Easily Clone A WordPress Site: Complete Guide

There are many reasons to need an exact replica of your WordPress site.  

Maybe you’re moving your site to a new host, need a backup, or want a test site. You might wonder: can you clone your site without breaking it?

Cloning a site can seem tough. Do you need a developer’s help? What if things go wrong? It’s normal to worry about losing your site’s data when cloning.

Use a migration plugin to move your site to another host without downtime, data loss, or a developer.

The good news is that cloning can be easy with the right tools. You don’t have to be an expert. With our help, you’ll learn how to make a copy of your site safely.

TL;DR: Cloning your site on a new host with a solid migration plugin. Create an exact replica of your site without zero downtime. 

Reasons to clone a WordPress site

Cloning a WordPress site can be very useful. It involves creating a copy of your site for various needs. Let’s dive into why and how you might do this.

• Are you redesigning your site? You want to try out a new look without affecting the live version. 
• Testing changes beforehand means you can make mistakes safely. Your real site stays unchanged while you experiment in a cloned version.
• Moving your site to another host. A clone helps transfer everything smoothly without losing data. 
• If you have a great site design and want to use it again, cloning allows you to make a new site template quickly.
• Cloning a site is perfect for safekeeping. It’s a smart way to back up your entire website. If something goes wrong, you still have a safe copy. 

Whether you are migrating, backing up, or testing, the steps to clone will vary.

Things you need to clone a site

Before you clone your WordPress site, ensure you have everything ready. Having the right tools and access to hand makes the process seamless.

1. First, you need the right plugin. BlogVault is highly recommended for all use cases. It simplifies the cloning process with just a few clicks. It’s user-friendly and doesn’t require technical skills.
2. Next, ensure you have access to your site. This means logging in as an admin. If you can’t access your site, you won’t be able to clone it.
3. Lastly, you need access to the destination. This is where your site’s copy will be saved. This is especially important when moving to a new host.

Duplicate a site to test changes

Using a staging plugin to clone a WordPress site is easier than doing it manually. Plugins save time and effort. 

Here, we use BlogVault, which doesn’t need FTP access. BlogVault’s staging feature lets us create a password-protected clone quickly.

We don’t need to create a subdomain or pay for extra hosting for the clone. BlogVault hosts it on powerful cloud servers. 

Here are the steps:

1. Install and activate the BlogVault plugin on your WordPress site. BlogVault starts backing up your site automatically. 

2. When done, go to the dashboard and under Staging, click Add Staging.

3. Choose the site version and PHP version you want to clone.

4. BlogVault sets up the clone. When complete, it gives us access credentials to the cloned site. Click Visit Staging to see the clone.

Access the cloned site’s dashboard by adding /wp-login.php to the staging site URL. Use the same login details as the live site. 

If changes from the clone need to go live, go to the BlogVault dashboard and click Merge in the Staging section.

Why do we recommend BlogVault?

How easy was that? You see, BlogVault is the best way to clone a WordPress site. Besides being quick and easy to clone a site with BlogVault, here are some other reasons why you may want to choose BlogVault over other methods:

• It automatically prevents Google and other search engines from crawling the cloned site, which would otherwise affect SEO performance due to duplicate content.
• You don’t need to pay for additional hosting. BlogVault will host the cloned site on its own, powerful cloud-based servers.
• SSL support for the cloned site.
• It password-protects your cloned site.
• Many business-critical websites have email sequences that are triggered based on certain events. BlogVault automatically blocks all emails from being sent out from clones of such sites, so you don’t need to worry about unintentional emails.
• Every cloned site gets SFTP access for secure file transfer.
• The cloned site gets phpMyAdmin support, so you can carry out any database operation easily.

Make a copy of a site to move to another host

This method is the simplest and most efficient for moving a WordPress site. It requires minimal technical skills and has a low chance of errors.

1. Install and set up BlogVault on your site, and wait for it to sync.

2. Go to the BlogVault dashboard. Click on Migrate in the Backups section.

3. Enter the destination URL in the provided field and continue.

4. In the Migrate Backup section, enter all the connection details. Click on Continue to complete the migration.

Alternatively, use Migrate Guru, our free WordPress migration plugin. It works seamlessly with over 5,000 web hosts worldwide.

Clone a site for safekeeping

Backup plugins eliminate the need to access cPanel or Plesk for downloading a website copy. They allow you to schedule automatic backups and offer 1-click restores, saving a lot of time and effort. 

This is the easiest and most reliable way to back up a WordPress site.

1. Create an account on BlogVault and add your site. 
2. Choose Automatic Installation and enter your wp-admin credentials. 

That’s it! Your site begins to sync, meaning a WordPress backup is underway. The sync happens in the background, so you can keep working on your site as usual.

Manual WordPress cloning (without a plugin)

You don’t have to use a plugin to clone a WordPress site if you don’t want to. If you’re a DIY person, you can do the cloning yourself. However, note that the manual procedure isn’t as simple, will take a lot of time, and is error-prone. Moreover, unlike using BlogVault, you’ll need a spare domain name and access to a server, either web-based or local, to host the cloned site.

