plugins
• Themes
• Images and other uploaded media
• Custom code
• Configuration files
• Other files stored within your WordPress installation

Your wp-content directory is particularly important because it normally contains your themes, plugins and uploaded media.

Your database contains much of the information that makes your website dynamic.

This can include:

• Posts
• Pages
• Comments
• Users
• Website settings
• Plugin data
• WooCommerce orders and related information
• Other content created or stored by plugins

This is why I don’t recommend thinking of a database backup as an optional extra. If your database disappears, having your theme and image files won’t magically bring your posts and settings back.

WordPress’s own documentation recommends backing up the database regularly and before upgrades.

There isn’t one perfect backup schedule for every website. The easiest way to choose one is to ask yourself:

How much recent data could I afford to lose?

A useful starting point looks like this:

These are starting points rather than hard rules.

Your hosting resources, database size, storage capacity and recovery requirements should also influence the schedule.

I’ve covered this in more detail in our guide to how often you should back up your WordPress site, including a more detailed backup frequency matrix.

One of the easiest ways to make your backup strategy more efficient is to stop treating every part of your website as if it changes at the same rate.

Consider a blog: You might upload a new image or install a plugin once a week, but your database could change every day because of new posts, comments, contact form submissions or other activity. Your files may therefore not need to be backed up as frequently as your database.

For example, you could use:

• Files: weekly
• Database: daily

For a busier website, you might choose:

• Files: daily
• Database: every four hours

This way you can protect frequently changing data without unnecessarily creating large file backups several times a day.

For this example, I’ll use UpdraftPlus because it provides scheduled backups directly from the WordPress dashboard.

UpdraftPlus can back up your WordPress files and database and lets you schedule them at regular intervals. The available scheduling options include intervals such as every few hours as well as daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly schedules.

Step 1: Install and activate UpdraftPlus
From your WordPress dashboard:

1. Go to Plugins > Add New Plugin
2. Search for UpdraftPlus
3. Find UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup & Migration Plugin

4. Click Install Now
5. Click Activate

Once activated, you can access the plugin’s backup and settings controls from your WordPress dashboard.

Step 2: Open the UpdraftPlus settings
Go to:

• Settings > UpdraftPlus Backups

• Then open the Settings tab.

This is where you’ll find the controls for your backup schedule, retention and remote storage.

• Look for Files backup schedule and change the setting from Manual to your preferred backup frequency.

You’ll be able to choose how frequently UpdraftPlus should create a file backup.

For a relatively quiet website, weekly may be enough. For a site where plugins, themes or media are changing regularly, you may want to increase the frequency.

Don’t automatically choose the most frequent option just because it sounds safest.

More backups mean:

• More storage consumption
• More server resources used
• More data that needs to be transferred
• Potentially longer backup operations

The goal is to choose a schedule that reflects how often your site changes and how much data you could afford to lose.

Step 4: Choose your database backup schedule

Next, find Database backup schedule.

This can be different from your file backup schedule.

For example, I might use:

• Files: Weekly
• Database: Daily

You’ll also see retention settings for scheduled backups.

Retention determines how many previous backups you keep before older copies are removed.

For example, if you create one database backup every day and retain seven scheduled backups, you would generally have about a week’s worth of scheduled database backups available.

Retention is important because automatic backups can otherwise consume your storage indefinitely.

I recommend thinking about retention in terms of recovery history, not simply the largest number you can store.

You might decide that you want:

• 7 daily database backups
• 4 weekly file backups
• Additional longer-term backups for important sites

The right number depends on how much storage you have and how far back you may realistically need to restore.

Don’t rely entirely on backups stored on the same server as your live website. If that server is compromised, damaged or becomes unavailable, your live website and your backup could disappear together.

UpdraftPlus supports several remote storage options, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3 and other storage services. Premium adds additional destinations and the ability to use multiple remote storage locations.

Once you’ve selected:

• File frequency
• Database frequency
• Retention
• Remote storage
• Files to include

scroll down and click Save Changes.

Your scheduled backup system is now configured.

Creating a backup can use additional server resources, particularly on larger websites. Scheduling backups during quieter periods can help reduce the impact on site performance and leave more server resources available when traffic is higher.

With the free version of UpdraftPlus, you can schedule backups at regular intervals, such as every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, as well as daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. However, you can’t choose a specific time of day for the backup to start.

For busier websites, having more control over timing can be useful. Running backups during periods of lower traffic can help reduce the impact on server resources while visitors are using your site.

UpdraftPlus Premium gives you more control over when scheduled backups begin by allowing you to choose a specific time of day.

For example, you could schedule backups to start overnight or during another period when your website typically receives less traffic. If you manage multiple websites on the same server, you can also stagger backup times to help spread the load rather than running several backups at once.

As your website grows, your backups may grow with it. Larger backups can require more storage space and server resources, so it can be useful to have more control over how backups are created and retained.

UpdraftPlus Premium includes two features that can help with this: advanced backup retention rules and incremental backups.

