How to clone website for testing: the easiest way for free

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Intro

In this tutorial I’ll show you how you can clone your website for testing purposes very easily and for free.

You don’t always want to make changes on your live site until you make sure it doesn’t break anything. For example, you need to install a new plugin or theme. But you will want to check it out if it works and how it looks like before applying the changes on your live site. Otherwise you risk breaking your live website.

That’s why you need a test copy of your website where you can experiment.

And I’ll show you how you can get it.

In this easy and detailed step-by-step tutorial you will learn:

  • How to create a subdomain, install WordPress there and copy your website to this subdomain using WP Clone plugin.
  • How to remove the subdomain and clean everything up after your experiments.
  • Some notes about restrictions of this free method of creating a copy of your website and alternative (more convenient and professional) ways to clone your site for testing using staging environment.

Another implementation of cloning websites may be simply duplicating sites. For example, I create copies of a WordPress site within a couple of minutes to use them on different hosts to monitor their performance for my Hosting Performance Contest project.

 
You are welcome to use the table of contents below for easy navigation within this tutorial:

 

Restrictions To Clone Website

Although WP Clone is very easy tool to clone website, you may need to know about some restrictions. There are good chances you don’t need to bother about them, but anyway there you go:

  • Cloning your website using WP Clone may take an hour or more if you website is more than 2 GB in size. But I find this plugin working well only for small sites (under a couple of hundred megabytes). There’s another plugin All In One WP Migration which has a similar functionality, but it works more stable (the plugin is free for websites upto 500 MB).
  • Also, if you use caching, security or redirecting plugins, you may have to re-install them on your test site.
  • Note that WP Clone does not make the 100% exact clone of your website. For example, it does not clone your custom folders or files (including .htaccess) in your WordPress installation folder (e.g. in public_html). However, if you are not going to migrate your website, and you just want to use WP Clone to create your site copy for further testing, then it’s likely you don’t need to bother about that (especially if you are not aware of custom files or folders). Or you can to copy your files and folders manually.
  • As noted at the plugin description, you should not use this plugin on WP Engine and some other hosts which use proprietary file system. It’s very likely that you are ok to use WP Clone with any shared hosting though.

Although you may be a bit hesitating now because you are not sure about all these restrictions, but don’t worry. In most cases you can go fine with WP Clone.

 

Best Alternatives To This Free Method Of Creating A Copy Of Your Website For Testing

In this post I describe the simplest way how to get a copy of your website for free. The core of this method is using WP Clone by WP Academy plugin. There are other great plugins such as Duplicator or All-in-One WP Migration which allow you to clone website, but WP Clone is the quickest and the easiest way to do it for smaller sites (under 2 GB or so).

However, in my own experience I find WP Clone plugin working well only for small sites (under a couple of hundred megabytes). Although the plugin works the fastest compared to its alternatives.

Another plugin, All In One WP Migration, has a similar functionality. And it’s also very easy to use (see my tutorial here). I love this plugin for being more stable. The plugin is free for websites upto 500 MB. I consider this plugin as the best alternative to WP Clone.

As regards Duplicator plugin, it’s not as easy to use. But it’s more fundamental compared to WP Clone. Although Duplicator can’t handle big sites too (usually due to shared hosting resources restriction). Even its paid version has a limit of handling websites 2 GB maximum.

Anyway, it may be not convenient each time to make a copy of your website like that using a plugin. Moreover, using cloning plugins can’t manage to push live your changes to your original site. It’s supposed that you just repeat the changes on your original site when you make sure they work on your test site.

Ideally, you just need to be able to clone your website and also push your changes from your test site to your original site with simply one click. But this is not possible without special staging (or testing) environment on you hosting.

So, if you are a website developer or just need to experiment often, you may want to use a specific functionality on a hosting level, because it’s much more convenient and more reliable to use. As I’ve noted it’s called staging environment and it’s available at some hosting providers such as SiteGround (very affordable prices), WP Engine and GetFlyWheel. By the way, these hosts offer Git integration as well. All these hosts are very good and recommended.

Just for an educational record: To be technically precise, staging and testing environments are different things, but for our needs it makes no sense in differentiating them. Thus, to simplify I mean the same thing under both ‘testing environment’ and ‘staging environment’ in this post. And if you are puzzled by these technical words, just ignore it without any hesitation and go on with the tutorial 🙂

Congratulations! The theoretical and the most difficult part of this blog post is already behind 
Let’s rock with easy practice!

