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How To Duplicate WordPress Pages

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Introduction

Throughout the time that a user a work with WordPress, they may find that that might need to clone a post or a page. They may, for instance, want to reuse the existing content as a template for future articles. In other situations users may find that they might need to build on top of existing content so that they do nor have to start from scratch. In scenarios where a duplicate of a post/page is needed, simple copy pasting is not enough, primarily because the post/page has associated data and metadata that can’t be duplicated without a programming solution. Luckily, this can be done easily through the use of a plugin. Among the plugins that can do this, one that we can use is the Yoast Duplicate Post. As the name of the plugin suggests, this plugin allows us to clone posts (including pages) right out of the box.

In this article, we will be showing how to duplicate a post/page using the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin.

Duplicating WordPress Pages

1. Installing Yoast Duplicate Post

We first need to install the Yoast Duplicate Post. To do that, navigate to the “Add Plugins” page from the admin dashboard, search for “Yoast Duplicate Post”, then install and activate the plugin.

Click install now and activate.

Since the plugin works out of the box, we can start duplicating post/pages without any further setup.

2. Duplicating Posts/Pages

The Yoast Duplicate Post Plugin offers different ways to clone a page/post. Let’s look at them

Cloning a Single Post/Page

The first method is a single clone. To do this, we have to navigate to the “Posts” page in the admin dashboard. Here we see all the posts, draft and published. To clone a post, we need to hover over one and then click on the “Clone” link. Once we do that, the post will be cloned.

Choose the "Clone" link

Cloning pages work the same way, we hover over the page we need to clone and then click on the “Clone” link.

Choose the "Clone" link

We’ve seen how easy it is to clone single posts/pages. Now let’s look at Bulk cloning

Bulk Cloning Posts/Pages

We can clone multiple posts just as easily as we could with single post/pages. All we need to do is click on the checkboxes beside the Post’s name. Then we choose the “Clone” option from the “Bulk actions” drop down and then apply it. This will duplicated all selected posts.

Clone a post with "Bulk actions"

This process is the same for bulk cloning pages. We select the pages we need and then apply the “Clone” bulk action.

Clone a page with "Bulk actions"

3. Cloning a Post/Page to a Draft

The plugin also has a feature which allows us to edit a post/page where we can use an existing post/page as a template for new posts/pages. To show that, let’s look at the image below. Here, we can see that we have a post with a title and some content.

post

From the “Posts” page in the admin dashboard, we will hover over the post and click “New Draft”. Doing this will take us to the block editor. There we can see that the content we used a basis for the draft contains the exact content. From there we can edit the content like we normally would.

How to clone a post to a draft

We can also do the same thing if we’re a logged in user and we are viewing a post. In the admin bar we, can see a “Copy to a new Draft” link. Clicking on that link will also allow us to use the existing post/page as basis for a new post or page.

Choose the "copy to a new draft" link

That’s it. Cloning pages works in the same way.

That’s how easy it is to duplicate a post/page using the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin.

Configuring the Yoast Duplicate Post Plugin Settings

Though the Yoast Duplicate Post Plugin works when installed and activated, the plugin can also be configured, To configure the plugin, we hover over the “Settings” item on the menu dashboard then we click on the “Duplicate Post” item. This will redirect us to the settings page for the plugin. There are three tabs here, let’s view them one-by-one.

Settings

What to Copy

The plugin allows us to copy a post/page, but what if we don’t need to copy all post/page elements? We can configure that through the “What to copy” tab. Here we can see checkboxes for each post/page element. Clicking on a checkbox will allow the element to be copied whenever a post/page is cloned. And unchecking it does the opposite.

Choose the elements to copy

It is also here where we can choose to exclude fields and taxonomies from being copied.

exclude fields

Permissions

A WordPress site can have many users as we know. However, we don’t want all the users to be able to clone existing posts/pages as could cause the database to bloat. Thankfully, the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin allows us to configure which roles can clone content. We can configure that in the “Permissions” tab. Aside from that, we can also clone which post types can be cloned by checking/unchecking its checkbox.

Permissions setting

Display

Lastly, we have the “Display tab. Here we can configure whether we will be displaying the “Clone” links or hiding them.

display settings

It is also in this tab that we can configure whether to show which original post the cloned post/page is from. In our case, we chose to have it shown in a column in the “Posts” page. Here it is in the “Posts” page.

posts overview

Conclusion

We’ve come to the end of the article. We learned how to use the Yoast Duplicate Posts plugin and how easy it is to duplicate posts/pages. We’ve also seen how to configure it.

That’s all for the article. We hope that you learned from it.

Kristin Eitel

Kristin Eitel