Most backup plugins fail on the same thing: a big site on a small server. WP Smart Backup is built around that problem — the database is streamed row by row, files are walked in batches, and everything runs on a background queue that survives a 30-second PHP timeout. Close the tab. The job keeps going.
No account needed to back up and restore. No licence key. No phone-home.
No feature below is a mock-up. Every one of them is in the shipping plugin — the free tag and the Pro tag tell you which plan it lives in.
Full site, database only, or files only — at any size, with no cap and no upsell. A 10 GB site works exactly like a 100 MB one. It just takes longer.
Any snapshot this site created can be restored at any size, free, permanently. Paywalling disaster recovery would mean locking you out of your own data. We won't do it.
A database snapshot is taken automatically before every restore. If the restore fails — or you change your mind halfway — one click puts the database back exactly as it was.
Stop a running job mid-flight and pick it up exactly where it stopped — for both backup and restore. Nothing is thrown away and nothing has to start over.
Moving a site rewrites URLs inside serialized data too, so widget settings, ACF fields and page-builder layouts survive the move instead of collapsing into broken arrays.
One page shows which engine is running, queue health, free disk space and a live write probe on the storage folder. Every restore is logged with a 7-day success rate.
Daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom cron rule — with a retention policy and full run history. Includes a setup URL for an external cron service, because WordPress cron alone drifts on quiet sites.
OAuth 2.0 with your own app credentials, so archives go straight from your server to your own cloud account. Resumable chunked uploads, and restore directly from the cloud.
Issue a one-time signed token on the source site, paste it on the destination, and walk away. The pull finishes on its own — even on hosts with no reliable cron.
Seal every archive with a master password before it leaves your server. Authenticated encryption, so a tampered archive is detected rather than quietly restored.
Captures every order the moment it happens, outside the snapshot. Restoring an older backup replays the orders placed since — so a rollback never drops revenue.
Get told when a job succeeds or fails, with quiet hours so a 3 a.m. backup doesn't wake anyone up. Configured per event, not all-or-nothing.
A $3/month shared host and a dedicated VPS need completely different strategies. Instead of shipping one compromise, WP Smart Backup ships both and picks at runtime.
Built for the 64 MB shared host with a 30-second execution limit that most backup plugins quietly give up on.
When the server actually has resources, the plugin uses them instead of pretending it's still 2015.
You never pick one. The plugin inspects the server on every run and decides. Move to a faster host and it upgrades itself — no settings to revisit.
Here's the scenario every store owner eventually hits. You restore last night's backup to fix a broken plugin update. It works — and it also erases every order placed since that backup ran. Real customers, real money, gone.
The order journal exists because a snapshot is the wrong tool for data that keeps arriving. Orders are captured continuously and stored outside the snapshot, so a rollback restores your site without rolling back your revenue.
Not on a schedule, not on the next backup run — the moment the order is placed. HPOS and legacy order storage are both supported.
Which is exactly why it survives a restore. The dashboard shows total entries and how many are not yet synced off-site.
Restore the older backup, then replay the orders placed since. The site goes back; the revenue stays.
Sync the journal to your connected cloud destination, encrypted, so it survives losing the server itself.
Connect Google Drive or Dropbox with your own OAuth app, so archives travel from your server straight to storage you already own. Nothing passes through us, and there is no vendor account holding a copy of your site.
Enable the API, create an OAuth client, paste the credentials once. After that every scheduled backup uploads on its own.
A large archive survives a dropped connection instead of restarting from zero on a flaky line.
Not just upload. Pull an archive back down and restore it without touching your local disk first.
Every request and response is logged in plain language, so a failed upload is something you can read rather than guess at.
It's a complete backup and restore tool with no size limit anywhere it matters. Pro is for people who need automation, off-site copies and store protection.
| Capability | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Backup size limit | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Restore your own snapshots | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Import an archive from another site | Up to 1 GB | Unlimited |
| Full site / database only / files only | Yes | Yes |
| Pause, resume and cancel | Yes | Yes |
| Rollback guard before every restore | Yes | Yes |
| Adaptive Dual-Core engine | Yes | Yes |
| Diagnostics & restore history | Yes | Yes |
| Email & Slack notifications | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled automatic backups | — | Yes |
| Google Drive & Dropbox destinations | — | Yes |
| Token-based site migration | — | Yes |
| AES-256-GCM archive encryption | — | Yes |
| WooCommerce order journal & replay | — | Yes |
Every plan includes the complete Pro feature set. The only difference is how many sites you can activate it on.