Video Tutorial How To Create A Copy Of Your Website For Testing For Free

On this video I show you step by step how to create a copy of your website using WP Clone. The video starts from creating a subdomain where your clone website will reside. And the video finishes with deleting the subdomain and cleaning everything up.

In the tutorial below I explain basically the same, but I add some notes.

 

Step 1: Backup Your Website Before Making Any Changes

It’s a good piece of advice whenever you are going to do some changes on your website.

You may want to back up your whole hosting account creating a full cPanel backup (if you are on a shared hosting, such backup can be restored by your host). Also you can create partial cPanel backups of your files and databases separately (you will be able to restore them by yourself if you need it). I have tutorials about cPanel backups here.

By the way, I use a hassle-free, very reliable and super convenient backup solution CodeGuard (you may find my comparison review here).

So, I consider that you have your backups and you are safe. Now let’s move on.

 

Step 2: Set Up Your New Test Site On A Subdomain

This chapter contains two parts: creating a subdomain in cPanel and installing a default WordPress site on this subdomain.

 

2.1. Create the subdomain

Log in to your cPanel and click Subdomains:

website clone - creating subdomain

Specify the name for a new subdomain and create the subdomain:

clone website - creating subdomain

You have created subdomain for your clone website!

 

2.2. Install WordPress on the subdomain you created

Now go back to your cPanel, locate WordPress installer (or Softaculous and then WordPress installer in it) and click it:

clone website - wordpress installer

When installing WordPress make sure you select the subdomain:

clone website - wp installing on subdomain

Be careful and do NOT select your website domain without the subdomain. Select the subdomain. Otherwise you will destroy your original website.

The other part of installing WordPress is nothing special. Watch the video tutorial I put in the beginning of this post if you want to see how I installed WordPress on my subdomain.

 

Step 3: Create Backup To Clone Website

This chapter contains two parts. The first part is about installing WP Clone plugin on your original WordPress website which you want to clone. And in the second part I will show you how you can create backup with WP Clone. It’s very easy.

 

3.1. Install WP Clone plugin on your original website

Nothing special in this part. Just login to your original website Dashboard and install WP Clone by WP Academy plugin the usual way. I.e. go to Dashboard / Plugins / Add new /, search for WP Clone plugin and install it.

clone website - locate wp clone

Then activate the plugin. That’s it.

 

3.2. Create a backup of your original site with WP Clone

It’s a very sweet part, because it’s just one-click action 🙂

clone website - create backup with wp clone

Yes, it’s that simple.

WP Clone plugin is ready to be used out of the box, right away after installation. But it also has some advanced settings for specific or advanced needs. These settings can be used for excluding folders, including non-WordPress database tables, memory settings for performance optimization etc.

However, if your website is not big (say, under 1-2 GB), then all you’ll need to do in most cases is just to click one button with all the settings set by default.

If your site is bigger, then in order to reduce the time of cloning, you may want to exclude some heavy folders, e.g. /wp-content/uploads/ where your images are stored.

Also, you don’t want to clone folders with backups. So, if you use a backup plugin that stores the backups within your WordPress installation folder (which is not a good practice by the way, then exclude this folder too.

Here’s where in WP Clone advanced settings you can exclude folders and big files (e.g. media files) from your being restored on your clone website:

clone website - exclude folders in wp clone

 
When you create backup with WP Clone, you get the link where the backup has been put. Copy this link address – you’ll need it on the next step when you restore the backup on your test site:

clone website - copy link address with backup

 

Step 4: Clone Your Website – Deploy Your Test Site

This chapter contains two parts. The first part is about installing WP Clone plugin on your test website. And in the second part I’ll show you how to restore the backup created with WP Clone on your test website to perform the cloning.

 

4.1. Install WP Clone on your test site

Installing WP Clone plugins is the same simple operation as I described above.
Install this plugin on your test site which is on the subdomain you created.

 

4.2. Restore WP Clone backup on your test site

This is the sweetest part. Because you can do this the heaviest job very easily by pressing literally one button.

You just need to open WP Clone section on your test site, select option “Restore from URL”, specify URL with your WP Clone backup (the link you copied on this step when you created the WP Clone backup), select “I agree” box to confirm restoration and click “Restore” button.

clone website - restore wp clone backup

Now your clone website is almost ready. The only thing is left is to make some checking. Read the next short chapter for that.

 

Step 5: Check That Your Test Site Works And Hide It From Search Engines

You need to do basically two things in your test website:

  1. Hide your test site from search engines to avoid possible duplicate content issues (can be bad for SEO). You can do it in Dashboard / Settings / Reading :
  2. clone website - stop search engines

  3. Re-save your permalinks (Dashboard / Settings / Permalinks)
  4. And just open your test site, see if it’s the same as your original site and click some links (e.g. open a blog post) to check that links on your test site work.

You may also want to re-install your caching and security plugins (as well as redirecting plugins) if you use and if you need them on your test site.

That’s it with setting up the clone website!
That wasn’t difficult, was it?
Now you can experiment on it as much as you want.

 

Step 6-7: Experiment On Your Test Site And Then Make Changes On Your Original Site

There’s no tutorial for this part, because it’s totally up to you.

For example, you can install new themes or plugins to see if they work for you well. Or you may completely change the design of your clone website. Or do anything with it.

So, you make any changes on your test website, see if they are good and apply these changes on your original site too.

Unfortunately there’s no ‘push’ functionality when you could move your changes from your test website to your original site easily without repeating these changes on your original site. For this purpose you need hosting with staging environment. Check out these hosts that I recommend that offer staging environment for convenient testing and development: SiteGround (it has very affordable prices), WP Engine (one of the acknowledged great WordPress managed hosting) and GetFlyWheel (more affordable WP managed host).

 

Step 8: Remove Your Test Site And Clean Up

When you are done with testing, you may want to delete your test site (to free up space on your hosting or to create a new clone website instead of this one).

To remove completely your test website that you have created following this tutorial, you need to do these steps:

  1. Remove installation of WordPress on your test site.
  2. Remove folder for your subdomain
  3. Remove the subdomain

Steps 2 and 3 can be done in any order.

 

8.1. Unsintall WordPress on you test site

In order to delete WordPress installation on your clone website (on the subdomain you created), you need to go to your cPanel / Softaculous / current installation for WordPress and remove your test site installation:

clone website - softaculous

clone website - softaculous wordpress

clone website - softaculous remove wordpress

Be careful when uninstalling – select the subdomain where your clone website reside, not the root domain with your original website 🙂

clone website  - remove wordpress in softaculous
clone website  - remove wordpress in softaculous 2

 

8.2. Remove folder for your test subdomain

Go to cPanel / File manager / public_html / , locate the folder associated with the subdomain you created for your test site and delete it. This folder will be already empty after you uninstalled WordPress on the previous step.

clone website - delete subdomain folder

8.2. Remove your test subdomain

Go to your cPanel and click Subdomains:

website clone - creating subdomain

And then remove your test subdomain:

remove clone website subdomain

That’s it! You have removed the clone website completely.

 

Conclusion

This tutorial shows how to create a copy of your website for testing or experiments using WP Clone. It’s the fastest and the easiest way to do it or free I know so far. for example, within a couple of minutes I create WordPress site copies for my Hosting performance Contest project.

Also, it’s very handy and risk-free way to clone website and test any changes on a copy before you make these changes on your original website.

The main drawback of this method of creating a clone website is that it does not create a real staging environment. In other words, it does not let you push your changes that you make on your test site to your original site – you need to simply repeat these changes on your original website.

Also, if your original website is not small (more than 1 GB), the process of creating a clone website may take some time (up to 1 hour or even more depending on your hosting).

That’s why if you need to be able to clone website or create test copies of your website faster and with literally a couple of clicks without bothering about subdomains, WordPress installations etc, then you may want to use hosting that offers staging environment. The great choices for that are SiteGround (with very affordable prices), as well as great WordPress managed hosts WP Engine and GetFlyWheel.

Anyway, this free way of creating a clone website I described in my tutorial can work on almost any shared hosting and it can be a really good trick in your arsenal and help you make one step forward to become an advanced WordPress user 🙂

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Comments

  1. Hey Michael:
    I wrote down the URL of your article “How to clone website for testing: the easiest way for free”.
    It looks useful. I am trying to clone my site — using “Duplicator” — a pain.

    Something I MUST KNOW before trying your way is this:
    CAN I point my browser at http://mysite-test.com (OR aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd) and see how it loads; how
    new plugins work and tweek them; etc?

    Today I learned how to make a menu for logged-in and non-logged-in-users.
    I want to do something like this:

    if (&logged_in)
    { display logged_in_menu;}
    else {display non_logged_in_menu;}
    #thats PERL CODE

    I want to avoid screwing up the production site.

    • Hey Todd,

      You are asking if you can point your browser at some testing website of yours and test new plugins, tweak them etc.

      I’m afraid I didn’t understand your question well. Why do you think you can’t do it?

