How to Easily Duplicate a WordPress Post or Page
There are lots of reasons why you might want to duplicate a WordPress post or page. One reason is that it allows you to work on content without affecting the original version. Another is providing an easy way for clients to look at content and make changes before it goes live.
Whatever your goal, duplicating pages or posts in WordPress is easy enough to do with plugins, even if you can’t do it out-of-the-box.
- Why Duplicate Content
- 4 Plugins for Duplicating WordPress Pages or Posts
- How to Duplicate a Page on Your WordPress Site
Why Duplicate Content
In this post, I’ll run you through some great options for helping you duplicate content. But first, let’s look at reasons why you’d benefit from having the ability to duplicate pages and posts on your site.
Consistency
Consistency is crucial in web design, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cut corners. In fact, if you have a tool to help you duplicate a page’s layout or settings, you’ll probably be more effective at maintaining consistency sitewide.
Edit Live Pages
There are a number of ways you can go about making edits to a live website.
- You can use a Git repository to make and save major changes, then sync them back to WordPress when they’re done.
- You can wait until your visitors are asleep (hopefully) and apply the changes directly to the live page.
- Or you can duplicate the page or post, make as many extensive edits as you want to it within WordPress, and then publish those changes (and replace the old page) when it’s 100% ready.
Shorten Development Time
If you specialize in developing sites for a specific niche or industry, you know that those websites often cover the same ground in terms of pages, layouts, and so on. Rather than build every new client site from scratch, you can save time (and make more money in the process) by first creating a page template to use as a base. Once you’ve created the first page and personalized it for your client, you can then duplicate that page’s style and settings to use across the rest of their site.
Since WordPress.org does not give us a way to duplicate pages or posts, and there’s no easy way to introduce this into the code, we, of course, need to look to plugins for help.
4 Plugins for Duplicating WordPress Pages or Posts
There are 4 plugins you can use when your goal is to duplicate or clone an entire page—and its corresponding settings—in WordPress. Let’s take a look at what each can do and then I’ll walk you through an example of how to duplicate a page on your WordPress site.
We’ll cover the following WordPress duplication plugins:
Duplicate Page Plugin
Although the name of this plugin implies that it only works with pages, it does in fact also enable users to duplicate posts. All you need to do is install the plugin and then you’ll find a new option provided beneath each page or post entry in WordPress called “Duplicate This”. Simply select the option and watch as a full copy of the page or post is made.
More details: Duplicate Page Plugin
Duplicate Post Plugin
This plugin works for posts and pages, and it’s definitely a helpful one to have if intend on recreating the magic from certain content on your site again and again. Not only do you have the option to “Clone” a post, but you can clone multiple posts all at once. Within each post, you can also select the option to “Copy to a new draft” under your Publish settings.
More details: Duplicate Post Plugin
Page and Post Clone Plugin
This plugin works similarly to the two above. Once installed, all you need to do is go to your Posts or Pages list and find the one you want to duplicate. Hover over it and select “Clone” to create the copy. The duplicate will automatically be created as a draft.
More details: Page and Post Clone Plugin
Duplicator Plugin
Now, this plugin is a little different as it only duplicates entire websites. When would this come in handy? Well, if you’ve recently completed a website for Client A and know that a similar company needs a website structured much like the one for Client A, you can use this plugin to save time building it from scratch. You can also use this if Client A has multiple websites they want created, all with a similar structure but branded differently.
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More details: Duplicator
Just one word of caution here: be careful about duplicating a page or post with these plugins. If you don’t take a moment to update the settings, you could end up with duplicate pages that immediately go live the second you make a copy. There are other things to think about as well in terms of which elements of the page you want copied. You can control all of this within the settings, so make sure to adjust those before making any duplicates.
How to Duplicate a Page on Your WordPress Site
For the following example, I’m going to use the Duplicate Post plugin, which you can find here.
Step 1
Once you’ve downloaded and installed your plugin, visit the Settings page. You can get to this either by clicking on Settings beneath the plugin name in the Plugins list:
Or by navigating to the Settings tab in WordPress and locating the new Duplicate Post option:
Step 2
There are three pages of settings to review and customize:
1. What to copy , which includes the various page elements you may want to include in your duplicate post or page. You can also customize the name of the new page so you can more easily identify the copy.
2. Permissions , which includes two types of allowances. One for the users that have the ability to create duplicate content and one for the type of content you’re allowed to duplicate.
3. Display, which allows you to set the visibility of the clone option. My suggestion is to select all of them, so you never have to backtrack and try and remember where to go to create a duplicate copy of your content.
Step 3
When you have a post or page you’re ready to copy, go to Posts or Pages to find it.
For single page cloning, hover over the page and click on:
- Clone if you want to create an exact copy of the page or post. This means that if the page is currently published, the copy you create will be published too.
- New Draft if you want to create a copy of the page or post, but set it to Draft so you can work on it without having to worry about it going live before it’s ready.
For bulk page cloning, click on the pages you want to duplicate. Then click on the drop-down just above the list of pages or posts that says “Bulk Actions.” Drop it open and click on Clone.
If you’ve just wrapped work on a new page and want to create a draft duplicate of it without having to navigate back to your Posts or Pages, you can also Copy to a new draft from beneath that page’s Publish settings.
And if that weren’t enough, you also have one more option to create a duplicate with this plugin. If you open a Preview of your page, take a look at the admin bar at the top of your screen. You’ll now see a “Copy to a new draft” option up there as well. Talk about streamlining your process and saving time.
Wrapping Up
As you work on gaining a higher quality of clientele, you don’t have time to waste on menial tasks that can easily be automated with a plugin. Duplicating pages and posts is one of those such tasks.
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Brenda Barron Brenda is a freelance writer from Southern California. She specializes in WordPress, tech, and business and founded WP Theme Roundups. When not writing about all things, she's spending time with her family.