Plesk Obsidian – Cloning a WordPress Website

Overview

The Plesk WP Toolkit clone function allows you to clone a WordPress site to another domain or sub-domain managed by Plesk. The clone tool will automatically update absolute paths, URL’s and configuration files, which would normally need to be done manually for other systems.

This means that no further action is required for the site to work once migration is complete.

Instructions

1. Login into Plesk via the Conetix Control Panel.
2. Once in Plesk, you want to access the WP Toolkit, this can be done by going to the left of the screen and clicking on WordPress
   
3. In the WP Toolkit check to see if the site you want to clone from is listed, if it’s not listed you will need to run a scan for WordPress Sites. At the top of the screen you will have a collection of options with one of them being scan, click on Scan
   
   Once the Scan is completed your WordPress Site will appear in the list
   
4. If needed Expand the WordPress Instance by clicking the arrow in the top left
5. In the expanded instance click Clone.
   
   

6. If you don’t already have a staging site, select “Create subdomain”, then enter the subdomain and path:
   By default, this will be staging.<yourdomainname.com.au> with a blank path so that you can access the site simply from https://staging.<yourdomainname.com.au>/
   

7. Rename the database so that it is easily identifiable. This will help with identifying the database later when troubleshooting:
   
    
8. Click ‘OK’.  
9. A window will show the clone progress:
   
10. Once the clone is complete, you can access your newly cloned WordPress site with the new URL (eg, https://staging.<yourdomainname.com.au>/).

11. By default, Plesk will automatically mark cloned sites not to be indexed by Google and other web crawlers. You can confirm this within the WordPress toolkit by checking the “Search engine indexing” settings and ensuring it’s turned off: