How do I clone a site?

Updated on May 1st, 2020

Flywheel already makes it fast and easy to create new WordPress sites from scratch, but what if you’d like to create an exact duplicate of a site you already own? In that case, you can use a Flywheel feature called Site Cloning. Site Cloning allows you to take a copy of a production site and recreate it as a new site or add it to an existing bulk plan.

Note

Cloning is different from Staging. If you are interested in learning more about Staging, be sure to check out our handy guide to getting started with Staging.

Cloning is helpful in a few different situations. For example, if you’re adapting a theme you’ve worked on in the past for a new client, have single sites and you want to clone into a bulk plan, or if you have a set of WordPress themes and plugins that you use for almost every client, it’s an easy way to get started on a new site without having to install the same plugins over and over.

To get started with Site Cloning, just follow the steps below.

Select the site you'd like to clone from your Flywheel dashboard.

On the site's overview page, hover over the 'gear' icon to access the 'Clone Site' menu option.

Fill in a few details about your new site clone.

We’ll ask you for a few basic details and preferences, like who should own the cloned site (you, or maybe an Organization you belong to, but you can always transfer to a client later); what name you’d like to call the new site; whether you’d like to enter your own temp domain or let us choose a random one for you; and whether you’d like all the old site’s collaborators to still be collaborators on the new site.

Choose how you'd like to pay.

Selecting “my client will pay later” will allow you to set this new clone up as a temporary demo site that you can transfer down the road. You can also select your data center at this point.

Select the "my client will pay later" payment option to create a demo site.

Want to learn more? Check out our video, or shoot the support team a request here.

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