Do you want to know how to Clone A Website?

In the old days of blogs and websites if you wanted a copy of your site there was a process to do it, but you needed to be

1. A complete geek, it wasn’t for the faint at heart
2. Willing to spend a lot of time doing it
3. Aware that one wrong move might mess up your whole website

First of all I guess I should explain to you the difference in cloning a site and making a backup of a site. When you make a backup of a site, and there are several free plugins with WordPress that you can use, basically you are going to get a text file with all your posts in it. If you pray real hard and hope for the best you MIGHT be able to recreate your site from those posts. There is one thing you can be sure of though. You aren’t going to be having much of a social life because there is a lot of manual work that will have to be done.

Think about all the cool graphics you have customized for your site…or all the plugins you have installed, activated, and set up…think about all the pages, and widgets and other things you have put into your site to make it really unique. Well you are going to have to do all that work over again. The bottom line…THAT SUCKS!

Cloning is a totally different beast. When you clone a website you are basically going into that site and taking a snapshot of everything. You end up with a neat little file called a “clone file”. You can take that clone file and immediately go to a brand new URL and recreate your site there…and the cool thing is you can do it in under a minute.

YES I SAID UNDER A MINUTE! (In fact I created a video showing me cloning TEN websites in just over 10 minutes, click here to watch that video)

You could also hold onto that clone file for a backup in case you ever needed it.

I have made a video that shows exactly how to clone a site. Here though I will give you the step by step instructions in case your the kind of person that prefers to read something. So here we go here is the step by step:

• Clone a website (making the clone file)
  

1. The first thing you need to do is log into the WordPress site that you are wanting to clone. (If you are not using WordPress you should get this training that shows you how to move your HTML site to WordPress)
2. Next using FTP (see this video if you do not know how to use FTP) move the “wptwin.php” file into the root directory of the site you want to clone.
3. Now go to a browser and type in the name of your site + “wptwin.php” and hit enter
4. When you do that you will see WP Twin pop up in the screen. Click the button labeled “Click to clone this site”
5. It will clone the entire site for you and then you just right click that new link and save it to your computer

• Clone a website (deploying the clone file)

1. Make sure you install WordPress on the URL where you want to clone your old site. (Here is a video on how to do that)
2. Now using FTP move the clone file and the “wptwindeploy.php” file into the root directory of the new site
3. Go to a browser and type in the name of the site + “wptwindeploy.php” and hit enter
4. You will see WP Twin pop up in the screen, put in your email address to verify you purchased it and click the button labeled “Validate Now”
5. The next thing you will see is a white screen that has a link that says “Click Here To View” and you are done!!!

If you want to log into the new WordPress blog just add “wp-admin” to the end of the site name and use the same username and password that you had for your other site.

If you want to see a video on how this works take a look at this one here…it is so simple and fast!

If you want to learn how to clone a website then click on this image and you will see it happen before your eyes