In this post I want to look at a new backup and migration plugin called WPVivid. In the past, to move a website from development to live, or back from live to development, I’ve used BackupBuddy, UpDraft Plus, and All in One WP Migration. UpDraft Plus and All in One WP Migration both work well, however, one of the things that makes WPVivid stand apart from those is that the migration function is included in the free version of the plugin. With UpDraft Plus you either have to purchase the premium version of the plugin or the migration extension. With All in One WP Migration you pretty much have to purchase one of the extensions if your site is any size at all.
Overview
So I thought I’d do a walk-through of WPVivid so you could get a sense of if it might fit into your work flow. You can watch the video or follow along with the steps below. Before I do the walk-through, I want to give a hat tip to Adam Preiser who shared a Dubb review in his Facebook group where he gave the plugin author some feedback. So, I learned of the plugin from Adam.
This is the plugin page on the WordPress.org plugin directory.
As you can see, the plugin is quite new, with only 300+ installs. However, it has 12 five star reviews and the author has been actively responding to support requests.
The plugin currently supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, SFTP, and FTP backup locations. Not bad for a free plugin.
Migration Walk-Through
You need to install the plugin on both sites for the migration. I have here a site on the Internet that has a pre-designed home page and a blog page.
Home Page
Blog Page
Looking at the installed plugins, you can see that there are a number installed, some that are activated and a few that are not.
I go ahead and install and activate the plugin in the usual manner by typing “WPVivid” into the search box. Once it is activated we are taken to the plugin screen.
As you can see, there are sub-menus on the left admin menu bar. These are reflected in the tabs across the top of the page.
The functions on the tabs is pretty straightforward, in that you specify your backup location on the “Remote Storage” tab and the backup schedule on the “Schedule” tab. Two tabs whose use may not be as obvious are the “Key” tab and the “Auto Migration” tab. These two areas are used for direct site-to-site migration over the Internet. On the Key tab you create a long key on the source site and paste that into the “Auto Migration” tab on the destination site. The key has a short lifespan and it ensures that the transfer is authorized.
In the scenario I’m testing, using a local development site, the direct migration isn’t possible, so we have to create a backup, download it, and upload it to the destination. To create a backup, click the big blue “Backup” button.
Once the backup is created, there will be an admin notice at the top of the page and at the bottom you will see the backup listed in the backups section.
We need to download the backup from our source site, so click on the “Download” link. That will show the file or files that need to be downloaded. There could be more than one file if you specify in the settings to break the backup into chunks for hosts that have a size limit.
As you can see, the download has the plugin name and date, but it would be nice if it also had the site name.
Here is a screenshot of the target of the migration, a new local site. It is fairly vanilla, though it has the Astra theme and Elementor installed.
Again, I install and active the WPVivid plugin on the new local site, but this time, I click on the “Upload” tab at the bottom to select the backup we previously made.
Once the upload completes, go back to the “Backup” tab and you should see the uploaded file. Click on the “Restore” link to kickoff the restore process.
You will go to a restore dialog. Click the option to replace the domain URL since we are doing a migration. Once you click the blue “Restore” button, a log output on the activity will show in the box below.
Finally, when it is done you will get a popup notice. They you will need to login again (using the login credentials from the source site). You should now see the migrated site with the correct plugins activated.
One thing I checked after the migration, was that I downloaded and installed the “Better Search and Replace” plugin from the WordPress.org plugin directory. It has its menu off the Tools menu. I searched to see if all of the URLs had been changed. I found a number that had not. Checking in the database I see that most of them are for log files, so that doesn’t matter. I mention this however because I always do this check when migrating a site and use the tool to make sure all of the URLs have been updated.
Conclusion
I was pleased with how the WPVivid plugin worked. Although it is new and will need to prove itself over time, it looks like a good, free, alternative to the UpDraft Plus and All in One WP Migration plugins. I intend to keep testing it out.
I hope this article was useful to help you evaluate if the WPVivid plugin might be something you could use.
