Do you want to transfer your WordPress website from one host to another? There are many cases why you need to clone your WordPress website. Some of them are;
- You want to move your website to another host
- You want to create a staging instance of your website and develop on it or upgrade the website.
- You just want to create a clone of your website. A clone is an exact copy of your website.
In this article, I will show you the easiest way to clone your WordPress website.
Duplicator – WordPress Migration Plugin
With over a million installations Duplicator Plugin is one of the leading WordPress migration plugins.
If you want to clone your WordPress website, you have to do the following steps manually:
- Copy all files
- Export the database
- Check the server configurations, PHP configurations
- In the database Customize the WordPress site URL
- Update all outdated links with the new website URL
Going through all these steps sure sounds tedious. Manual installation also brings many unexpected errors.
Duplicator does most of the work that you would otherwise have to do manually, saving time and reducing the possibility of an error.
Duplicator will even install the new WordPress website on the new server, saving you an extra step.
Install Duplicator
Duplicator is a free WordPress plugin: WordPress DuplicatorInstall first the Migration Plugin Duplicator using the following tutorial: As installed to use a WordPress plugin? After the installation you can use the plugin directly from the menu item Duplicator > Packages.
Here you can create a new package with “Create New” Button. When installing, you can just continue the steps.
If you want to transfer the website to a new server immediately, you can fill out the server information in advance.
To do this, create a database on the new server. For the access to database, you need a database user too. You can now fill out this information under the Installer tab below the MySQL server.
Install Duplicator on the new server
After you created the package, you can download the installer and package, then upload them to the target server.
Now you can call the installer on the new server. Let’s assume that the WordPress website needs to be installed on the domain “azizozbek.ch”. The installer can be accessed at the following URL:
https://azizozbek.ch/installer.php
This installation page allows you to configure your new WordPress website.
If you already filled out the database information while creating the package, the database fields will already be filled out. Otherwise you have to add these informations. After connecting the Database, you can configure the website name and admin passport and your new WordPress website is ready to go!
Troubleshooting
There is a good chance that the installation will fail due to an unknown error. Here you need to investigate the cause. I will document the possible error messages here.
#1 Duplicator timed out – 500 internal error
If you get this error message, there is definitely a server-side error. Make sure the following PHP parameters are set up a bit liberally as shown in the following screenshot:
If adjusting these settings doesn’t help, you can extract the archive file from Duplicator yourself.
The ZIP file may be too large and the server cannot extract the file. The easiest way is to extract the zip file on your hosting management tool like Plesk or cPanel.
Now you can open the installer and choose Options > General > Extraction > Manual Archive Extraction.
