Moving a website from one URL to another can be a pain and carry some risk. And there are many reasons to want to clone a website (on it’s own domain or on a subdomain):
- you may want an archive site
- you want to play around with an existing site without disrupting your live site
- you want to move a newly created site to another url
In the past, I have used the C-panel on Bluehost to copy files. Today, I found a better way: All-in-One WP Migration. It’s easy to use and it worked well. Here’s what you need to do:
- set up a new domain or sub-domain
- install WordPress on this new domain or sub-domain
- install and activate All-in-One WP Migration on your existing/source site
- go to the All-in-One WP Migration plugin in your existing/source site
- click ‘export’ and save the file to your computer, Dropbox, or any of the options give. This will create a zip file of your website
- log into your new/destination site’s WordPress dashboard
- install and activate All-in-One WP Migration
- click ‘import’ and choose the source site’s zip file that you just created. You can do this with drag and drop.
- It will then instruct you to log into the destination site’s WordPress dashboard using the source site’s credentials (it will have replaced your destination site’s user name and password). Go to setting and save the permalinks twice (yes, you have to hit save twice; this is a WP bug
That should be it. The first time I did this, it took a while for the new site to show up. I thought this was strange and no one has been able to say why. I also can’t find any other users reporting this problem. Aside from that, this plugin worked great and I’ll be using it on more sites going forward.
Have you tried it? What do you think?