How to Clone Your Website
If you’d like to move your website from another provider to Websavers or from another hosting account to your own, this is called a migration. You can learn how to migrate your website here. Or you can let us take care of it for you! Check out our SiteMigrator service here.
Requirements
- You cannot and should not clone an app to a destination that already contains a website. You should backup and remove any site content in the destination domain or subdomain first.
- If the source website isn’t yet showing in the list of apps under 1-click web apps in Plesk or web applications in the Client Centre, yet your website is powered by one of the supported web apps (such as WordPress, Magento, or Joomla), you should import it now.
Steps to clone your web app
- Option 1: Clone in the Client Centre
- Login to the Client Centre and Manage your hosting plan
- Under the Web Applications box, find the app you wish to clone and click the Manage button followed by the Clone button
- Select the destination. It could be a domain, subdomain and/or path you wish to copy the site to. You can also choose the option to create a new domain here.
- Click Clone or Continue to proceed with the clone.
- Option 2: Clone within Plesk
- Login to Plesk
- If you’re copying the site to a new domain or subdomain, and it hasn’t yet been added in Plesk, you must add your new domain now.
- Go to the 1-click web apps utility and find the web app in the list that runs your site
- Press the Clone button and select the new domain, subdomains and/or path
- If you’re creating a staging/development site, check the box beside “Create a staging site?”
- Click Clone or Continue to proceed with the clone.
That’s it! It will automatically update all configuration files and paths in the database for you as well as copy over all files.
Steps to clone a website not in 1-click web apps
If your website does not use an app found in 1-click web apps, you can follow these steps to clone it to another domain.
- Option 1: Use the Website Copying feature
- Go to Domains > example.com > Website Copying.
- Specify the following settings at the page:
- The Website in Plesk option is already selected by default.
- Select the destination domain in the Site name dropdown menu – in this case it will be dev.example.com or staging.example.com (whatever subdomain you created above).
- For What to do with existing files, choose Delete all existing files. It will delete all files on the destination site before copying, which is acceptable because your new subdomain should have no important data yet.
- Press the OK button to start the copying process.
- Option 2: Manually copy the files
- Backup the live site files, then remove them using FTP or the Plesk File Manager
- Use Plesk’s File Manager to find the folder that your development website resides in.
- Select all the contents in the folder, and click “add to archive” in the menu bar. Create a name for the archive and click OK.
- Click on the archive to highlight it, and use the “Move” button in the menu bar to move the archive to the folder for the live domain. This is often /httpdocs for the primary domain
- Navigate to the folder for the domain, click on the archive, and select “extract archive”.
Post-Clone Actions
- If you are only planning on using the website at the new URL, you should now remove the old site using 1-click web apps. This ensures it is not a security risk for your hosting account.
- If your clone was completed to move the site to a new domain, take a look over our guide to setting up a 301 redirect to ensure anyone reaching the old domain is redirected to the new one.
Troubleshooting
If the missing files are in a directory on the web root (e.g.: /fonts instead of /wp-content/fonts) there’s a very good chance that 1-click web apps simply doesn’t know that these files are part of the application.
Go to the 1 Click Web Apps tool, click on the site, and then go to the “Files and Tables” tab where you’ll see a list of all the files and folders that 1-Click believes are part of the web application. If you find the missing files not selected in the list, you can click the checkbox next to it and then click save at the bottom. Then, when you clone next, it will know that it is part of the content you wish to copy. You should do this for any files or folders you choose to put up that are outside of the “expected” WordPress structure.
You can now either copy the missing files over manually or move the files into your child theme’s folder; that is where they belong after all!
See this knowledge base article to learn how to fix 500 errors.
Solution 1: Try manually re-saving your theme settings (note, not WordPress settings — the settings fields that pertain only to the theme), it will fixing everything with a simple click of the save button.
Solution 2: Look for an option in the theme settings to export your data from the old/source version of the site, then import that file it provides into the new/destination version of the site.
Solution 3: If you’ve encountered this problem after manually running a find/replace on your database and this is your only option for importing the data, you can then run this script on your sql file. It will update the character counts for all serialized data in your database dump. Then import the sql file and you should be all set.
This occurs when the WordPress source site’s database is configured wrong in 1-click web apps. When it clones the site, it’s taking the data from the wrong database and so the destination doesn’t end up with any of the site’s configuration or content.
The most common reason Installatron can be configured with the wrong database info is if your site was at some point cloned/duplicated/imported using a utility other than 1-click web apps as those scenarios often create different databases that 1-click web apps doesn’t know about.
Solution: inform 1-click web apps about the correct database in the source app, then re-clone the site. This is done by going to 1-clickw eb apps and clicking the wrench icon for the site you were cloning (the source, not the destinatino). Go to the Files & Tables tab and change the database name to the correct database. Save, remove the destination site (cloned one that failed) and then clone it again.
Posted in Client Centre & Plesk
About Websavers
Websavers provides web services like Canadian WordPress Hosting and VPS Hosting to customers all over the globe, from hometown Halifax, CA to Auckland, NZ.
If this article helped you, our web services surely will as well! We might just be the perfect fit for you.