      This is quite a normal scenario – you clone a website to a new URL (it can be a new domain or a subdomain) and you test/tweak anything you want. The new website (the clone) is a separate and completely independent website.

  2. I am running a subscription site. I can’t afford to have it go down.
    I am constantly upgrading things on it.

    I want to install a clone site and test many things. Among them, login and conditional SE,
    CAN I log into the test site to test the login and “conditional search” abilities?

    EX:
    Instead of http://ira-help.com DO
    http://ira-help.com/test-site

    • Hello Todd,
      When you create a clone site, it becomes a totally independent WordPress installation. And then you can test whatever you want, including SE and login.
      However, if you want to test search engine optimization, I’d suggest using a totally different domain name. However, this is up to you.

  3. Hi Michael, I followed steps above and now my main domain (www.xxx.com) 301 redirects to the new subdomain (xyz.xxx.com) – any help is appreciated

    • Hi Justin,

      Hm, WP Clone does not do anything with 301 redirects from old location to the new one. Redirecting from old site to the new site looks something that was done not related to this tutorial.

      I’d rather expect that you experience issues with redirecting from the new site to the old one. But not vice versa.

      Perhaps the redirect from your old site to the subdomain had been before the migration process?
      Anyway, I can suggest trying doing it all over again. But during the cloning process make sure before each next step that there is no redirect. If after some step you encounter that the redirect appears, it will be more clear what the issue is.

      Feel free to let me know how it goes.

  4. Hi Michael,
    I followed your instructions. But at step 4.2(Restore WP Clone backup on your test site) I encountered an error. When I click the restore from URL button this error message comes up:
    “The plugin encountered an error while downloading the zip file,the following error message was returned:
    Error Message : Internal Server Error
    Temporary files created in **SITE-ROOT**/wp-content/wpclone-temp will be deleted.”
    I tried it a few times and I believe I followed exactly. I’m able to see the basic wordpress site at the new place. Any suggestions on how I can solve this?

    • By the way my site is around 63MB. So I don’t think size was a problem.

    • Hi Ajith,
      Sorry to hear about your issues. I’ve seen some people experiencing the same issue. And someone suggested trying another browser.
      If it does not help, use All-in-One WP Migration plugin. It’s free to use on websites upto 500 MB. I’m writing a tutorial on it right now. But it’s as easy as using WP Clone, so it’s a great alternative.

  5. Hi Michael

    I have watched your video and seemed like if i follow step by step then it wont be hard to make a test website. As I haven’t done it before, do you think it would be safe to do.

  6. Dear Michael Bely. I am so happy I discovered your website and found your guidance so much more helpful than all that I read before making a sub-domain as a clone to my domain. God bless and keep up your good guidance

  7. Thanks for the tutorial! I have a quick question: On step 5 after I clone the site on the test folder, am I supposed to see “test.XXX” URLs when I access the site? I see the live URLs, so I’m afraid that if I make changes they’ll be pushed to the live site. Thanks!

    • Hi AJ,

      Thanks for stopping by and your question.

      All changes that you do on your new (test) site are not pushed to you original site. Your new test site is a separate and independent WordPress installation.

      On step 2 you create a separate and totally independent installation of WordPress on another domain or subdomain.
      On step 3 you create a backup copy (i.e. you export data from your original site).
      On step 4 you restore the backup to your new site.

      And then, whatever you do with your new site does NOT affect your original site.

      So, if test.xxx is your new site, then not only on step 5, but also on step 4 you should see your new site (test.xxx) and work with it.

      If you do any changes on test.xxx, the changes will not be pushed to your original site (xxx).

      You say that you see the live URLs. Make sure you work on your test.xxx site. You should NOT see the live (original) URLs when you work in your test.xxx site. Your test.xxx site is a separate website and all ULRs on this site should belong to test.xxx

  8. Simon Bertoli says

    Great stuff… Clear and concise and EFFECTIVE

    Thanks heaps!

  9. Impressive and informative Blog post i really like it.If you are using duplicator and you want more features in it you can use Duplicator by WPadm.com : https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator-clone/

  10. Thanks for such a detailed post . I am a current user of Duplicator / Cloner / Migrator for my website . I can easily duplicate , backup and clone my website for free . It is reliable and easy to use .

  11. Hey Michael, great post! The original website has to be on WordPress or can this be used on any website?

  12. Really interesting post, Michael. Thank you. I have to do something very similar, not exactly the same, but close enough that this lighted my way for me and took a lot of the pressure off. I am very grateful.

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