Cloning a WordPress Site

Posted on 03. Oct, 2010 by Aaron in Scripts

This was the title of an email I received late last night, and quite frankly it made me furious, because naturally I thought it was going to be software for cloning other peoples websites and being one of those ‘other people’ I didn’t want some lazy sod coming along and cloning my WordPress sites at a click of a button.

In fact what it turned out to be was one of the best scripts I’ve ever bought. To be honest it’d be so easy to overlook the importance of this but for me a similar problem that needed solving cropped up last Saturday and if I had this script then it could have saved me a huge amount of pain (it’s on my accountability update I wrote last Sunday if you want to read the long version), just reading this next part will make you realise how powerful and useful this script is.

This is one of my all time favourite productivity tools that sits right up there with Roboform.

Rewind 1 week, I have a heavily modified WordPress install on a test server so the client can see his site. The test server was having problems last Saturday but the long and short of it was that I’d set up WHMCS client billing on my reseller account but didn’t realise on set up that for some reason it was blocking all other incoming IP addresses apart from me the administrator, and nobody else could view the sites on my account. I tried lots of things to remedy the problem but being new to the WHMCS system, and getting in a bit of a flap about it all really wasn’t helping matters and the very last resort was to move the WordPress site to another server.

This was something I really didn’t want to do as it wasn’t your average install and last time I did it, it took well over an hour to move just from my local test server, then re-configure the whole site. Just to give you an idea, the client site was:

• A totally bespoke WP Theme, with child themes, built from scratch.
• Heavily modded and re-branded admin area through the functions.php file, if you’ve ever logged into the backend of one of my WordPress installs you won’t even recognise it as being a WordPress site.
• 52 Pages of content, all on the new WordPress dynamic menu system, which means if you do a standard move, copy / re-install a wordpress backup, the menu settings won’t be transferred and you have to rebuild it.
• There’s a forms plugin which has numerous settings for each form on the site
• All in One SEO, activated and in use.
• An embedded catchpa plugin, part hard coded into the theme, part plugin.
• Various levels of role management for both me and the client.

This is probably scratching the surface, but I thought if anything is going to trip this WordPress Twin Script up, this’ll be the site to do it.

Well, fat chance of a refund, first time using it I transferred the whole site from one server to another in 12 minutes, and most of this time was spent downloading and re-uploading the site backup, they couldn’t make the script any easier to use if they tried, in fact I’ll be surprised if anyone actually reads the instructions.

And? …… Every single little bit of the site on the new server was running as per normal, bloody amazing!!!!

Apart from the regular uses of moving and backing up, this would also be a huge benefit for site flippers selling WordPress sites or selling batches of niche sites.

For the price being asked for WP Twin, it’s tiny compared to the amount of time you could end up wasting, really this is one of my all time favourite productivity tools that sits right up there with Roboform.