Here are the steps to manually copy a WordPress site:

1. Create a copy of your site files and download it to your computer.
2. Upload the copy to a web server.
3. Export your live site’s database.
4. Set up a database for your site’s clone.
5. Import your live site’s database into the clone’s database.
6. Edit the wp-config.php file

For this section, we use FTP to access WordPress, which is a protocol that defines how files should be transferred over the Internet. To use FTP, you need an FTP client, like FileZilla.

Step 1. Create a copy of your site and download it to your computer

To create a local copy of your live site, you’ll essentially download the WordPress installation directory. This directory is usually public_html or www by default.

1. Connect to your live site in FileZilla using your FTP/SFTP credentials.

2. Navigate to the directory where you want to download the copy of your live site in the left-hand pane labeled Local site.
3. Download the root directory of your live site, where you installed WordPress, to the local directory mentioned in the step above.

Depending on the size of your live site, it will take quite a while for FileZilla to download all your WordPress files and folders. FTP can be agonizingly slow, which is another reason to use BlogVault for cloning instead.

Step 2. Upload the copy to a web server

1. Connect to the web server that will host your site’s clone.
2. Upload the directory that you downloaded in Step 1 to the server’s root directory.

Step 3. Export your live site’s database

To export your live site’s database, you’ll first need to launch the corresponding database manager. The two most common ones are phpMyAdmin and Adminer. We’re using Adminer to illustrate the steps in this section. The steps are essentially the same for phpMyAdmin.

1. Open the Adminer dashboard for your live site. It should look something like this:

2. Click on Export from the left-hand pane.

3. Select ‘save’ as the output, SQL as the data format, and then click on Export.

4. In the pop-up window, give the SQL file a suitable name and download it to your computer.

Step 4. Set up a database for your site’s clone

Every WordPress site needs a database to store its content and settings, and your site’s clone is no exception. In this step of the cloning process, we’ll set up a new database for the clone. We’re using Bluehost. The steps should largely be the same for any other web host.

1. Go to Advanced > Databases from the left-hand navigation menu.

2. Under the section ‘Create New Database,’ provide a name for your new database, then click on Create Database. In this example, we’ve named the database ‘mybhsite_home_for_new_database.’

3. Now, we’re going to add a new database user for our account. Scroll down to ‘Add New User’ under ‘MySQL Users.’ Choose a username and a strong password for this user, then click on Create User to finish.

4. Now, add the user you created in Step 3 to the database you created in Step 2 as shown in the image below.

5. On the next page, assign all privileges to this new user and then click on Make Changes.

Step 5. Import your live site’s database into the clone’s database

1. Launch the database manager of your website clone’s web host. 
2. Select the database you created for your site’s clone, then click on Import.

3. Choose the correct SQL file to import, and then click on Execute to start importing.

It can take a while to import the data if your live site’s database is huge. After a successful import, you’ll see a confirmation message.

Step 6. Edit the wp-config.php file

The wp-config.php file is a critical file of your WordPress installation. It is located in the root directory of your website and contains your website’s base configuration details, like database connection information. This file is what WordPress consults to communicate with the database. So, if it isn’t configured with the correct database information, a visitor won’t be able to access the site.

In this step, you’ll modify the wp-config.php file so that it contains the correct database information.

Navigate to the cloned site’s root directory from the ‘Remote site’ area of FileZilla, then download the file. Modify the following lines of code with the new server’s MySQL database credentials:

define('DB_NAME', 'new database name here');
define('DB_USER', 'username for the new database');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password for the new database');
define('DB_HOST', 'new MySQL hostname');

Next, add the following lines of code below the line that says “That’s all, stop editing! Happy publishing.”, replacing “newdomain.com” with the correct domain of your cloned site:

define('WP_HOME', 'http://newdomain.com');
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://newdomain.com');

Save the file and re-upload it to the root directory of your cloned site in FileZilla.

And that is it! You now have a fully operational clone of your live site.

What does cloning a site entail?

Cloning a WordPress site means making an exact copy of everything on it. Let’s look at what this includes.

• Site structure: This is how your site is set up, with pages, posts, and menus. A clone keeps this layout the same.

• Files and database: Files have plugin and theme information. The database holds your site’s content and settings, like posts. Both need to be copied for a full clone.
• Server and hosting: This includes settings like the PHP version. Matching these on the cloned site helps it run smoothly.
• Size of your site: Bigger sites can have issues when copying due to internet interruptions. If a site is too large, manual copying methods are likely to fail.

Conclusion

WordPress cloning can feel hard, but with the right tools, it’s simple. Using BlogVault, you can easily make a perfect copy of your site. It helps with backups, moves, and testing. BlogVault makes it quick and error-free. By using BlogVault, cloning your site becomes easy, so you can focus on your site’s growth.

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