Overview
The Plesk WordPress 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 once migration is complete no further action is required for the site to work.
Tip
We recommend making a clone of your site before making any major changes and/or upgrades so that you can test first.
Instructions
- Navigate to the WordPress site you wish to clone from and click ‘Clone’:
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>/
- Rename the database so that it is easily identifiable. This will help with identifying the database later when troubleshooting:
- Click ‘OK’.
- A window will show the clone progress:
- Once the clone is complete, you’ll be able to access your newly cloned WordPress site with the new URL (eg, https://staging.<yourdomainname.com.au>/).
- 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:
Warning
Removing or disabling your staging site once complete is critical to the health of your website. We have more detail in our article on Maintaining staging and development sites.