Are you a control C + control V or a right-click copy/paste person?
Whether you love a good keyboard shortcut or swear by the mouse, if you work on websites, you’ve probably wondered why it isn’t just as easy to duplicate a page in WordPress.
This post shows you how to quickly duplicate a page in WordPress and reviews some special considerations when you clone pages.
The main reasons to duplicate a page are because you’re trying to create a page that uses many of the same design elements, or because you need to reuse some of the content or design.
Some people also choose to duplicate pages and keep them as drafts while working on a new version of a live page. Then they swap out the draft for the live one.
Cloning pages can be a huge time saver, especially when building a new website. But there are other methods you can use to save yourself some work.
If you need to reuse the same layout or include the same content on multiple pages, consider creating a template page or using the new block patterns. The new full-site editor makes creating page templates easier. If you’re only interested in replicating one section, the block patterns are a great solution. We cover the details on how they work in our post on what are WordPress block patterns.
You don’t have to use a block-compatible theme or the new full-site editing features. Many page builders like Elementor or Divi also include options for creating page templates and reusable blocks.
If you’re duplicating live pages so you can work on them without publishing your changes, you might want to consider using a staging site instead. Instead of duplicating a page, you’ll duplicate your entire site into a testing environment. You can make all the changes you want and then replace the live site with the updated one. The ability to make changes behind the scenes is one of the many benefits of staging sites for WordPress and why Pressable offers our clients staging sites. Learn how to create a staging site for WordPress.
The alternatives work great, but in some cases, you still need to clone an entire page. Unfortunately, duplicating a page is not a native function of WordPress.
The WordPress.com version includes this option, but the open source version of WordPress requires you to manually enable it or install a plugin.
Some people recommend editing your functions.php file to include the PHP code allowing you to duplicate a page or post. If you’re a savvy coder, go ahead. But if you’re not comfortable editing your site’s core code, using a plugin is much easier. Another disadvantage to editing the functions.php file is that your changes can easily get overwritten every time you update your theme.
Installing a plugin is a faster and simpler way to enable page duplication. Most plugins give you the option to duplicate a page from the page listings or while you’re editing a page. You can search page duplication in the WordPress plugin directory or try one of our picks.
Duplicating pages can save a lot of time when developing a large site, but you must be careful. If you get into too big of a rush, you could overlook two important details impacting your site’s search engine rankings.
First, when duplicating your page, check to see what the page slug is. Many plugins will simply add a number to the end of the original slug. For example, if you duplicated your services page, the URL might be yourwebsite.com/services-2. Even if you update the page title to About Us, the URL slug will still say services-2 until you update it.
Web pages with original text rank higher in search than pages that you obviously duplicated. When you duplicate a page, update the copy to help distinguish the new page from the one you copied. Even moderate rewording will help the page perform better. You don’t have to worry about static content like footers or navigation, but try to keep the body copy of your page unique.
Cloning a page in WordPress is only one of the ways you can make building a site easier. One of the best ways to take the headache and hassles out of building and managing WordPress sites is to use Pressable’s managed WordPress hosting service. Our platform is simple and fast. You can set up a new site in a couple of clicks. We offer unlimited staging sites and unparalleled security and support.
Schedule a demo to see why we consistently rank as a favorite host for WordPress.
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