You might have heard the saying, “Cloning a WordPress blog” or heard this term used before and you’re wondering what exactly does it mean?
It means that if you want to set up a new WordPress site for yourself or someone else, whether it’s a membership site, shopping cart, content site, or any other kind of site, you don’t want to have to repeat more steps than you need to.
Instead, you create a new blog, which includes your theme, plugins, settings, files and posts exactly the way you want and then you back it up.
Then you create a new blog and restore (clone) that blog in the new location. That is what cloning a WordPress blog is all about.
Many people who have been blogging for more than a few weeks have their own way of setting up their WordPress blog. They have themes or designs they like better than others. They like certain color schemes.
They like to go in and they like to make the permalinks or the structure or their pages or the navigation a certain way. They like to put certain things on the widget sidebar and so on.
Setup your blog exactly the way you want.
You’re going to set up certain plugins and then set those settings for those plugins in a variety of different ways.
You’re going to be setting the settings for WordPress itself. For example, how comments are approved, how the posts look, how the dates look.
You might be changing certain files. You’re going to be adding your own files, adding your own articles, your own videos, your own written content, but you’ll be setting up WordPress in your own specific way.
Once that site is set up exactly the way you want to, we get a WordPress backup plugin, back it up to (2 files), and create a new WordPress blog somewhere else.
In many cases, but not in every case, this could be on a different website, different domain name, different webserver entirely, and you will restore your backup in this new location.
Restoring basically restores the files in the database but that’s all you need because the files include the themes and the plugins and the database includes your tweaks, your settings, and your written and video content.
Setup WordPress, tweak it out exactly the way you want to do it, back it up then restore it in a new location.