10 Yetis Insight Blog - How to: WordPress Site Cloning

What I mean by WordPress Site Cloning:

It does literally mean a clone of a WordPress site. So if I cloned a site to another domain it would look exactly like the site that had been cloned. Including all the plugins, post, images and settings.

Why you would need to clone a site:

• Moving to a different domain
• Ready to launch on live site
• Clone live site to local server, to work offline, without making changes to live site till changes have been tested on the local server.

How to clone a WordPress site:

The way I cloned a site was using a WordPress Plugin called: Duplicator. It was very easy to use and pretty quick. Much quicker than re-installing the theme, export and importing WordPress files, re-downloading plugins and manually altering the settings.

Note: Before following the steps below, please make sure you have access to the WordPress admin dashboard for the site you are cloning, URL of the new site and create a new database for the new site.

Here is what I did:

1. Install and activate the Duplicator plugin to the primary site (site you want to clone). Here’s the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/, or you can search for “Duplicator” plugin from your admin dashboard. Note: make sure it’s “By LifeInTheGrid”.
2. Once it’s been installed and activated, the dashboard side menu will have a new option called Duplicator, click this and the packages page will appear in the main section



3. On this page you can create a package by clicking the “Create New” button – which will save all the data and settings that are currently set on the site. Note: If you add a new blog post or make changes to the settings after the package was created, it will not include the new data and settings in the package. So if you want to clone the latest version of the site you must create a new package (only applies if you’ve created a package before).
4. Once you’ve clicked “Create New”, you’ll be showed step one of the process – Setup. First you’ll see if you have passed all the required, if you have it looks like this:

If not, it’ll let you know which requirement(s) did not pass.

5. Then you’ll have an option to name the package, by default it’s the date and the site name. You can change it to something more meaningful or leave it as it is if the date is enough.
6. Next section – Archive, you can choose where the data is stored, by default it will create a folder called “wp-snapshots” in the root folder of your site.
7. Next you have the options to exclude certain files and database tables, I left them both unticked – this will transfer everything.
8. The final section on this page – Installer, here we enter the information for the newly created database (this needs to be empty) and site URL for the secondary site (site that will be cloning to).
9. Then click “Next”, now onto step two of the process – Scan.



10. Wait for it to finish scanning, then it’ll display any errors, warnings and good statuses:



So for example, here I have a warning on the total size, you can expand this section to see more details (Click Total Size):



From this explanation of the warning, I am going to carry on without filtering. If there are any problems later on, we can come back to the previous stage and filter some of the data then.

11. Now we need to tick to continue with the warning detected.



12. Once we’ve ticked that, we can click “Build”. Now it will start building the package:



13. Once it’s finished building the package, it will display the package completed and you can download the Installer(php) and Archive(zip).



14. Once you’ve download them, move them to your new site directory and then go to your new site URL, followed by “/installer.php”. For example: http://new-site/installer.php. You should see the Duplicator Installer on this page:



15. Here, I chose “Connect and Remove All Data”, make sure the database information is correct, then click “Test Connection”.



16. Test is successful. Tick “I have read all warnings & notices” and click “Run Deployment”.
17. Now you will get a prompt to confirm installation. Click “OK” if you are ready.
18. Wait for it to process the files and database. Once that’s done, check the information and click “Run Update” and wait for it to process.

And that’s it! Your site has been cloned to another domain. Just go ahead and visit the site.

Note: If you are working with a client and you don’t have access to their domain, you can follow step 1 to 13, then send them the Installer (.php) and Archive (.zip) files and have your client create a new database, and follow steps 14 to 17(end).

Hope you enjoyed my little tutorial, drop me an email at: karen@petoba.com for any questions.

Have a good day!