SitesSaver – WordPress Backup & Migration Plugin

SitesSaver – a free, open-source WordPress plugin I designed and built for full-site backup, one-drag restore and domain migration, with no file size cap, no restore paywall and no migration upsell.

SitesSaver is a WordPress plugin I designed, built and still maintain myself. It copies an entire site, database plus every file, into a single ZIP, puts it back by dragging that ZIP into wp-admin, and moves a site to a new domain with every URL rewritten, including the ones hidden inside serialized data.

Why I built it

After fifteen years of building and maintaining client websites, I kept hitting the same wall with backup plugins: the free version caps the file size, locks restore behind a licence, or keeps migration as a paid upsell. That is exactly the moment a site owner can least afford friction, when a site is broken or has to move today. So I built the tool I wanted for my own clients and made the whole thing free: full backup, full restore, scheduling and migration, with no artificial limits.

It is made for anyone who looks after WordPress sites and needs a backup they can actually restore: business owners running their own site, freelancers, and small agencies managing sites for clients.

What it does

• One-click full backup – database and all files in one ZIP, processed in chunks so large sites have no size ceiling.
• Restore by drag and drop – onto the same site or onto a fresh WordPress install.
• Domain migration – URLs rewritten everywhere, including nested serialized arrays where a plain find-and-replace corrupts data.
• Scheduled backups – hourly through monthly, several frequencies at once on independent timers, plus a private trigger URL for real server cron when WP-Cron is unreliable or disabled.
• Incremental backups – scheduled runs store only what changed since the last full backup, while every restore point still restores the complete site.
• Google Drive – automatic off-site copies, resumable uploads for multi-gigabyte archives, and restore straight from Drive.
• Background exports – large backups run in a server-side worker, so host request timeouts can no longer kill them halfway.
• Backup manager, retention and branded email reports – label, download and prune backups, and get a clear report that tells a failed backup apart from a failed upload.

How it was built

SitesSaver is written in plain PHP 8.1 on WordPress APIs, with no build step and no third-party runtime. It updates itself from GitHub releases like any other plugin in the WordPress Plugins screen. The riskiest parts of a backup tool, the SQL splitter, serialized-data rewriting and incremental restore chains, are covered by automated tests, including an end-to-end test that replays a backup chain and checks the restored site matches byte for byte. I also designed and built its product website, sitessaver.com, which pulls the latest version and changelog from GitHub automatically.

Need something like this for your business?

If you need a custom WordPress plugin, an internal tool, or a feature no off-the-shelf plugin gets quite right, this is the kind of work I do: understand the real problem first, build it properly, test it, and keep it maintained. Tell me what you need, or read the SitesSaver source on GitHub.

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