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Move WordPress Websites With Orion

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clone-managewp

Making changes to a live website is exciting, in an “I am sooo dead if I don’t fix this before anyone notices” kind of way. I’ve crashed websites. I’ve broken forms, made whole sections of sites disappear. Learning was fun.

Over time I learned that WordPress professionals handle the changes by creating staging versions of the websites, where I could do anything I want without jeopardizing live (also known as production) websites. The idea is pretty straightforward: perform all the updates, modify the CSS, change the layout, and see the result. If everything checks out, do the same on the live website.

There’s just one problem: keeping an up-to-date staging website takes time. Some high-end hosting companies offer staging/live sync, but that’s only if both of them are on the host’s servers. So you’re stuck with a choice:

  • Waste an hour manually cloning the live website to a staging area, in order to perform a 10-second theme update, or
  • Just update on the live website and hope for the best.

Nobody wants to waste time on mundane things, so we play fast, we play loose, and we get the job done. Be honest: if life was Lethal Weapon, would you be Riggs, the guy who gets the job done and breaks out of straight jackets for fun, or Murtaugh, the family man who keeps talking about retirement and being “too old for this s**t”?

The boxer shorts are making this decision really easy

We tell our clients that we’re reliable professionals, but we all cut corners at times. This is why, in order to get the job done ASAP, we built a set of reliable tools that will let you be Riggs, minus the path of destruction in your wake.

ManageWP Orion Clone Tool

Orion Clone tool is built for one thing: to move your WordPress website from point A to point B in under a minute, with minimum hassle. You can utilize it in a number of ways:

  • Set up and keep your staging area up-to-date
  • Move WordPress websites to another host
  • Deploy template websites to your client
  • Restore a website from a backup archive

If you’re using Orion backup, you already know how to restore website from a backup with one click: just go to the Backups screen and click the Restore backup button and you’re done.

restore-backup-button-managewp

There’s also the Clone button. Cloning is done in two basic steps: the source and the destination.

The source is the currently selected backup. The destination can be a WordPress website you already added to your ManageWP dashboard (note: this option is currently being tested, and will be live soon), or it could be a new destination on a site server. Choosing a new destination opens a form where you enter the required info.

test-credentials-clone-managewp

The Test Credentials button helps you track down credential and permission issues that would prevent the Clone tool from running successfully. Now all that’s left is to click the Clone button at the bottom to move WordPress to the new server.

Improvements Over The Classic Clone Tool

We can pretty much call this a new tool, not an improvement, because in the back end everything’s completely different.

Performance and Stability

The Orion Clone tool is a huge improvement in performance and stability. We already talked about how Orion backup is using cutting edge tech to back up websites that no other backup solutions can handle. It’s similar with the Clone tool.

The Classic Clone Wizard establishes a connection between the source and the destination servers. That means that there are two potential points of failure. With Orion, the backups are stored on our cloud infrastructure, which eliminates the possibility of the source server causing the clone process to fail.

Another huge improvement is the connection itself. If the PHP process on the destination site is terminated before the files have been uploaded (if you ever experienced a failed clone with pretty much any WordPress cloning solution, this is the likely suspect), the Clone tool falls back to FTP file transfer to complete the task. It is a bit slower, but way more reliable method.

Smart Cloning

Most (if not all) cloning solutions on the WordPress market have a glaring flaw: you have to clone everything. If you have a staging area where you test changes before you do them on the live website, this is a big problem because you clone a 2GB website over and over again. It will eat up your bandwidth. It will be less reliable, because of the size of the website. It will take up a lot of your physical space.

That’s why we figured we should play smart with the Orion Clone tool. What the new Clone does is compare the source and destination files. If they are the same, it skips them, and clones only the different files and the database. Suddenly an arduous 2GB clone will come down to a 2MB worth of files and database. It will be done in seconds. It will be reliable.

We have more improvements in plans, but right now we need your help.

There are a lot of hosting companies out there, with just as many different server setups. We need to test the Clone tool on as many different server setups as possible, in order to work out the kinks and be certain that it will get the job done when you need it the most. Try cloning your websites on different server infrastructures, and use the Feedback button to tell our developers if you encounter any issues. As a precaution, I recommend against cloning over live websites.

Thank you for helping us improve the Orion Clone tool, and that’s why the tool is available to all ManageWP users. We need to make it as sturdy as possible, so you could be 100% certain it will get the job done when you need it. Without it, you’re just inviting mayhem to your websites.

That’s 7 milestones down, and only SEO, Manage Users, Client Report Scheduling and Sub Users remaining on the Orion roadmap.

As always, if you’ve got a suggestion how we could improve the Clone tool, let us know in the comment section, and we’ll figure out if we can implement it.

Nemanja Aleksic Avatar

54 responses

  1. Scott Avatar
    Scott

    It is really a wonderful tool. It will not only save the developer’s precious time but also increase productivity to many folds.
    Keep it up.

  2. kontakt@medianotions.de Avatar
    kontakt@medianotions.de

    Great, thank you! ManageWP Orion is a really precious tool and has become even more valuable 🙂

  3. me@robjames.eu Avatar
    me@robjames.eu

    Will give this tool a go over the coming week on a test site I have deployed. Many thanks to the team for your hard work!

    With regards to feedback, would certainly love to have the ability to schedule Performance and Security scans, to something like weekly. When we start monitoring a larger number of sites it becomes quite a manual process to scan each and everyone. If that was automated and would alert us to issues on a weekly basis (as example) it would certainly cut back on man hours required for that single task.

    Thanks again!

