UpdraftPlus 1.9.19 – our latest and greatest – is in the process of being released. You should see it in your dashboard shortly.

This is a low-impact update, and we recommend it to all. It contains a laundry list of minor tweaks for efficiency, performance, and coping with all the strange quirks that are found out there in real-world WordPress setups, the temperamental behaviour of real-world networks and the troubles of over-sold, under-resourced web hosting setups. We see all those dodgy servers out there as a challenge. The algorithms in the UpdraftPlus backup engine are very strong, and this set of minor tweaks will bring out even better performance from it.

Key changes

• It has been tested and is compatible with the upcoming WordPress 4.o.
• We’ve re-organised a lot of the code, to make sure that if UpdraftPlus is not backing up, then it has absolutely minimal performance impact. WordPress plugins are invoked by WordPress on every page load, and even if they have nothing to do, then all their code usually gets checked by the PHP engine for syntactical correctness. (PHP is the programming language that WordPress, and hence all its plugins, is written in). This is very quick, but every little helps. So, we’ve re-organised UpdraftPlus so that none of its code needs to even get checked unless it’s backing up. (Use the very handy third-party P3 Profiler plugin on your site to check which plugins are having a performance impact).
• If you create a file with the name .donotbackup in any directory, then that folder will not get backed up. This is useful for preventing unnecessary data from being backed-up without needing to go into the UpdraftPlus settings. Developers especially may find this handy.
• Translations have been updated: Hungarian, Swedish, Russian, Brazilian (Portuguese), Spanish, Czeck, Dutch, Turkish and German. Thanks very much to our excellent team. If UpdraftPlus is not yet available in your mother tongue and you’d like to translate, then please do let us know!

As we say – a recommended update for all. We’re confident it’s the best UpdraftPlus yet. Not yet got UpdraftPlus Premium, our flagship product? Please do take a look at it. As WordPress 4.0 is about to arrive, it’s a great time to get sorted out.