In mid-2011, David Anderson came across Updraft, a free backup plugin first released back in 2010 by a guy called Paul Kehrer. Impressed with its ease of use and ability to restore files, David began using it, tweaking and updating it with new code along the way. Keen to share the improvements he’d made with others, David got in touch with Paul.

Paul responded positively: “A patch like this sounds pretty fantastic and I’d love for someone with more time/energy to take over Updraft if you’re still interested.”

And so it began.

Released in August 2011, UpdraftPlus 0.1 was clean, updated (to work with WordPress 3.2), and had a new encryption feature for backups.

The more changes David made, the more positive feedback he received from users, who spurred him on to continue the good work.

When users started to say things like “I’d pay for a version with this-or-that in it”, David developed paid add-ons, and UpdraftPlus became a commercial enterprise. Officially registered in January 2013, updraftplus.com launched soon after.

Our first logo, from the days before the professionals came on board… produced after a quick bit of tinkering in an effects wizard!

UpdraftPlus became a full-time project for David. Tens of thousands of downloads turned into hundreds of thousands and Joe Miles came on board as Director of Business Strategy, along with other full-time employees and accountants.

UpdraftPlus started to overtake established players. Today, it’s WordPress’s most popular backup plugin, with over three million active installs, which puts us in the top 20 most popular WordPress plugins in the world.

We’ve also maintained a top star rating (4.8 out of 5). Our reputation is extremely important to us, and we work hard to maintain high standards, develop new functionality and improved user experience.

We offer our users the highest number of cloud storage providers. We’ve also developed our own cloud storage, UpdraftVault, which is backed behind the scenes by the power and reliability of Amazon’s market-leading computing services. In October 2016, we released UpdraftCentral, a powerful remote control for WordPress that allows users to backup, restore and migrate multiple websites from a single dashboard.

We’ve also started to expand our plugin portfolio through acquisition. As David says; “we have a great and growing team, a lot of experience in the internals of WordPress and a lot of users who trust and depend on us. There’s plenty of opportunities for us to expand.”

At the end of 2016, we acquired the popular and highly-rated database clean-up plugin, WP-Optimize, which helps websites to run at optimal efficiency without the need for manual requests. At the start of 2018, we acquired Easy Updates Manager. It’s a neat little plugin that allows users to customise automatic updates on individual aspects of WordPress core, themes, plugins, browsers and translations. Read about more of our plugins below.

Want to join us? Check out our vacancies here or Email Us.