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 glad tools like Softaculous Staging exist. In this guide, we’ll show you how to make the most of it... and make changes with peace of mind.

Test Clone

The staging tool lets us quickly create a copy of our site without affecting the live content. This way, we can run tests, apply updates, try out new features, or anything else, all without risk. Once everything works just as we want it to, we can move the changes to the live site.

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

cpanel.nuestrositio.com

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

Note: cPanel is included with all our hosting plans.

Next, click the following button:

Then, find and click the blue icon:

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

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

Then, 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 keep in mind that we’ll 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 Test Site

After making a copy of our live site, we can implement changes and run tests freely, without worry. We can update a theme, the WordPress version, or a plugin, modify functions.php, or do anything else: 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 live 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 happy with the changes, experiments, updates, or anything else we’ve done on the test site, we can replace our live website in just a couple of clicks. Note that we can also leave our staging site intact in case 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 changes might cause.

Let’s look at how to replace the live site with the "staged" or cloned site, step by step.

As before, we’ll log in to cPanel, find Softaculous in the Software section, and go to the active installations.

Next to our cloned site, click the "push to live" button to send all the changes to the live site.

Next, choose the Customize tab to make a few choices. These include deciding whether to overwrite files and folders, replace the live database with the clone’s database (for example, if we received comments on our blog in the meantime, they would be lost), or choose which parts of the database to change.

Check the options for the items we want to publish. When we’re done, click the blue button shown in the screenshot above. As when we created the test clone, we’ll see a progress bar followed by a success message.