10 Best WordPress Plugins to Clone or Duplicate a Site
Do you want to give your website a makeover and add some special features? Do you want to try out new stuff, vary it a bit, and then perfect it as best? Afraid you might mess up and land yourself with a broken website? Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to where you started before you messed up?
You can do that if you can clone your website and safely keep a copy. You can retrieve it later and use it afresh if you need it. Copy your entire website—folders, files, databases, and all—before you attempt to make changes. This is called cloning or duplicating your website. The clone will be an exact original copy, with no missing portions and all the links working fine.
When Might You Want to Clone or Duplicate a Site?
There are plenty of situations where you might want to make a copy of your website. You may need to:
- to shift your website from one server to another.
- to shift from a local development project to a live server or vice versa.
- a testing environment or a staging server to try out some changes.
- to simply back up your website.
- a copy for a similar project.
While you can clone, duplicate, and move a WordPress site manually, it’s time-consuming.
This is why every smart, professional WordPress developer and power users utilize a cloning plugin to manage transfers and migrations effectively.
If you’re on a managed WordPress hosting provider, most of them will have built-in features for easy staging, cloning, and site backups.
Here are some top WordPress hosting companies that have WordPress staging and cloning features: Bluehost, SiteGround, WP Engine, Liquid Web, Dreamhost, etc.
Which is the Best WordPress Plugin to Clone or Duplicate a Site?
For most use cases, Duplicator Pro is the best WordPress plugin to clone or duplicate a website.
Whether you’re looking to migrate a site, move a site to a local server, or anything else, Duplicator can do the job.
If your goal is to create a staging site, then we always recommend using the option that’s built-in to your WordPress hosting provider. All good hosting providers like SiteGround, Bluehost, WP Engine, Liquid Web, etc offer this feature to their users.
However, if your host doesn’t have the staging feature, you can use WP Stagecoach. It’s easy to use, budget-friendly, and has a free trial.
Finally, if you’ve got a multisite network of sites, then NS Cloner might be just what you need. It’s specifically designed to copy sites within a multisite network, and the basic version is free.
Best Plusing to Clone and Duplicate WordPress Websites
1. Duplicator Pro
Duplicator Pro is our favorite WordPress cloning plugin. It’s extremely popular, with over 15 million downloads. You can use it to back up your site, but it’s also a very powerful plugin for cloning a site.
One of Duplicator’s biggest advantages is that it allows you to move a site between domains or hosts with zero downtime. If you don’t want to miss out on any traffic or customers, this could be an important consideration.
Duplicator works by bundling up everything from your site into a single “package” in a zip file. This package includes everything from your sites, including plugins, themes, content, database, and even WordPress files.
2. All-in-One WP Migration
Like most plugins on this list, All-in-One WP Migration can create a simple backup of your files. It also clones your website and installs it at a new location. You will need to install a WordPress plugin at both ends before you start the migration. The plugin interface is easy to use, and you can clone everything on your website—files, database, themes, and plugins.
Once you have done this, you have to sit back and wait for the completion of the import process. When this is complete, log in to the new website and save the permalinks. The plugin can handle serialized data competently, and you will not have to mess with the URLs. All database references are automatically changed. It is free, but for some functions, you will have to purchase add-ons.
The many premium add-ons support a higher file upload size and enable export and storage at additional locations like Amazon S3, Dropbox, and Google Drive. OneDrive, and loads of others. Add-ons will also help in migrating multi-sites. You can migrate the entire website or any part with this extension.
3. XCloner
XCloner is a simple, free WordPress plugin that lets you create backups of your site. It can create “differential backups” that only include files modified after a certain date.
You can set XCloner to create automated backups regularly. You can even use it to generate automatic backups before any automatic WordPress updates.
Once you’ve created a backup, you can use it to restore your website or in a new location. This lets you duplicate your website on a new host or a new domain.
