Cloning your website can be a useful way to create a quick copy of your website to test whether or not applying an update, adding a new plugin, or making a change to your website could break anything, allowing you to potentially break your website while leaving the original production website untouched. Once you're happy an update or config change is going to be ok, you can then replicate that on the live site confidently.
Tip - This can also be really useful if you need to give a plugin or theme developer access to your site but don't want to give them access to your live site. Just clone the site, have them troubleshoot and fix on the clone, and then ask them what they did so you can replicate on your live site without exposing customer data or your other information to a third party.
To clone your website you will first need to find the domain you would like to clone and click the "Clone" button, this can be found in the same row as the WordPress Icon.
There are 2 target options to choose from when cloning the website.
1. Create Subdomain
If you have not already set up a subdomain for the cloned website you can do so here, by default the new subdomain will be "staging" however, this can be changed to anything that does not already exist.
2. Use existing domain or subdomain
If you have an existing domain you would like to clone the website to you can click the dropdown and select the appropriate target.
Once the target has been set you can click "Start" and the cloning and domain setup process will start. Once completed you will have an exact replicate of your website, you can login to the WordPress dashboard either via Plesk control panel or with the usual login details but on your newly created subdomain instead. So for the second example above the WordPress dashboard would be at test2.example.uk/wp-admin
Note - Your cloned site will have all the same data as your live site, so if you initiate an action that might email a customer or all users then this will actually send to your real customers and users. So be careful!