An annual licence never switches a feature off. When it expires you keep every Pro feature you paid for — you stop receiving updates and support until you renew. More on that →
Lifetime pricing is available during launch only. Once the launch window closes it is removed for new customers — existing lifetime licences are unaffected.
The free version backs up your entire site at any size and restores it at any size, permanently, with no account and no licence key. Try it on your worst, slowest, biggest site — that's the one it was built for.
If yours isn't here, ask in the comments on either video and it will get answered.
Yes — they are planned for a future version. Version 1.0 ships with Google Drive and Dropbox, and we would rather support two providers properly than five badly.
Amazon S3 (and S3-compatible storage such as Wasabi, Backblaze B2 and DigitalOcean Spaces) and Microsoft OneDrive are both on the roadmap for a following release. The cloud layer was written as a driver system from day one specifically so new providers slot in without touching the backup engine — an S3 driver is a new file, not a rewrite.
Existing Pro licences will get those providers as a normal update. You will not be asked to pay again for them.
Correct. Backups are unlimited, and restoring a snapshot this site created is unlimited too — free, permanently.
The one limit is importing an archive from a different site, which is the migration workflow. That is capped at 1 GB on free, which is twice what the most popular alternative allows. Pro removes the cap.
Because your archive is in our own .wsb format and no other tool can open it. Charging you to read it back would mean locking you out of your own data at the exact moment you're in trouble.
We would rather sell you automation, off-site storage and store protection — things that genuinely cost us something to run — than sell you access to a file you already own.
That is exactly what it was designed for. Every step is pure PHP — no exec, no shell access, no assumptions about what the host allows.
Work is chunked so no single request runs long enough to hit a 30-second timeout, and a restore keeps advancing even after the database import has temporarily broken the REST API. On PHP 7.4 the Standard engine uses small sequential chunks tuned for a 64 MB memory ceiling.
The rollback guard takes a database snapshot before every restore begins. If the restore fails, or you cancel it, you can revert to the pre-restore state from the Restore History panel.
Files already written stay on disk, but the database — the part that actually breaks a site — is fully recoverable.
No. There is no telemetry, no phone-home and no analytics on your site's data. The free version makes no external HTTP requests at all.
Cloud storage does talk to Google or Dropbox — but only in Pro, only after you connect an account yourself, and using your OAuth credentials. Backups are written to /wp-content/uploads/wp-smart-backup/ behind an .htaccess rule that blocks direct web access.
Yes. Download the snapshot from the source site and import it on the destination — free up to 1 GB. The URL remapper is serialization-aware, so widget settings, ACF fields and page-builder data survive intact rather than turning into broken arrays.
For larger sites, or to skip the manual download entirely, Pro adds a one-time signed token: issue it on the source, paste it on the destination, and the pull finishes on its own.
No. Install it, activate it, run a backup. There is no registration wall, no email capture and no key to paste in before it will do its job.
You don't have to — but on a quiet site you probably should. WordPress only runs scheduled jobs when someone visits the site, so on a low-traffic site backups drift or never fire at all. That is a WordPress limitation, not a plugin one.
The Schedule page gives you a ready-made setup URL to paste into any free external cron service. It takes about a minute, and after that your 3 a.m. backup actually runs at 3 a.m.
Not yet. Version 1.x is REST API and admin UI only. WP-CLI is a frequent request and is on the roadmap.
Every Pro feature you paid for keeps working — permanently. Scheduling, Google Drive and Dropbox uploads, token migration, WooCommerce order protection and unlimited imports all stay switched on after the licence expires. Nothing is disabled, nothing is downgraded, and no feature quietly stops on the renewal date.
What a lapsed licence does stop is the two things that cost us money to keep providing:
So a licence buys you a year of improvements and help, not a year of permission to run the software. Renew when the next release is worth it to you, not because your site is about to lose a feature.
And your archives are yours regardless — existing snapshots stay on disk, and backup and restore are free features that never expire in any case.
The big, slow, neglected one on the cheap host that every other backup plugin has already timed out on. That's the site it was built for.