It’s completely free. However, it’s a little more technical than some other plugins. You may want to pick a different plugin if you haven’t got a reasonable amount of experience with WordPress.
4. NS Cloner
NS Cloner is specifically designed for WordPress multisite networks. It lets you take any existing site on your network and make a new, identical site with the same theme settings, plugins, and content.
It’s a great plugin if you host and manage many client sites within a multisite environment. It also works well if you want to set up multiple test sites or produce sites for members of an organization.
Keep in mind that it only works with WordPress multisite. You’ll need the NS Cloner pro version if you want to use it with single sites. The pro version lets you clone between single and multisite WordPress and vice versa.
With the pro version, you also get extra features, like the ability to clone all the site’s users and their permissions.
5. InstaWP
InstaWP Connect is a feature-rich WordPress plugin that enables the creation of staging sites in seconds. Despite being a recent release, it stands out for its seamless integration with all hosting providers and its ability to create staging sites on its server without stressing your live site’s hosting.
The plugin lets you connect any WordPress site with the InstaWP dashboard and gives you access to several noteworthy features, including a free SSL and staging URL, an intuitive dashboard, reusable templates, support for multiple PHP versions, and an easy way to share access with teams and clients. Additionally, it integrates with Git and is compatible with Apache and Nginx servers, with human support available.
While InstaWP is a promising option, it is worth noting that it is still a relatively new player in the market. It’s incremental updates feature and selective database merge capabilities are still in development.
6. Updraft Plus
Updraft Plus, with 700,000+ active installs (equal to that of Duplicator) and a 4.9-star rating, is a popular plugin for cloning a website. It is primarily for creating backups, but the premium versions can also be used for cloning and migration.
Back up your files and database at different times. Exclude files that you don’t want to keep while backing up. You can also schedule your backups to happen automatically. Split larger sites into multiple archives and resume failed uploads. Restore selectively and automatically from a backed-up version. There will be no need to change URLs manually.
7. ManageWP
ManageWP is not a plugin. It is a WordPress Maintenance service that helps you manage all your WordPress sites from one dashboard. It can handle huge databases and replace URLs in serialized data after cloning. A new WordPress installation will be required.
8. Duplicate Post
Duplicate Post – hence the name – allows you to duplicate any post you want. It is pretty straightforward, as it does not require any knowledge to use it. With this free WordPress plugin, you can duplicate or clone the post you want and save it as a draft for further editing and improvement. For your information, this plugin also allows for duplicating pages.
Once in the admin section, you will see an option to clone the post you want just under the title (appears on mouse hover). Moreover, if you are interested in cloning several posts, you can use the bulk feature, too. Additionally, you will see a new function appear inside the post when editing, and you can even copy it directly in a new draft.
9. Migrate Guru
Migrate Guru is a free plugin that works with almost all popular WordPress hosting providers. It’s designed to help you move your site from one host or server to another.
It comes from the people behind the popular BlogVault plugin, and it uses BlogVault’s servers. This helps make it a quick and easy process. Once your migration is complete, Migrate Guru will remove the copy of your site from the BlogVault servers.
If you’ve got a fairly large website, Migrate Guru is a good option as it can move a 1 GB site in less than 30 minutes. It can be used on sites as large as 200 GB. You’ll get real-time and email alerts about where your migration has got to.
This isn’t suitable for developing a website on your local host, though, as it doesn’t support moving to/from your local host and your live website.
10. Duplicate Page
A similar plugin to the previous one, offering you to duplicate quickly, posts, custom posts, and pages. Using a single click, of course! The duplicate Page plugin gets you going immediately, offering you to create as many new duplicates as you want. Moreover, you can set the duplicate as a draft, private, public, or pending. The options are right at your fingertips.
Once you install and activate the plugin, you will see it appear in the Settings category in the left menu of your admin panel. From then on, you can set different parameters for how you would like the Duplicate Page plugin to operate and go from there. You can also set user roles, who can use the function, like admin only, editor, author, etc.
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