Support Start > Web Hosting Technical Information > Recommended Software and Scripts > WordPress > Duplicating a WordPress Site

Many customers transfer an existing WordPress site to our company and need to clone or copy the existing site.

We offer a WordPress migration service if you’d like us to do it, but it’s also possible to do it yourself using WordPress plugins.

The simple way to do this is to use the built-in WordPress export tool: First export the data from your old copy of WordPress to a file on your computer, then create the new empty copy of WordPress on our servers and import the data from the file you exported. (This is the only way you can do it if you’re currently hosted with the “WordPress.com” company, unless you’re on one of their more expensive plans that includes support for plugins.)

However, if you use the built-in tool, you’ll find that it only copies some of your site content: it doesn’t copy your theme files, plugins, users and settings. You’ll often have to reconfigure those, which can be time-consuming.

If your current blog is hosted anywhere except the “WordPress.com” company, you can take advantage of more comprehensive options that avoid the need to reconfigure things afterwards.

One possibility is to copy the underlying WordPress files and database from the other server to ours. You’d use FTP for the files and phpMyAdmin for the database, then follow the detailed technical tips on the WordPress site. That will work fine, but is a manual process that may not be needed in all cases.

Solution: the WordPress Duplicator plugin

Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that, with a little extra effort, allows you to copy everything without worrying too much about the details. It’s called Duplicator, and it makes an exact copy of the existing site. We’re not the authors of Duplicator, but we do recommend it to customers who wish to copy their site this way.

You can follow the steps on our Duplicator plugin page to install the plugin on your existing WordPress site and copy the content to our servers.

The Duplicator plugin requires using FTP. Is there any alternative?

A plugin called WP Clone is similar to the Duplicator plugin, and doesn’t require that you use FTP at all. However, in our testing, the WP Clone plugin seems slightly less reliable than Duplicator, especially on larger WordPress sites that have hundreds or thousands of posts. Customers who have a small site and wish to avoid FTP entirely may wish to try WP Clone, and use Duplicator only if it doesn’t work.

Another plugin option for smaller sites is All-in-One WP Migration, which also doesn’t require FTP. This may be worth a try if the others don't work. You can find a useful introductory video on the plugin information page. To use this plugin, install it on both the existing site and the new site, then export the existing site to a ZIP file that gets downloaded to your computer. (Be sure to specify the existing site's address and the new site's address in the first set of "Find" and "Replace with" text boxes.) You then upload the ZIP file to the new site, via your browser. There is a size limit of 512MB for the ZIP file upload. If your site is larger than that, then turn on the advanced option "Do not export media library (files)" when exporting the existing site; you can copy the media files separately using FTP.