Generally speaking, cloning is considered an unethical practice. However, when you think of cloning in terms of making a duplicate WordPress site, a whole new world of completely ethical possibilities can open up for your business. In this article, we will show you how to clone a WordPress site in 7 easy steps.
What Is Cloning, and Why Use It?
The idea behind cloning a WordPress site is simple: you make an exact copy or duplicate of one WordPress site and apply it to another site. Are there any good reasons to actually do this? Absolutely!
One practical scenario is when you are moving a WordPress site to a new web host or a new domain name. Cloning a site will save you hours of work.
Another possible use is when you are developing a site for a client. Once the project is done you can clone the WordPress site to the client site.
Lastly, you can clone a live WordPress site to your local server for testing and development purposes.
Cloning a WordPress site is not that difficult at all, here is how you can do it with these simple steps.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Using BackupBuddy To Clone A WordPress Website
For this article, we will be using BackupBuddy plugin. BackupBuddy is a WordPress backup plugin which allows you to not only just backup your WordPress site, it also allows you to easily restore your site from a backup. We will show you how to use this site restoration tool to easily clone any WordPress site.
1. Installing and Setting up BackupBuddy
First thing you need to install and activate the BackupBuddy plugin. Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled ‘BackupBuddy’ in your WordPress admin bar. Clicking on it will take you to BackupBuddy setup wizard.
The setup wizard is very straight forward. First you need to provide an email address. After that you need to enter a password.
This password will be used when you restore your site. The next option is to choose a location where you want to store your WordPress backups. The last option allows you to set up automatic backups.
BackupBuddy allows you to store your backups on cloud services like Stash, Amazon, Rackspace, and Dropbox. You can also store your backups on your own server or email them to yourself.
Once you are done with the setup wizard, click on save settings button to continue.
2. Backup Your WordPress Site
BackupBuddy will automatically initiate the backup process when you finish the setup wizard. Upon completion it will show you the option to download your backup or send the backup to a remote destination.
You can always create a fresh backup by visiting the BackupBuddy » Backup page.
3. Preparing To Clone Your WordPress Site
BackupBuddy provides a very easy site cloning / migration tool. Simply visit the BackupBuddy » Restore/Migrate page to begin the cloning process.
First you need to download the importbuddy.php file to your computer.
After that, you need to download the backup zip file from your existing backups shown on the same page.
4. Upload Backup and Importbuddy to New Location
Now that you have a complete backup of your site in a zip format and your importbuddy.php file, the next step is to upload them to the new location.
This new location can be a live website, or a site on your local server. If it is a site on your local server, then you just need to copy and paste the files into a subfolder inside your htdocs or www folder, like this:
C:\wamp\www\mynewsite\
If it is a live site, then you need to upload these files to the root directory using an FTP client.
No matter where you are copying the files, you need to make sure that the folder is completely empty and has no other files or folders inside it except importbuddy.php file and your backup zip file.
5. Running The Import Script
After uploading both files, you need to visit the importbuddy.php file in a web browser. It will be located at a URL like this:
http://www.example.com/importbuddy.php
Replace example.com with your own domain name.
You will be asked to enter your importbuddy password. This the password you created during step 1 or the password you entered when downloading importbuddy file during step 3.
After entering your password, you will notice that importbuddy has already found your backup zip file. Simply click on the Next Step button to continue.
Importbuddy will now extract your backup file when it is done, you need to click on the next button.
You will now reach the URL and database settings section.
Importbuddy will automatically guess your new URL. It will also show your previous URL. Below that, you need to enter the new database settings. Enter the new database name, database username and password.
If you have not created a new database yet, then you can always login to your hosting account and create a database using cPanel. If you are moving the site to local server then you can create a new database using phpmyAdmin.
After entering your database information, click on the test database settings button. If you entered all information correctly, then you will see test results like this:
Click on the next step button to continue. Importbuddy will now import your WordPress database and show you the success message. After that you can click on the next step button.
Importbuddy will run some tests and show your new cloned site’s URL to verify that everything is working fine.
6. Test Your Cloned Site
Test your new site by visiting the link shown on the last step of importbuddy process. Check that your single posts links are working fine. Visit the WordPress admin area to see if you can perform all administration tasks.
