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If you came here for a backup plugin that sends your site to the cloud, install
UpdraftPlus. It is free, has more than 3 million active installations, holds 4.8 out of 5 across 8,636 reviews, is tested against WordPress 7.1, and the free version already backs up to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Rackspace, FTP, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift or email on a schedule you set.
WD Backup, which used to be the obvious free pick here, is gone. It was closed in the WordPress plugin directory on 2 June 2021 and its last release was version 1.0.20. There is nothing to install and nothing to migrate to except a live plugin, so start with UpdraftPlus.
The rest of this page covers the three separate jobs people mean by “WordPress and cloud storage”, because the right plugin depends entirely on which one you are doing: serving files for download, offloading your media library, or taking backups.
1. Serving files for download
This is the job where you want visitors, customers or members to download something, and you would rather not have your web server pushing the bytes.
Download Manager is the mature option. It has more than 100,000 active installations, sits at 4.1 out of 5 across 1,007 reviews, is tested against WordPress 7.1, and is maintained by Shahjada. Cloud storage comes through separate add-ons rather than the core plugin, and the Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive add-ons are free; pCloud is premium. On top of that you get access control, download counters, categorised file lists and a front-end interface, which is more than a raw link ever gives you.
If what you actually want is to embed documents from a Drive account rather than manage downloads,
Embed Files from Google Drive does that. It used to be called Google Drive Embedder, has around 4,000 active installations and 4 out of 5 from 48 reviews, and it requires the free Google Apps Login plugin alongside it. Go in with your eyes open: its last release was about a year ago, it is tested only to WordPress 6.8.8, and WordPress.org flags it as untested against the latest three major releases. Try it on staging first.
Storing documents in the cloud solves one half of the problem; displaying them on the page is the other, and our check of
ten WordPress PDF viewer plugins found two that should no longer be installed.
2. Offloading your media library
Media files usually account for most of a site’s disk usage. Offloading moves them to object storage and serves them from there, which cuts your hosting footprint and puts files closer to your readers.
WP Offload Media Lite is the one to try first. It is maintained by WP Engine, tested against WordPress 7.1, updated frequently, and supports Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces and Google Cloud Storage. Its rating is a modest 3.7 out of 5 across around 30,000 installations, which reflects how fiddly cloud credentials are rather than the plugin misbehaving.
Know the limit before you start. The free version copies
new uploads to your bucket and rewrites the URLs; it will not batch-migrate a media library you already have. Moving thousands of existing files, controlling offloaded media from the library screen, serving CSS and JS from a CDN, and the WooCommerce integration all sit behind the paid version.
WP-Stateless is the choice if you are committed to Google Cloud Storage. It is maintained by UDX, updated within the last few days, tested to WordPress 6.9.7, requires PHP 8.1 or newer, and holds 3.9 out of 5 from 51 reviews across roughly 4,000 installations. It offers four modes, and picking the right one is the whole decision:
Backup copies files up but serves them locally,
CDN copies and serves from Google,
Ephemeral serves from Google with only temporary local copies for processing, and
Stateless keeps nothing locally at all.
Offloading is not the same thing as optimising. If your pages are slow because the images are enormous, moving them to a bucket changes where they are slow from.
Our image optimiser comparison covers the compression and format conversion side.
One name to strike off any older list:
Media Cloud, the imgix-connected media plugin, was closed in the WordPress plugin directory on 20 August 2026 pending review, and its last release was two years earlier. Do not build a media pipeline on it.
3. Backups
Take backups off-site. A backup that lives on the same server as the site is not a backup; it is a second copy waiting to be lost in the same incident.
UpdraftPlus
The default recommendation, and the one to pick if you only read one line of this section. More than 3 million active installations, 4.8 out of 5 from 8,636 reviews, tested against WordPress 7.1, and updated within the last fortnight.
The free version does the things people usually assume are paid: scheduled backups of files and database, separate schedules for each, restore from inside the dashboard, email notification when a run finishes, and remote storage to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 and S3-compatible services, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, OpenStack Swift or plain email. Premium adds OneDrive, Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV and UpdraftVault.
Duplicator
Duplicator is the better tool for moving a site rather than protecting one. It has over a million active installations, an unusually strong 4.9 out of 5 from 4,930 reviews, is tested against WordPress 7.1, requires PHP 7.4 or newer, and was updated within the last week.
Be clear about which version you are reading about, because this is where older roundups mislead. The free plugin in the directory is Duplicator Lite, and it creates backups and migration packages on demand.
Scheduled backups and cloud storage destinations are Duplicator Pro features, along with multisite support. If you want automatic off-site backups without paying, UpdraftPlus free does that and Duplicator free does not.
Choosing between them
Run UpdraftPlus for scheduled off-site backups. Reach for Duplicator when you are cloning a site to a new host or spinning up a staging copy. Plenty of people run both, and they do not conflict.
If you want the wider field, including the paid managed services,
our backup plugin roundup compares them, and
our Dropbox plugin comparison goes deeper on that one destination.
Test the restore
The part almost everyone skips. A backup you have never restored is a hypothesis. Once a quarter, pull your most recent backup down to a staging site and restore it end to end. That exercise finds the broken cron job, the storage quota that filled up and the database export that was silently truncated, at a moment when none of it matters.
