How to Clone an Application with Softaculous

Updating something on our site, modifying code, or changing a plugin’s settings can—and often does—cause errors and/or incompatibilities. Suddenly, our site may look different or even break. That’s why we’re grateful for tools like Softaculous Staging. In this guide, we’ll explain how to make the most of it... and make changes with confidence.

Test Clone

The staging tool, or “staging environment,” allows us to quickly create a copy of our site without affecting the content online. This lets us run tests, perform updates, try out new features, or do whatever we need, all without risk. Once everything works exactly as we want, we can move the changes to the live site.

To get started, we need to access our website’s cPanel:

cpanel.ourwebsite.com

After entering the appropriate credentials, we look for the Softaculous icon in the Software section.

Note: cPanel is included with all our hosting plans.

Next, we’ll click the following button:

Then, we’ll find and click the blue icon:

On the screen that appears, we can make a few decisions:

We need to choose our site’s protocol from the available options: http://www, http://, https://, and https://www.

Next, we’ll select the site to clone. If we have only one, it will appear by default.

Next, we can enter a folder name, for example, ejemplo.com/test. This is optional, but remember that we’ll then access our test site at ejemplo.com/test

We can also change the database name (optional).

Then, simply click the blue "Create Staging" button. When the process is complete, we’ll see a success message.

Testing Our Site

After creating a copy of our live site, we can freely implement changes and run tests without worry. We can update a Theme, the WordPress version, or a plugin, modify functions.php, or do whatever we need—no one will see the changes until we decide to publish them. When we’re done, we can delete the test site or replace the online content with the changes made to the clone. Note: making changes to our live site does not affect our clone either.

Replacing Our Live Site

Once we’re satisfied with the changes, experiments, updates, or anything else carried out on the test site, we can replace our live website with just a couple of clicks. Note that we can also leave our staging site intact if we want to run more tests in the future. This makes Softaculous’s staging tool an excellent way to protect our content from any issues that a modification might cause.

Let’s see how to replace the live site with the “staged,” or cloned, site step by step.

As before, we’ll access cPanel, look for Softaculous in the Software section, and go to the active installations.

Next to our cloned site, we need to click the "push to live" button—that is, send all the changes to the live site.

Next, we’ll select the customization tab (Customize) so we can make a few decisions. Among other things, we can decide whether to overwrite files and folders, replace the public database with the clone’s database (if, for example, we received messages on our blog in the meantime, they would be lost), or choose which parts of the database to change.

We’ll select at our discretion what we want to upload online. Once finished, we’ll click the blue button indicated in the screenshot above. As when we created the test clone, we’ll see a progress bar followed by a success message.