How to Duplicate a Page In WordPress

It stands to reason that once you’ve perfected your site’s design, you’ll also want to use your created layouts for other pages. Most people will manually duplicate a page in WordPress, but there’s a better way.

WordPress’s extendability means you can use plugins to help you duplicate a page. There are several ways to do this due to the platform’s flexibility. However, for most users, a plugin can help you duplicate a page in minutes.

In this post, we’ll show you how to duplicate a page in WordPress – and the process is arguably one of the easiest to achieve!

Why You’d Want to Duplicate a Page In WordPress

Whether creating a small portfolio site or a sprawling behemoth network, consistent design throughout is vital. This is for several reasons:

• Users will instinctively know they’re on your site.

• Future changes can be rolled out without you needing to schedule multiple design phases.

• If you need to perform site maintenance, you can extrapolate your work across your whole site.

While design consistency is essential, many other valid reasons exist for duplicating a page in WordPress. For example, you may have custom elements and code you want to use elsewhere on your site. Moreover, you may have optimized a layout to the point where it becomes a de facto template for your other pages.

Duplicating pages is a regular task that helps you run your site more efficiently and deliver consistent quality. However, many site owners do so in the wrong way.

Why You Shouldn’t Manually Duplicate a Page In WordPress

If you took a straw poll of WordPress site owners, we’d bet the majority manually duplicated their pages. For the uninitiated, we’re talking about doing one of the following:

• Highlighting the page text, copying it, and pasting it into a fresh draft.
• Navigating to (and clicking) the Copy all content option within the Block Editor, then pasting it into a new draft.
• This, while quick and relatively simple, is not optimal. The main reason is that it erodes the consistency and efficiency you’re trying to achieve in the first place. What’s more, there are several drawbacks to the manual approach:
• You won’t be able to copy any of your site’s taxonomies, permalinks, meta descriptions, or custom elements. This means multiple rounds of copying and pasting, all of which have the potential to introduce errors.
• Depending on how you copy your data, formatting issues or superfluous HTML tags may be buried within your page’s code. These will all need fixing and removing.

Like any task with complex under-the-hood parts, automating the process is ideal. In the next section, we’ll show you how to duplicate a page in WordPress using a plugin – the recommended approach.

How to Duplicate a Page in WordPress

It’s worth reiterating – to get consistent results, using a WordPress plugin is the best way to duplicate a page. In addition, this approach using the plugin we recommend takes no more than a couple of minutes.

If you browse the WordPress.org Plugin Directory for duplicate page plugins, there are a few to choose from. Duplicate Page and Post, Yoast Duplicate Post, and Duplicate Page or Post are the most popular. However, we recommend Duplicate Page:

There are many reasons for this, but in a nutshell, it has an excellent overall rating from other users, over a million installs, and works with a current version of WordPress. All three of these factors scream quality. As such, the rest of this article will show you how to duplicate a page in WordPress using the Duplicate Page plugin.

The most complicated task you’ll carry out here is installing the plugin. If you’ve done this before, you’re home and dry. However, to summarize the process for the uninitiated:

• Head to the Plugins > Add New page in the WordPress dashboard.

• In the Search plugins… field, type “Duplicate Page.”

• Click the Install Now button on the Duplicate Page plugin.

• When WordPress has been installed, click the blue Activate button.

You can access the Settings > Duplicate Page screen after the process.

You’ll see a few options to customize your experience:

The settings here will let you set a default editor for duplicated pages, choose an initial status for the page, select the screen you’ll head to after duplicating a page, and add a suffix to your page for easy identification. For example, you could ensure that all duplicate pages open in the Block Editor as Private, with the suffix “Duplicate”:

When you’re ready, save your changes. Once you have a page to duplicate, head to your Pages > All Pages screen within WordPress, hover over the page you’d like to copy, and click the Duplicate This button:

WordPress will refresh, and your duplicated page will be ready to open and work with.

Conclusion

WordPress’s flexibility and extendability are great, especially for routine tasks. There are usually myriad ways to complete a job, but in many cases, a plugin will serve you best.

To duplicate a page in WordPress, we recommend ditching the old copy-paste routine you may have used and installing a plugin instead. The Duplicate Page plugin takes seconds to download and install, and even with a tweak of the settings, you’ll be able to duplicate your pages in no time.

What’s your current routine for duplicating a page in WordPress, and does the plugin approach convince you to change? Let us know in the comments section below!