Updates are now too frequent and are too numerous for the majority of us. The worry of your website being damaged by every update is ever-present. Particularly when you don’t have a backup strategy.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’re required to update the WordPress or script, try the new version, add a few nifty widgets in a few places, add new features, or even hand over your site to a tech team to help it, you feel nervous about losing your spot.
In the worst case scenario, you could discover that your WordPress website stopped working, and you’re unable to log in to the website’s dashboard in order to make changes.
To reduce the chance and anxiety that your site could be lost completely The best option is to set up a staging website and test the site prior to rolling out updates to your live site.
In this post, we’ll be talking about the best way to accomplish this. We’ll walk you through the steps for creating a perfect clone of your website into an interim site for testing and test updates and modifications before releasing it to live.
It takes less than 5 mins to finish!
Let’s get started.
Table Of Contents
- Why You Might Need to Clone Your Website
- How to Clone Your WordPress Website
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- Before You Clone
- Using Duplicator (Step-by-Step)
- Using WP Staging Plugin
Final Thoughts
Why You Might Need to Clone Your Website
There are many possible scenarios in which you may require to duplicate your site.
From the simplest updates to themes and plugins, to and including complex theme customization, the advantages surpass the time it’ll require by ten times.
Certain scenarios include:
- Themes and plugins are updated and up-to-date, as well as testing compatibility
- Themes can be changed and plugins
- A child theme can be added
- Changes in PHP versions
- Updating WP Core
- Adding additional functions by using plugins
- Modifying themes and plugins
- Transferring a copy your website to a technical team to help troubleshoot
- Change your Domain Name
- Changing Web Hosts
- There are many more things too.
In essence, the rule of thumb is that if you plan to make changes to your site, prior to making the change to the live site, it is recommended to perform the modifications on a duplicate staging site to ensure that the changes won’t affect your live site.
In this instance, it’s important to note that “cloning” doesn’t just refer to the backup of your website. There’s an entire subject that relates to that. In a way, it’s about making a backup copy of your site and moving it to a different server. It could be on your web hosting, or an alternative.
In essence, it is the literal meaning for “cloning” Making an exact complete duplicate of your website for the reasons mentioned above.
It’s also important to note the fact that the server you’re planning to establish your staging website on is comparable to, or identical to, the live site. We’ll go over this in detail in the next section, but you’ll also should ensure that your content is synced between your live and staging websites.
After examining the reasons you might want to duplicate your site, let’s talk about the benefits that it can bring:
- A backup of your website all the all the time If you’re a habit of regularly cloning your website, make assured that you’ll have a new version of your website constantly.
- Make sure that you don’t cause harm to your live website with updatesThis is what we’ve been saying for a long time. You’re able to always restore your staging website; however, your live site is the sole one.
- Playground to play with new pages and items that aren’t yet on the web.With staging sites, it is certain that you will always have a new area to explore for new pages, and you’ll have the ability to design without affecting the speed of your site or SEO.
- Handover of tech support for worry-free If you frequently transfer your website’s information to a third party support representative and you are not required to be worried about the changes they make to alter your live website.
After having gone over the whats and whats, let’s get into the steps. We’ll discuss two very simple ways to duplicate the look and feel of your WordPress website in just five minutes! *
The speed of your website will mostly determine the scale of your site.
How to Clone Your WordPress Website
There are many possible ways to do this, however in this article, we’ll concentrate on two of the most simple plugins on the market. However, there are certain prerequisites.
Before You Clone
Before you can begin copying your site, you must first have created your stage environment.
You could do it using a different host, with the same host, but a another directory, or make a local environment.
Instructions are available on the internet and in other places. However, don’t install WordPress there, but we’ll handle it during the cloning process.
Let’s go straight to the point!
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