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 explain how to make the most of it... and make changes with peace of mind.

Staging Clone

The staging tool allows us to quickly create a copy of our site without compromising the online content. This way, we can run tests, perform updates, try out new features, or whatever else we need, all without risk. Once we’re finished, and everything works exactly as we want it to, we move the changes to the public 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 in all our hosting plans.

Next, we’ll click the following button:

Then we’ll look for and click the blue icon:

On the screen that appears, we can make some decisions:

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

Then we’ll select the site to clone. If we only have 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 public 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 anything else we need: no one will see the changes until we decide to publish them. Once we’re finished, we can delete the test site or replace the online content with the changes made in the clone.
Note: making changes to our online site does not affect our clone either.

Replacing Our Online Site

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

Let’s see how to replace the online site with the "staged" or cloned site, step by step.

As we did earlier, 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 public site.

Next, we’ll select the customization tab (Customize) so we can make some decisions. These include deciding whether to overwrite the 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 will be lost), or choose which parts of the database to change.

We’ll check the options we want to publish online. Once we’re done, we’ll click the blue button indicated in the screenshot above. Just as when we created the test clone, we’ll see a progress bar followed by a success message.