WordPress Plugins to Clone a Website

 WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) which offers the platform to build and maintain a website as well as customize it, without any knowledge of coding. From being a simple platform for those who wanted to create and host blogs it has evolved into a flexible, efficient and powerful tool for creating any type of website. It is an open-source software and this platform is free to use.

Every website needs to be hosted with a web hosting service provider which provides the services, server space and the technologies that are required for making a website accessible via the Internet. In this regard, WordPress Hosting is a type of hosting that ensures that the performance and security needs of a WordPress site are met. Many of those web hosts that are considered to be the best website hosting company or as the best Windows hosting company or even as the best Cloud hosting company, offer WordPress hosting plans for different budgets.

Cloning a website is the process in whicha fully operational copy of your site is created and set up in a specific location. Cloning your WordPress site might be needed when you need to test new features and require a safeenvironment for it. It is risky to test major updates live. Having a clone of your site eliminates this risk andensures that the changes that have been made, run smoothly before your live site is updated.

It can be needed when you have plans to move your site to a new host. In this scenario, you can set up your WordPress site on a new server without any changes. It can also come in handy when you are changing your domain name.

If you are not using managed WordPress hosting, you can use certain pluginsthat will help to clone or duplicate your website. These plugins, in no particular order, will be the focus of this blog.

The first one is DuplicatorWordPress Migration Plugin. It is used as a tool for copying and transferring a WordPress site from one place to another while saving all the settings. This plugin saves your time as it ensures that you do not have to manually configure the same themes and plugins. All it needs is to configure the site once. Then it is bundled into a package which needs to be installed for further usage. This plugins’ features include, moving and cloning your website, WordPress full migration andsupport of MySQL. It can easily pull a live site down into a local environment. Moreover, it does not require PHP extensions.

The next plugin is All-in-One WP Migration. It had been created for website migration and exports your WordPress website along with its database, media files, themes and plugins. It is a very good option for non-professional users. It does not require PHP extensions and is compatible with all PHP versions from v5.2 onwards. Its free version has many restrictions, so you can opt for a pro version to avail its full features. Its primary features include the ability to store multiple backup copies that have been ordered bydate as well asan easy import process that can be implemented via drag and drop. It also provides ultra-fast export facility and the usage of a custom open-source archive format.

 

WordPress Backup and Migrate by BackupGuard is one such plugin that helps to create a copy of your website with ease. It has very powerful free features along with the opportunity to store backups in a cloud which makes this plugin very modern and highly relevant. It provides the restoration of log files as well. It doesn’t require any extra library and offers serialized data refactoring for proper migration.

 

The next plugin worth mentioning is WP Staging - DB & File Duplicator & Migration. It is an extremely popular and simple plugin. With the aid of this cloning plugin a copy of the entire website, including a copy of the database, can be created into a subfolder of the main WordPress installation. Its free version is good enough for cloning your WordPress site. One of the major benefits of this plugin is that it does not interfere with the rest of WordPress which ensures that it does not cause any unexpected problem.

Last but not the least is Updraft Plus WordPress Backup Plugin which allows very fast backup of files and database into a cloud. It is one of the most extensively used plugin for easily cloning and migrating any website. Its premium version has been developed for cloning.The pro version gives access to additional storage, incremental backup function,a great amount of Updraft Vault, database encryption as well as automatic backup while updating WP/plugins/themes.

These are few of the plugins that can be used effectively to create an identical copy of your WordPress website to ensure your convenience when either moving your site to a new server or running compatibility tests.

Source: https://htswebhosting.wordpress.com/2020/12/09/wordpress-plugins-to-clone-a-website/