Back Up and Restore Your Website

Jetpack VaultPress Backup automatically saves every change and helps you get back online quickly with one‑click restores. This guide will show you how to access your site’s backups and restore your website to any previous point in time.

This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans, and the legacy Pro plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.

Backups are powered by Jetpack VaultPress Backup and included in eligible plans. Once you activate your plan, backups start automatically. As a site owner, you don’t need to worry about backing up your site manually or installing extra plugins — we take care of it for you.

Backups are saved at least once per day, typically 24 hours after the previous backup. If many changes are being made to the site, backups can also occur multiple times in a single day.

We back up the following data:

• Your pages, posts, media files, followers, and other content in your wp-content folder.
• Your installed themes and plugins.
• Your site’s root-level WordPress files.
• Your site’s WordPress database. Specifically, any tables that begin with your WordPress table prefix and have a unique or primary key.

The following data is not backed up:

• The core files of WordPress, which are managed for you by WordPress.com.
• Files outside the directories listed above.
• Database tables that don’t look like they belong to WordPress or whose rows have no unique identifier.
• Cache and backup directories.
• Additional WordPress installs, such as ones that are included inside a subdirectory.

As long as a site has an eligible plan, you can restore a backup as far back as 6 months. If your plan expires, backups are kept for 30 days after expiry.

Click on the Actions button in the top right corner of a backup, where you will find the following options:

If you see the “Download backup” option but not the “Restore to this point” option, you will want to ensure that Jetpack is connected and your hosting plan has not expired.

Backups are a great tool to use if:

• You are missing content or wish to undo a change that cannot be restored via post and page revisions.
• You wish to reset your site to a previous point in time (up to six months ago.)
• You’ve installed a plugin or theme that breaks your site. A backup is available, and you know for sure which plugin or theme is responsible.
  • Follow the steps in the Solve Problems With Plugins guide to determine which plugin is causing an error on your site.

With Jetpack Backups’ built-in functionality, you don’t have to upload a backup from your computer to restore your site to a previous point. Instead, you can restore a backup directly in your WordPress.com dashboard.

To restore your WordPress.com site to a previous point in time:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. On the left side, hover your mouse over Jetpack.
3. Select “Backup” (or “VaultPress” if using WP Admin).
4. Use the date options to navigate back to the date and time of the backup you wish to restore.
5. Click the “Restore to this point” button:

6. You’ll then be asked to confirm which parts of the site you’d like to restore. Leave all boxes checked to restore every part of your site to your chosen backup time. Alternatively, you can tick or untick the boxes for the following parts of your site:
   • WordPress themes: This will restore your site’s theme folder to what it was at that point in time. Depending on your third-party theme, this will not necessarily restore a theme’s settings when those settings are saved outside of the theme folder.
   • WordPress plugins: This will restore your site’s plugin folder to what it was at that point in time. Depending on the third-party plugin you are using, this will not necessarily restore a plugin’s settings that may be saved outside of this folder.
   • WordPress root: This will restore WordPress root files related to your site’s configuration, including wp-config.php and any non-WordPress files.
   • WP-content directory: This will restore the wp-content folder and its contents to the state it was in at the time of the backup. Please note that this will not restore the themes, plugins, or media uploads folders, which you can include or exclude separately.
   • Site database: This will restore content for posts, pages, comments, and (depending on the third-party themes and plugins) some plugin and theme settings.
   • Media uploads: This will restore the contents of your media library to what was in there at that point in time. You must also select ‘Site database‘ for restored media uploads to appear.
7. Click the “Confirm restore” button to begin restoring your site. Once the site restoration has been completed, you’ll receive an email notification that your site has been successfully restored.

Please note that backups may take some time to complete, ranging from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the size of your site. You can safely navigate away from the screen while the restore is in progress.

You may need to restore a backup but preserve some content you added or modified after your chosen restore point. Before you begin restoring your site, make a copy of the content.

If the change is small, such as the text of a blog post, copy and paste it into another program on your computer. After the backup has finished restoring, you can add it back to your site.

For large changes to your site’s content, export your site’s content.

If your changes include Media (such as images or video uploads), you must import the content into another WordPress site. You can create a free site in your account for this purpose. Export files do not store media files. They only contain links to media files, which are then uploaded upon importing to another WordPress site.

When you’ve completed the restore on your original site, export the content from the free site and import it into your original site. This will update only the pages and posts that need to be updated, leaving your plugins and other configurations in place.

In most cases, it is not necessary to try to upload a backup file in order to restore your site to a previous version. Before you attempt to upload a backup, follow these steps:

1. Log into your WordPress.com dashboard.
2. Navigate to Jetpack → “Backup” (or “VaultPress” if using WP Admin).
3. Locate the last known good backup of your site using the date options.
4. Click the “Restore to this point” button.

Restoring directly from Jetpack is a much more simple process than uploading a previous backup file (which is more useful for self-hosted WordPress sites).

If it is absolutely necessary to restore a downloaded backup file, you will need to do so manually. If you have an existing .tar.gz file follow the guide to Manually Restore a Backup.

What will happen to my WooCommerce orders if I restore a backup?

We’ve developed Jetpack VaultPress Backup with WooCommerce in mind. You can safely restore your site to any past state — all orders and products will be kept current.

I want to migrate one WordPress.com site to another WordPress.com site. Can I do that with a Jetpack Backup?

This is possible but can be a challenging process. The recommended method for this type of migration is either to:

• Export the content from the source site to XML via Tools → Export, and then import to the destination site
• Use a plugin such as All in One WP Migration to create an export of your source site and then import that content to the destination site.

How do I exclude certain files from being backed up?

You have two options for excluding certain files from being backed up:

• Create a new directory to exclude: You can move files to a new directory called donotbackup. Jetpack VaultPress Backup will know to skip this directory automatically. This is a great way to reduce the storage size of your backups.
• Exclude an existing directory: You can add a file called .donotbackup to any existing directory. Jetpack VaultPress Backup will skip the entire directory that includes the .donotbackup file.