Have you ever encounter a situation where you need to quickly duplicate a WordPress page or post?
Duplicating a post sounds trivial — unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in functionality.
You can’t do it out-of-the-box.
In this post, I’ll show you how to quickly duplicate a WordPress page or post with a simple click.
Why Duplicate a Page or Post?
When building a website, there’re times when you need to run A/B testing for optimizing your website conversion. Usually, the changes you need to test are very minor. For this reason, you need to quickly produce these pages in a short period of time.
Not only that, you might be creating a blog post series where the layout of parts of the content is similar. So you want to duplicate an existing post and update the actual content.
When you’re just starting out, manually cloning a couple of posts or pages are fine — just a little chore. But as your site grows big, suddenly these little chores becomes a daunting task.
The good news is there’s a simple way to duplicate posts and pages in WordPress.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Duplicating a post or page makes it easier to run A/B test for your content marketing and campaign.” quote=”Duplicating a post or page makes it easier to run A/B test for your content marketing and campaign.”]
How to Duplicate a Page in WordPress?
The easiest way to duplicate a WordPress page or post is to use a plugin — yes, a plugin. And the best plugin you could install and use is the Duplicate Post plugin. As its name implies, this plugin only does one thing and it does it best.
Duplicate Post is a free WordPress plugin — with over 3 million active installations — that lets you duplicate a post or page in WordPress with a single click. With this plugin, you could grant the functionality to specific user roles for your site. By default, only Administrator and Editor are allowed to copy. But if you have a huge team consists of authors, or contributes, you could grant them access too.
First, install and activate the Duplicate Post plugin. Once activated, either go to Post > All Posts or Page > All Pages. Now, you should see 2 new options to clone or create a new draft.
Clicking on ‘Clone’ will simply create a new duplicate post. Don’t get mistaken with WordPress clone plugin.
Whereas, clicking on ‘New Draft’ will duplicate the post and open it for you to work on it right away. The same applies to pages as well.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Duplicate a post with 1 click with Duplicate Post plugin.” quote=”Duplicate a post with 1 click with Duplicate Post plugin.”]
Personalized Duplicate Post Settings
This plugin works out of the box by default and most of the time you don’t have to make any changes. However, there are few settings you could configure to extend its behavior.
You could set a prefix or suffix to be added before or after the title of the post or pages. For example, you could set prefix “Copy of” so any duplicated posts or pages’ title will start with “Copy of … “.
You could also extend this plugin support beyond posts and pages. The plugin will detect available custom post types for your theme and you could choose to support those as well.
Go to Settings > Duplicate Post to customize its settings. On the first tab, you could choose what elements a duplicate post/page should inherit. Basically what you want to clone. You could also set the title prefix and suffix here.
On the next tab, Permissions, you could choose which user roles and post types have access to this feature. By default, Administrator and Editor are allowed to create duplicate posts and only posts and pages are enabled.
Final Thoughts
So in WordPress, which duplicate post plugin is the best?
While there are few other plugins available to duplicate posts and pages, Duplicate Post plugin is the most popular and the only one I recommend.
With this plugin, it’s easy to create different posts and pages. You could run different tests to increase your traffic, conversion, and improve your content readability.
If you haven’t started on your own blog yet, check out our detailed guide to get you started in no time. Or better yet, make use of our free WordPress site setup service.
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i didnt know you could do this, thanks for info!!
Wow this is a great post to help other bloggers. I never would have thought about duplicating a post but you’ve shown me that there could be a need for it. Especially when writing a series. I have thought about doing click through blog posts from one week to the other but they seemed like such a hassle to write and set up. The tips in your article show me that it could actually be pretty easy. Thank you!
I did a mini-series where I copied and pasted a couple of times. If only I’ve known about it sooner myself.
Thanks for this post! I wish I had read this sooner because I had to copy and paste everything from an old post over to a new post today.
Been there, done that. I’m a victim of copy and paste too.