When and Why Do You Need to Copy a Website?

April 23rd, 2024
307 Views

You’ll need to copy a website in different situations to ensure any changes are made and tested on the staging environment before they are pushed live.

This is particularly helpful for web agencies that run several websites across multiple WordPress hosting providers. Whenever an issue arises, they can create a copy of the client’s website, fix it, and push it live again.

Here are a few scenarios where you might need to clone a website.

Compatibility Testing
Moving to a New Server
Back up Your Website
Clone for a Similar Project
Take a Website Live

1. Compatibility Testing

Compatibility testing involves checking whether the website components are working as expected and whether the entire code base can run on various hardware and/or software infrastructures.

Testing changes on a staging/cloned website instead of a live website is always recommended, mainly because untested themes and plugins could conflict with the existing installation and bring down the entire website.

Similarly, any custom changes in the code need to be tested at a staging/cloned site before they can be pushed to the live site.

2. Moving to a New Server

Migrating a live website to a new server is always a risky business. Doing so without cloning the site puts you at risk of losing everything.

If you want to transfer a website to PHP hosting or to a different hosting provider, you should create a clone by backing up website files and databases and importing the whole package to the new web hosting alternatives.

That way, if things go wrong, you always have an operational clone ready to take live.

3. Back up Your Website

Cloning is also used to back up a website (including web files and database) and keep it at an offsite location for disaster recovery. In the case of WordPress, many people use different WordPress backup plugins.

I will also cover the process of copying a website that can be used to create a backup of your website.

4. Clone for a Similar Project

If you are a web agency and build websites for clients, you may want to create a blueprint and copy it to another location to speed up the development process. Most of the time, these setups include theme & plugin configurations, code-level customizations, etc.

5. Take a Website Live

It’s common for developers to build websites on their preferred local environment and then clone the website to a web hosting server to ensure things do not break during the transition. This setup also requires a complete backup of website files and databases.

Before moving on to clone the website, there are several things that you need to align. This is to ensure that your cloning process isn’t interrupted because of some negligence.