There are a number of cases where you may need to duplicate a page or post in WordPress. You may want to create a new post using a similar format, or you may want to make changes to a page without editing the live version.
You could just copy and paste your content to a new draft, but this would not include the featured image, SEO settings, categories, tags, or other metadata associated with the post.
In this tutorial, you’ll see how to create an exact copy, metadata included, with a single click.
How To Duplicate WordPress Posts & Pages
Before you can duplicate posts or pages in WordPress, you’ll need to install and activate the Duplicate Post plugin:
Once you’ve activated it, go to Posts > All Posts in your WordPress dashboard.
Now, when you hover your mouse over one of your posts, you’ll see two new options:
- Clone — This will duplicate the post, using its content and settings to create a new draft, but you won’t be redirected to the post editor.
- New Draft — This option does the same thing, except it will automatically open the post editor so you can start working on the duplicate post right away.
A new “Copy to a new draft” option will also appear in the admin bar, both on the post editor and on the live version of the post:
These options are also available for pages, and the process looks exactly the same.
How To Duplicate Custom Post Types
You can also extend the same functionality to your custom post types.
Make sure you’ve installed the Duplicate Post plugin, go to Settings > Duplicate Post, and click over to the Permissions tab at the top.
Under “Enable for these post types,” select any custom post types you want to have the option to duplicate.
After saving your changes, you will be able to duplicate custom post types just like posts and pages.
Customizing Duplicate Post Settings
There are some other options you can adjust to further customize your workflow. To edit these settings, go to Settings > Duplicate Post in your WordPress dashboard.
What to copy
This section determines what specific data is copied when you duplicate a post.
By default, the title, excerpt, content, featured image, page/post template, post format, and menu order will be copied. You can disable any of these, and you can opt to include the date, status, slug, author, password, attachments, children, and/or comments.
Below that, you can add a prefix or suffix to the title (e.g. “Copy of”) to denote that it is a duplicate.
You can then edit the resulting menu order and specify any meta fields you’d like excluded from the copy. You can also choose to omit taxonomy data such as categories or tags.
Permissions
On this tab, you can specify which user roles are allowed to duplicate posts, and you can add support for custom post types (as mentioned above).
Display
In this section, you can choose where you’d like the duplicate post links to show up.
Final Thoughts
Being able to duplicate a WordPress page or post with a single click is incredibly handy. It’s unfortunate that this feature isn’t available out of the box, but the Duplicate Post plugin is a seamless solution that works really well.
If you have any questions about duplicating content in WordPress, feel free to leave them in the comments below!