  4. brianjosephking@gmail.com Avatar
    brianjosephking@gmail.com

    If I’m currently in mirroring mode between classic & Orion how can I clone an existing site to a new site on the same server?

  5. Donna McMaster Avatar
    Donna McMaster

    Looks cool!
    Question: is this modifying the database contents for the new path (and possibly new URL)? Or are you assuming we’ll do that ourselves as a separate step?

  6. peter@t1.co.nz Avatar
    peter@t1.co.nz

    “the Clone tool falls back to FTP file transfer to complete the task. It is a bit slower, but way more reliable method.”
    Fantastic! – unfortunately our server is still on PHP 5.2 (legacy sites) so the original cloner wouldn’t work. But now a test is happily chugging along!

    We have a temple site that we copy from one sub-domain to another for dev sites. It’s very quick copying the files within the server itself, but updating the database is always a problem. Is it in your plans to enable a clone DB only, (and maybe wp-config and update it), that could save a lot.

    Great work Guys!
    Peter

  7. darren@stuartmedia.co.uk Avatar
    darren@stuartmedia.co.uk

    Great, I would love to see the Client Reporting feature being able to select which sections go into the report and also what updates and backups have been done added as a section. With those I would automate the clients reports but without that I would not be happy to send the default reports to clients.

  8. ellegaard Avatar
    ellegaard

    I do a lot of work on trains and airplanes and other places, where the internet connection is unreliable. So most of my development is done on the local system using Desktopserver from ServerPress.
    Is there any way, that I can get a local hosted website hooked up on ManageWP, so I can use this wonderfull new tool?

  9. info@digout.com Avatar
    info@digout.com

    It would be great if you could schedule a clone in the same way as backup

  10. Jay Avatar
    Jay

    Where is the clone tool?

  11. a.schimpf@db-punktlandung.de Avatar
    a.schimpf@db-punktlandung.de

    Nice done! I´ve given it a try under Apache and it worked like a charm. Faster & nicer as the classic one. I´m happy! 🙂 Keep up the good work!

    Cheers Alex

  12. Andrea Gatley Avatar
    Andrea Gatley

    For some reason the clone tool didn’t move my theme styling over. All of the content is there, just none of the theme changes I made. Weird.

  13. mlux@graphiclux.com Avatar
    mlux@graphiclux.com

    I have no Orange Clone button in the Orion Back up area.. Am I missing something here?

  14. Guy Lev Avatar
    Guy Lev

    Thats very nice! Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good work.

  15. petaqui Avatar
    petaqui

    Awesome being able to read about news, and having fun at the same time. Really great! And true the part of “Making changes to a live website is exciting, in an “I am sooo dead if I don’t fix this before anyone notices” kind of way. I’ve crashed websites. I’ve broken forms, made whole sections of sites disappear. Learning was fun”

  16. olli@oliomedia.fi Avatar
    olli@oliomedia.fi

    Should it copy .htaccess?

  17. mel@moderntraction.com Avatar
    mel@moderntraction.com

    Great feature I’ve been long awaiting. Couple questions:

    1. Why do you say not to use this on live sites yet? If I only go from live > staging, could this cause any problems/glitches with the live site at all?

    2. Any plans to have a option to disable some plugins on clone, and even toggle ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ from the settings > Reading screen. This can be a nice shortcut when cloning to a staging site and back to live.

  18. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    Love the Orion tooling.

    For backup/cloning we would like to know is there in the planning to be also be able to backup and include external folders and database on backup like folders outside wp-content and some database/tables.

    Thanks

  19. serveradmin@coinno.no Avatar
    serveradmin@coinno.no

    We have tried it before orion, but didn’t work for us. Now we are looking for a solution. Just tried migrate db pro, but it didn’t work and if so, I found out it wouldn´t move themes and plugins anyway. Now I want to check out the new version and this is what I hope to find:

    It needs to be super simple. And user friendly. And move everything. Handle serialized data well, move the plugins, every kind of themes, theme settings, media files and everything else. Working on all servers. If it does new path and url automatic that sounds good. Writing the file path is a stupid source of errors if its done enough times. Does that require installing wordpress with a wp worker on the destination? Or how does it know? Asking the user like in the old version would in my mind not be very bright. I just saw from the video that entering a file path is optional, and guess that is if you don´t have installed anything on the target ftp and sql.

  20. paulsadamson@gmail.com Avatar
    paulsadamson@gmail.com

    Hi,
    are the any tutorials for this? specifically with regards to Database username & password. How can I provide those, do I need to create a database ??
    I’ve had truly terrible experiences with other cloning tools so i’m hoping this is my new solution.

  21. serveradmin@coinno.no Avatar
    serveradmin@coinno.no

    I just get the “Could not connect to the test script (HTTP status code: 404). Please, check the provided FTP path.”

    I tried it to replace an existing page on the same server and it worked out fine. Now I try to load to a place before I point the domain there, and it doesn´t work. So this is more like a real life situation. You develop the page at a devsite with a subdomain for some time. When it is done the page will be moved to a new spot on the server with an ip adresse. Finally you change the dns to point at the new spot.

    Another likely scenario that i havnt tried yet, but is up next is to install the worker at a customers existing page. The smaller customers usually have crappy servers so SEO wont work, so thats the first thing to fix. I want to move the site to a new server, and then point the dns in the right direction.

    So far i have not gotten the first move and then point domain later scenario to work. How do I get it done?

  22. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Two questions.
    Does the clone tool use the backup of the source site as its source?
    Is there a way to copy directly from one site to another? Both my live and staging sites would be on the same server. Thinking it would use unnecessary bandwidth to copy out and the back in to the same server.

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