If you run into any issues check out our guide on how to fix common WordPress errors.
7. Delete Temporary Files
On the importbuddy screen, click on the cleanup and remove temporary files button. This will delete importbuddy and all temporary files it created during the cloning process.
That’s all, you have successfully cloned your WordPress site. You may also want to check out our list of 40 useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress blog.
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I used a much simpler way. My WP installation is with Godaddy…so logged in the cPanel of the site I wanted to cloned…went to subdomains and created the domain for the site destination…then I went to applications and the top of cPanel and clicked the little check box next the primary site I wanted to clone…then hit the clone button…and voila…and exact copy of our site was created in less than 10 minutes…
Is there any plugin or other software that could clone a wordpress website to another wordpress on the live?
The price for this is riduculous. Even the cheapest option is $80 PER YEAR! What an absolute rippoff!
Better off just going to Control Panel, zipping up your files and download them … then go to PHPMyAdmin and downloading a copy of your database. Then upload your zipped files to the new location…edit the config file, then import the database.
If that’s too hard for website retards … just install the free version of “Duplicate” (similar to Backup Buddy … but FREE).
You’re right man, no need to spend a dime on such a a simple task…
Either of you have a step by step guide? I am trying to copy my site to a subdomain to target a different city from the main site.
The only thing I understand so far is that I have to:
1. create a subdomain
2. create a new database
3. copy the public html folder of the main site over to the subdomain pubic html folder
After that, every tutorial I’ve seen on the internet gets too confusing
Can i copy someone’s site page to my site??
Hi,
I really appreciate all the posts you share with us! Please keep them coming!
My question regarding this post is…
This technique using BackupBuddy works flawlessly.
However, I now have a problem:
When I type in the URL of my original site (where I took the backup), I get directed to the site I cloned from that backup. It’s as if my original site now has a redirect to the cloned site.
What on earth have I broken?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Allan
Check your DNS record. That would be one of the only ways this would happen.
Thanks! Worked perfect!
Hi,
I would like to know how to clone any wordpress website have no hosting access information as well. I mean, suppose a buyer order your wpbeginner like website. Then, How to do it sir. Do you have any tutorials plz.
not possible anymore to use backup buddy unless you want to pay. Is their a different method?
Duplicator is perfect.
i want to copy the theme of running website to another website…
Hi Sandeep,
Did you get solution to this. I also want to copy a theme to another website(subdomain)
I’ve used another service to clone WordPress sites and have discovered a problem with residual tables, and I was curious whether this was an issue with BackupBuddy as well.
In the scenario I recently encountered, I create WP Site A with table prefix wp1_.
Then I have to create a new environment to clone to, so I install WordPress at WP Site B with table prefix wp2_.
Now I use my [unnamed] tool to clone site A to site B, which appears good on the admin and public side but when I look in the database I have both wp1_ and wp2_ sets of tables, and all of the GUIDs in the functioning tables for the new cloned site have WP Site A’s URL, not WP Site B’s as I would have expected.
These have to be cleaned up manually. So I wonder, does BackupBuddy do the same thing? Is this to be expected?
BackupBuddy’s sales/support team can probably answer this better.
I’d be curious to know how to manually perform this task without a plugin or is a plugin recommended for backing up and migrating over to a new website?
BackupBuddy fails on large WordPress installs. I can’t get it to back up our site which between database all files is over 400GB in size.
I had to manually download all of the files, then re-upload them to the new site and use importbuddy with just the database. Even that fails if the raw database is too large (failed around 200MB in size).
wonderful technique but there is use of another plugin
I recently moved a small simple blog with all-in-one wordpress migration and it worked great. But when I attempted a larger site on wp4.1 it failed. I think I would like back up buddy but the price is staggering. It would be my biggest wordpress expense, almost twice as much as my hosting!
I love using BackupBuddy for backups and migrations.
All you need is access to install the plugin and your set to move.
Great article!
I used to have similar problems too, but after using
“long path tool” You can use to solve this problem.
How about if we want to clone a website that we have no backend access? Is there an easy way?
Do you have ftp access? Do you have access to the database? You would need those two things to backup a website if you don’t have access to wp-admin.