Creating a Copy of Your Website

Creating a Copy of Your Website

This guide walks you through the steps to create a copy of a website via our platform. The copy feature is useful if you want to create a staging version of your live site and duplicates the files and database so you get an exact copy to work on without effecting your live site.

Are you looking for the site duplication tool and staging site tool? We have consolidated both of these features into the Copy tool giving you one simplified interface for creating copies of your sites.

You can use the tool to create a copy of your site on the same server as your live site. You can also use the feature to copy the site to another server if you have multiple servers with us.

Please note that the copy tool is not compatible with multi-sites.

Steps

1. From the Website Dashboard click "Copy" on the lower left hand side of the page.

Then enter the Domain and set your preferences below, before clicking on 'Create Copy Website'

Note: You can tick the Destination Server box if you would like to create the copy of the site on another server.

2. Our platform will then start creating the new copy of the site for you. You will be presented the below screen which allows you to go to the website dashboard for the new site. If you want to stay where you are, click "Ok".

Follow on steps

As indicated in step 2 of this guide, The system will not update your sites database connection string, nor will it update any URL's in your sites database.

For WordPress sites:

  • You will need to change the wp-config.php file to reflect the database name, database user & database password for the new site.
  • You will also need to update the URL in the wp-options table in the database to reflect the new staging URL. This can be done by accessing phpMyAdmin on the sites Databases page from within the platform.

For Magento 2 sites:

  • You will need to change the env.php file located in "public/app/etc/env.php" to reflect the database name, database user & database password for the new site.
  • You will also need to update the URL in the core_config_data table in the database to reflect the new staging URL. This can be done by accessing phpMyAdmin on the sites Databases page from within the platform.
  • And lastly you will need to clear the sites cache.

In general, you may also need to edit your PHP Configuration section to either remove or make amendments to file paths that will be different due to your site copy having a different domain name. If you are using plugins such as Wordfence or Malcare, you will also need to make amendments to site files (.user.ini, wordfence-waf.php, etc) to work with the new site home file paths.