Must have for updraft – cuts backup sizes in half – at least.

I was attempting to reduce my sites backup sizes, to ease day to day administration, and from a sustainability perspective. All data transfers and hot storage uses energy – there is a carbon footprint to those backups.

Excluding themes and plugins that I might as well get from www.remarpro.com in a rare restore situation, helped a lot. But those many WordPress image variants were a real eyesore. Even with a lean theme, there is at least 6 different variants/thumbnails of each image.

Exclude Image Thumbnails From UpdraftPlus Backups did away with those images unnecessary in the backup, making it so much smaller, faster to backup and friendlier to the enviroment.

Bonus tip: I chose to exclude all webp images from the backup as well. Those are in my case generated from the original jpg or png images, for even speedier load times. I would be able to re-generate those easily if restoring my site. Obviously you shouldn’t exclude webp if you upload these manually to the media library…

Highly recommended.