Cloning is not bad, not at all – when we talk about WordPress

clone a WordPress site

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Over the years, medical research and experimentation around clonation have surrounded the term “Clone” with a halo of wickedness. The picture heading this post seems to demonstrate one of these bad practices from the past, but nothing further from reality. In 1925, Brangulí captured the “Artificial Solarium” for infants of unmarried mothers in the “Pabellón Rosa – Casa Provincial de Maternidad y Expósitos” in Barcelona.

At Wetopi, we use the term “clone” for the “good practices”,  to clone our WordPress sites.
It is important to note that a Clone is more than just a backup or a test sandbox environment.

A clone of our WordPress is an alive replica of our website.

It is alive because we can work with this clone as if it were the original.
It is a replica because the clone not only is a copy of the contents of our original WordPress but the whole infrastructure that runs it: database, web server, config files, etc.

Why cloning?

Basically to not break our production WordPress. For instance:

  • Do you plan to update WordPress, plugins or templates? Then better do this on a clone!
  • Do you have to try a new template or plugin? Then the experiments better on a clone. This way we will not bother our users or mess up our WordPress with code that we will never use.
  • Have an emergency and have to ask for external help? You can create a couple of clones and send them to two different WordPress developers. Both developers will work in parallel without risking our production site. Furthermore, they won’t spend extra time setting up their sandboxes, they are playing with a full functional clone of our production site 😉

How to clone?

Each Wetopi site has three clone slots. Which means you can have up to three clones running at the same time. You can have one of those clones promoted to “production”. This clone will  be your “live” site:

wordpress site con dos clones libres

To create a clone from an existing Clone, we simply have to open the “Menu Options” and then click on the action “Clone”:

Web con espacio para crear dos clones
site con dos clones

Depending on the size of our WordPress, this process will take between 5 and 10 seconds. At the end “voilà” our new clone will be ready under a new subdomain of wetopi.com (E.g., demo.a.wetopi.com):

This new clone is deployed on a new server an is an exact copy of the original. The only thing that distinguishes it from its original is the URL.

By opening the options menu, we can see the available “actions” this clone accepts and all the credentials related to this new server:

menu opciones de un clon WordPress
(Note: WordPress users and credentials will be preserved. This is considered part of the contents).

Do not forget, a clone can also become someone.

It may be that the new template, plugin or update works as we desired!
Brilliant!
We haven’t wasted our time..

With Wetopi, we can promote a Clone to production with just one click. You’ll find the action “Promote to production” in the options menu.

Opción Promueve a producción

As a result of promoting the clone, this clone inherits the production domain, the one we have assigned to the site.

sign up in just seconds and try clonation by yourself


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