Inside the Feature: Why Real-Time Backups Are a Big Deal

Losing your work is a thing of the past with our built-in real-time backups and one-click restores.

Jeremy Anderberg

Let’s be honest, new and shiny features get most of the attention around here. It makes sense: New stuff is exciting! But WordPress.com has plenty of baked-in features that are worth talking about too.

Losing your work is one of the most frustrating things you can experience as a website owner. When you choose WordPress.com, you never have to worry about that again. Today, let’s chat about backups, which are powered by Jetpack (Automattic’s own suite of security, performance, and growth tools).

Real-time backups and one-click restores

With Jetpack VaultPress Backup, every single change to your site is captured in real-time. We also back up your site at a consistent time each day as a failsafe.

Our backups happen in real-time, making restoring your site to a previous state as easy as finding a cute dog on the internet.

Let’s look closer at how this feature can benefit you and your site(s).

Manually backing up a website is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task, not to mention a bit daunting on a technical level.

We’ve removed all that hassle by doing the work for you behind the scenes.

Even better, we house redundant copies of your backups on multiple servers around the world, so your data is always secure and accessible.

Version control, but for your website

With the Activity Log, you can quickly see every site change at a glance, letting you know exactly what action (and which user!) broke the site.

Our one-click restores allow you to quickly recover a site from any point in time: Simply find when the problem occurred, click “Restore,” verify that you want to revert your site to a previous state, and in as little a few minutes’ time, you’ll be back up and running.

If you’re running an online store, you know that orders can come in at any time. It goes without saying that you need a backup system to keep your order and customer data safe. There are times when daily or even hourly backups simply don’t cut it.

If you’re running WooCommerce on your site, you can reinstate your store to any previous iteration, while keeping all orders and products current.

Losing your work is a thing of the past

Our automated backups save everything for you: posts, files, databases, themes, plugins . . . all of it. Should your site crash for any reason — an incompatible plugin or theme, for instance — rest assured that it can be easily restored in just minutes.

Whether you’re running a business or spending hours perfecting your site as a hobbyist, our state-of-the-art technology provides the peace of mind that you’ll never miss a sale or lose content again.

Learn more about our real-time backups

Real-time backups and one-click restores are available on Business and Commerce sites.

Missing out on the latest WordPress.com developments? Enter your email below to receive future announcements direct to your inbox. An email confirmation will be sent before you will start receiving notifications - please check your spam folder if you don't receive this.

Join 99,604,521 other subscribers

I am a blogger less than a year using WordPress. I keep getting notified to shift to jetpack sighting it’s more palatable. Educate me to get a comprehensive understanding

We’ll be streamlining the WordPress app you use now to focus on the writing and publishing basics only. It won’t include stats, and other features that are specific to Jetpack. The good news is that the Jetpack app will offer both pieces of functionality. It will offer full control of your WordPress site (same as you enjoy now) with no changes. If you stick with the WordPress app though, you are likely to see some features removed as it is simplified.

If you want to keep using the app as you do now we recommend switching to the Jetpack app, which works exactly the same and has the full functionality you are used to

Ok, I have multiple sites with different WordPress logins… the JetPack app only offer login to one account at the time? I want to be able manage everything by simply switching accounts within the app.

Hey there, it sounds like you may have multiple accounts that could be merged perhaps. This is possible to do, so please reach out to us here, so that we can guide you through that process.

Thanks but I don’t want to merge accounts, I want to keep separated yet use the app to manage multiple sites under 2-3 accounts. A lot of other apps allows us to do that, but not JetPack, which is to bad and keeps me away for paying for JetPack services otherwise I would consider. I wish there was switch accounts option on the app. So I can stay logged in and switch between them.

Thanks for the insight Jerry. I love using the jetpack app

Is this a feature for paid-for websites or is it available to all bloggers? Presumably you don’t have to have a smartphone and ‘apps’ to use it if so?

Hey there, it’s available to all, but in order to access back ups, the site on WordPress.com would need to be on the business plan or higher.

Okay thanks – mine’s just a hobby blog so I’m not on any of the paid plans. I use the normal backup function in ‘Tools’ so I’m hoping that will suffice. Thanks for your help

Thank you! I really, really appreciate this because, heaven knows, I’m usually in Octopus Mode and have the propensity of clicking on the wrong button as in, “Oh, nooo!!! What have I done?!!”

I wish that the minimum level of WordPress Plan required for a feature was noted in posts like these! This feature requires Jetpack VaultPress plugin, but that is not stated anywhere!

Hello there 👋,

Thank you for the feedback. We can consider this for future posts.

Our plans and included features can be found at https://wordpress.com/pricing. On WordPress.com, the Business plan is required to get real-time backups.

Is this facility available on a free WordPress blog also or do I need to take manual backup?

Hey there, this is available on WordPress.com – and would need the business plan or higher in order to activate this section. Is this something you’re interested in utilising?

I love love Jetpack 😍❤️