Imagine you are a developer. You once made a site that you were so proud of, you now wish you could replicate it for all your clients.
What if you could make a quick copy of that hero site, and then tweak it to suit your new clients’ needs?
With the latest feature brought to you by our hardworking Engineering Team—Copy Site—you can do just that!
What is Copy Site?
Copy Site is a new feature that allows you to create multiple copies of your existing production sites.
- Copy Site allows you to copy one site over to another existing site.
- There is also an Add option that allows you to create a new install that is a replica of an existing site.
The result is similar to a staging environment. But instead of being limited to two fixed environments (staging and production), WP Engine’s customers can now make use of multiple environments.
What Can Copy Sites Do?
Copy Site aims to ease all sorts of workflows. For example, starting a new site from a full copy—or strawman copy of a site you already own—is much faster than starting from scratch. Or, you may want more than just one testing environment.
For the full list of what you can and can’t do with Copy Site, please check out the Copy Site Article in our Support Garage.
Who Can Use Copy Site?
Copy Site is particularly aimed at site developers and business owners who need to own, create, and manage multiple sites on their account.
The number of environments you can use will depend on how many installs are allowed in your plan and how many copies you make.
Here are the finer details:
- Personal accounts include one site. (You have the option of purchasing one extra site.)
- Professional customers have access to up to 10 sites.
- Business accounts include up to 25 sites.
- Premium and Enterprise accounts have unlimited access to Copy Sites.*
* Access varies per custom plan.
Getting Started
The best place to start is the relevant article in our Support Garage, where you will find step-by-step instructions and answers to likely FAQs.
Once again, thanks to everyone that requested this feature! Your feedback enables us to keep innovating—with the goal of bringing you the best possible customer experience for a WordPress platform.
This came at just the right moment. I have to duplicate a site and I was wondering if there was an easier way to do it!
Nice work WPE. I cannot wait to see what else you have up your sleeve.
So glad we could help out Mitchell, and we definitely have some more good stuff up our sleeves we can’t wait to show you.
As a developer this is a great addition to an already excellent hosting solutions. Thanks guys this will save hours of mundane set up of sites.
Thanks,
Jim
Jim, thank you for the compliments. We saw saving that mundane time as an opportunity to give you more value for hosting at WP Engine, and it sounds like you see it the same way. So happy we could help!
Fantastic work. Good for us developers. If you could allow integration with ManageWP and/or allow easy import of site that would be great. Import which include search/replace of old and new URLs within serialized entries in db.
Now that would shave a lot of time and headache for us.
Thanks for your feedback Elliot. We had developers in mind at the onset of this feature, so it’s a good confirmation that you’ll get good use out of this feature.
Thank you also for the suggestion on migrations. We know those are a painful part of changing hosting, and we are investing in ways of making migrations more painless every day.
Doing 4 migrations to WP Engine today alone!
Using this for migrations: http://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/
Might be worth looking at integrating.
Thank you!!! We’ve been hoping this would come soon!
Johnathan, this is something we’ve been working on for a while and we were excited to release it. We hope you find this new feature as helpful as we intended it to be.
This is very cool. :o)
Thanks so much.
This is a great addition to an already fabulous service
Thank you for the generous compliment. We’re not done innovating yet!
This is a great new feature that will be a real time saver! Thank you so much and keep up the great work!
Thanks so much Joe. Glad to hear we’re saving you time. It’s implicitly one of our goals as part of being Customer Inspired.
Yes!
I’d been doing botched clones myself and it was getting tedious. This is amazing. Thank you WPE.
Hooray! So glad to hear it’s working well for you, and saving you from both tedious and error prone work!
Awesome… thanks for the new feature… WPEngine is just getting better and better…
Now all we need is a manual “reset install” button instead of having to contact support to do it for us…
Thanks for the complement.
“Reset” is a feature we hear often, and we’re working on perfecting it for you all.
This is a really useful feature, thanks for releasing it! It will help us a lot in our operations.
Glad it’s helping.
Awesome news.
I have been meaning to clone my site to cater to regional audiences whilst keeping content more-or-less the same.
This would be a huge productivity-gain tool.
Thanks WPE.
Glad it’s a help for you! We love hearing more use cases of how teams are using Copy Site!
This is great new feature and is there any way to copy a site within a multisite install or a subsite from a multisite to a new single install or within a new multisite install?
Thank you. Unfortunately no this functionality does not copy sites within a multisite install, nor does it allow you extract subsites to a new install. We understand working with multisite is tricky, and we’re working on some ways to make it more manageable. More to come.
Many thanks for the added info and I’m looking forward to seeing what you do here.
me too! This would be very helpful for multisite, as we add new sites etc!
I know we can download zip backups of the site from backup points
But is there a way to import / restore a site from the .zip we downloaded or is this a “customer service support ticket” kind of mission? Do we need to upload the .zip file to support and have them restore/import from it?
and is this a feature to consider adding in the future to let us manually import/restore from .zip?
—-
and my last question, I could swear there was a delete backup point button in the past, or maybe it’s my memory being cloudy and playing mind-tricks on me… how do I delete backup points that I have manually created? (not talking about automatic backup points)
I’m a big fan of WPEngine and hope to see the service improve in the future. It’s great value for money and support goes beyond the call of duty to help and assist. A+ to support!
You can restore from backups from directly within the portal, but .zip downloads would require some help from Support. We’ve been thinking of adding .zip file support in the portal, so thank you for the feature request & validation.
You can’t delete backups, but since they’re not really counted against you, we feel you shouldn’t really need to. I’d love to hear more about why you’d like to be able to delete them.
Cool feature guys and absolutely love WPEngine:)
Quick question: If we are using 1 site for developing new ideas with 10s of web developers on it how do we use this copy feature without copying the users from site 2 to site 1, which is our Main Cazoomi site?
~Clint
@cazoomi
thanks for that great solution!
HK