You may need to duplicate page or posts from your website for a variety of reasons. Making a clone of a post or page enables you to work on it without impacting the original.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to duplicate a page or any kind of post in WordPress.
This is a quick and very useful tip that can be helpful for a number of reasons.
Actually, this tip I am going to show you right now is among the first 2-3 things I do with all my WordPress websites.
It’s super simple to do and I’m going to explain in the instructions below. Also, the video shows you the steps.
Why do you need to duplicate page or post in WordPress?
As I already said, duplicating a page or any kind of post in WordPress is useful. For example, cloning or duplicating allows you to use a certain page as a template, so you can create similar content over and over again starting from the same page.
In another case, it could be on a website redesign where you want to duplicate a page but you also want to keep the original, so if you just need to make tiny changes, that’s a great way to use this functionality.
Doing this in WordPress is simple, but it’s not very obvious because WordPress doesn’t have native cloning or duplicating functionality.
Let’s see how we can fix this right here on WordPress.
The traditional method of duplicating a page would be to open it up. You would then copy the entire content, and then you would create a new page, give it a title and then paste in all of that content.
You know this works at some level, but it’s not the best way because this is not a duplication of that page.
Basically, copying the content over a page in WordPress is much more than just the content.
You have to set things like permalinks, featured images, page attributes, not to mention page templates.
When you’re just copying the content using copy and paste, all of these page attributes are not copied with it, so you would have to redo them all over again.
Duplicate Post Plugin
To add the duplication functionality to WordPress, we can use a plugin.
So go to plugins to add a new plugin and we’re going to search here for a plugin called Duplicate Post.
Let’s go ahead and install it and activate it.
Now if you go to the pages, you will see that we have two extra options when we hover on a page in this list.
We have a clone and we have a new draft.
- Clone: If we do a clone, it’s going to create a copy of that page and put it in draft mode.
- New Draft: If we say new draft, it’s going to do the same thing, but it’s going to automatically open the editor for us.
Also, if we had any featured images or different templates, these would get copied onto the page.
So not just the content but also all page attributes are copied.
As you can see in the screenshot below, now we have the original sample page and two more copies of it. One was created by the Clone function and it is still in draft mode and I have just published Sample page 2, which was created by the New-Draft function.
Duplicate Post for any kind of posts
Of course, this plugin also works with any kind of post, not just pages. It’s a very simple procedure using this free duplicate post plugin.
Its installation process added to the settings section of WordPress the Duplicate Post Settings. From there, we are able to define the specific post or page elements we want the plugin to copy each time. Such as the title, excerpt, feature image etc.
We can also exclude things, like, for example, post categories or tags, or product categories, etc.
In the Permissions tab, we can assign user roles authorised to use the plugin functionality. For example, only administrators or editors are allowed to use it. The enable for these post types defines what post types we want the clone functionality to be added to.
Usually, I enable posts, pages, orders, products, coupons, and portfolios, but it really depends on the type of project you are doing.
So make your choices and click on the Save button.
Video Review
Video review by: WPGoPro
Summary and Wrap Up
You may need to duplicate pages or posts on your website for a variety of reasons. WordPress doesn’t have native cloning or duplicating functionality. Use this amazing free plugin, Duplicate Post, to do it with just one click!
You may need to duplicate a page or post from your website for a variety of reasons. Use this amazing free plugin, Duplicate Post, to do it with a click.
Nick Kagelaris Tweet