How To Quickly And Easily Clone Your WordPress Blog

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Larry Herrin writes:

I’d like to see an article outlining a method or methods to clone a WordPress blog. By that I mean setting up a blog just how you want it, with all the pages you want, plugin configurations done, etc., and then easily copy that whole thing in order to be able to move it to another URL. Talk about a timesaver! What do you think?

Larry, I think I like it!

As it turns out, an acquaintance of mine pinged me on Skype yesterday and grilled me for more or less this same information. Sounds like a hint to me.

Cloning your WordPress blog now

Cloning your WordPress blog right now really depends on 2 things:

1. How fast you want it done.
2. How much money you want to spend.

You have several options:

1. Do it yourself. These directions should be all you need if you have even a little bit of technical background.
2. Hire a “pro,” pay a lot, get it done (hopefully) really fast and really accurately. You can use this article as part of your due diligence to ensure your pro got it right.
3. Outsource it: craigslist, elance, getafreelancer, etc. You can use this article as part of your proposal.
4. Hire me for reasonable rates, 100% satisfaction money back guarantee, and put me on it soon while I have time in my schedule.

I’m not going to ask why you want to clone a blog, that’s your business. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a hassle and try to avoid it if possible. But sometimes, it’s necessary… so let’s proceed.

How to clone a WordPress blog

First, the most fundamental question to ask when cloning a blog is this: Do you need to preserve your current search engine rankings (SERPs)?

If you don’t have enough SERPs to matter, everything gets a lot easier: set up the new blog, export from the old, import into the new, you’re done.

If you do have SERPs that matter, you will need to take some extra care to preserve your rankings by using 301 redirections either at the blog level, .htaccess level, or directly in the Apache configuration files.

Suppose you have a temporary worpress installation running “client.mydomain.com” and you want to switch it to something like “blog.client.com.”

Here is an 8 step procedure for cloning that blog:

1. Set up the initial account using a subdomain like http://client.mydomain.com/ (or whatever). Install WordPress, create the blog or website as needed.
2. Redirect from http://blog.client.com/ to http://client.mydomain.com/
3. Later, install on client at http://blog.client.com/
4. Copy the WordPress installation, including all uploaded files, plugins, etc. from client.mydomain.com to blog.client.com.
5. Export database from http://client.mydomain.com/ using the WordPress Export function from the administation menu
6. Import database to http://blog.client.com/ using the WordPress Import function from the administation menu
7. Remove redirect from http://blog.client.com/ to http://client.mydomain.com/.
8. Adjust internal blog.client.com permalinks as necessary.
9. If you require maintaining SERPs, adjust redirections using WordPress plugins, .htaccess and Apache configuration as necessary.

This will get you very close to retaining most, if not all of your SERPs. Frankly, I’m not an HTTP 301 redirection nor an Apache .htaccess expert, but these tools are not hard to learn. I teach myself what I need to know as I go and you can too. If you’re willing to carry the 301s on your original server for, say, a few months to a year, you should lose very little ranking.

The last step of setting up redirections really is the trickiest part. If maintaining SERPs is critical, subbing out just that last step to an Apache guru couldn’t cost more than a few hundred bucks, at worst, and once you have it correctly implemented for one site, any other sites you need to clone should follow the same pattern.

If you’re a consultant and building blogs on spec, I wouldn’t even bother with maintaining SERPs. I doubt the client will have enough initial traffic on that URL to matter, and if they do, they should already have a blog/website maintenance budget in place.

Doing this on Bluehost is almost absurdly easy. I’ve had accounts at Bluehost over 2 years, and I am an affiliate as well. I’m running over 50 top level domains on a single BH account, several of these are low traffic blogs, with a couple of higher traffic blogs, and the rest are parked. I’ve had no problems at all.

Comments welcome!