Advanced retention rules

While the free version lets you keep a set number of recent backups, Premium allows for advanced retention rules. You can configure the software to keep daily backups for the past week, weekly backups for the past month and monthly backups for the past year. This gives you a longer history of restore points without needing to retain every daily backup indefinitely.  This will be important if your site is hacked and it has taken you a while to notice.  You will want to restore a backup before the hack.

Incremental backups

Creating a full backup of all your website files every time can use significant storage space and server resources. With incremental backups, UpdraftPlus Premium can back up files that have changed since the previous full backup rather than creating another complete copy of your files.

This can reduce the server resources and storage space required for frequent backups, making it particularly useful for larger or frequently updated websites.

WordPress uses a scheduling system called WP-Cron to handle scheduled tasks. Unlike a traditional system cron, WP-Cron is triggered by activity on your website and checks whether any scheduled tasks are due to run.

For websites receiving regular traffic, this is often sufficient for routine scheduled tasks such as backups.

The limitations of default WP-Cron

One limitation of WP-Cron is that scheduled tasks may not run at precisely the time they’re due if your website receives little or no traffic around that time.

For example, if a backup is scheduled overnight but nobody visits the site for several hours, the task may be delayed until WP-Cron is triggered again. This is worth considering if running backups at a particular time is important for your website.

Setting up a server cron for more reliable scheduling

If reliable timing is particularly important, you can use a server-level cron job instead of relying solely on WP-Cron. Server cron jobs run independently of website visits, making them useful for sites where scheduled tasks need to run consistently even during periods of low traffic.

Setting up a server cron is more technical, so if you’re unsure how to configure one, check your hosting provider’s documentation or ask your host for support.

I strongly recommend following the basic principle behind the 3-2-1 backup strategy:

• Keep at least three copies of your important data
• Use at least two different storage locations or types
• Keep at least one copy offsite

This is one of the most overlooked parts of backup planning. Seeing a backup listed in your dashboard isn’t the same thing as proving that you can restore your website from it.

After setting up your schedule, I recommend checking:

• Did the scheduled backup actually run?
• Were both files and database included?
• Was the backup uploaded to remote storage?
• Does the backup log show errors or warnings?
• Can the backup be downloaded?
• Can you restore it successfully?

For important websites, a restoration test is especially valuable.

You don’t want your first restoration attempt to happen when your live website is already down.

If you want to learn more, our guide to restoring WordPress from a backup covers the restoration process in more detail.

I’ve seen a few mistakes come up repeatedly when people set up automated backups.

Your database is important, but it isn’t your entire website. A database backup doesn’t contain your themes, plugins and uploaded files. For a full website recovery, you generally need both files and database backups.

The opposite mistake is just as problematic. Your WordPress directory doesn’t contain the database that stores your posts, pages, comments and other dynamic information.

This creates a single point of failure. If the server goes down or an attacker gains access to it, your backups may be affected too.

Automation is useful because you don’t have to remember to run the backup. But that doesn’t mean you should never check it. I recommend occasionally looking at your backup history and confirming that recent backups exist and completed successfully.

If you keep only one backup and that backup is damaged or contains a problem that you didn’t notice immediately, you may have no clean recovery point. Retention should give you enough history to recover from the kinds of problems your website is likely to encounter.

The opposite can also happen. Keeping hundreds of large backups can consume storage and make managing your backup collection unnecessarily expensive. Choose retention limits carefully

A backup that cannot be restored isn’t much use when you are facing an outage. Make restoration testing part of your maintenance routine, particularly for business-critical websites.

Don’t ignore backup warnings or errors. If you have email reporting enabled, review any notifications you receive and periodically check your UpdraftPlus backup logs.

A failed backup or remote storage connection could mean that your latest recovery copy hasn’t been created or stored where expected, so it’s worth investigating any errors promptly.

Before considering your backup system finished, I’d check the following:

☐ Both website files and database are included

☐ Your backup frequency matches how often your website changes

☐ Database backups are frequent enough for your site’s activity

☐ A sensible number of backup copies are retained

☐ Backups are stored somewhere separate from the live website

☐ Your first scheduled backup has completed successfully

☐ Backup logs show no unresolved errors

☐ You know where your backups are stored

☐ You know how to restore a backup

☐ You have tested a restoration or recovery process

☐ You create an additional backup before major changes

Scheduling your WordPress backups removes the need to remember to create them manually and helps make sure you always have a recent recovery point available if something goes wrong.

The right schedule depends on how often your website changes. For many sites, that could mean backing up files weekly and the database daily, while busy ecommerce or membership sites may need more frequent backups.

With UpdraftPlus, you can schedule your files and database separately, choose how many backups to retain and send them to remote storage automatically. UpdraftPlus Premium adds more control with features such as backups at specific times, incremental backups, advanced retention rules and multiple storage destinations.

Whichever schedule you choose, check that your backups are completing successfully and test your restoration process periodically. A backup strategy is only useful if you can rely on it when you need to recover your site.