Clone a website?

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  steinerskolenimoss · Member · Dec 17, 2019 at 7:45 am

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  Hi,

  I´m wondering if there is a way to convert our current webpage to a WordPress webpage? Like, if I copy the .html of our current website and paste it into WordPress and BOOM. It´s been cloned! Is it possible?

  We have a design that is homemade that we like to use.
  The page can be seen here: http://www.moss.steinerskolen.no

  Regards,
  Lars

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  staff-zinnia · Staff · Dec 17, 2019 at 3:08 pm

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  Hi Lars –

  Thanks for writing to us. In order to use your custom theme and “clone” the site you would need our business plan.

  That option includes our hosting, 24/7 support, and the domain.
  https://wordpress.com/pricing/

  The site infrastructure would allow for custom themes and plugins too.

  Does this help? Write back to me here with more questions.

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  steinerskolenimoss · Member · Dec 19, 2019 at 7:42 am

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  Hi,

  Thank you for the quick reply.
  Do you know if the prosess of cloning the website is easy or does it require hours and hours of work? Is it “copy and paste”? For example; we use the CSS Modal multiple places on our website. Can we just copy the CSS and it works in the WordPress page? We also have multiple tabs. Can i copy the html, paste it in WordPress and the tabs are there?

  I think I need to see it or at least experiment a bit with it. Does the business plan have a trial time?

  Lars

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  kokkieh · Staff · Dec 19, 2019 at 8:16 am

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  Hi Lars,

  Our Business Plan actually won’t help you in this case. There’s no automatic way to convert a static HTML website into a WordPress site. WordPress sites are made up of .php, .css and .js files. The HTML structure and site appearance are defined within the .php and .css files of the theme, and the content is stored in a SQL database, loaded dynamically into the browser when you open a particular page.

  So it works completely differently than a basic HTML site like what you currently have.

  To recreate your site’s appearance on a WordPress site you’d need to create a WordPress theme with that appearance. If you have the ability to create a theme like that you’d be able to use it on WordPress.com on our Business Plan, but honestly it would be simpler to just “redesign” and start over with an existing WordPress theme. You can always tweak the theme later using custom CSS if you prefer.

  As for the content, you’ll have to manually copy-paste it into new posts and pages on a new WordPress site. There’s no way to export content from a static site so that it can be imported to a CMS, and while there are plugins that try to automate this by scraping a website for content and then recreating it on a WordPress site, but those don’t work equally well in all cases, and it’s not worth buying a WordPress business plan just to use a plugin like that that might lead to you having to redo everything manually in any case.

  As for your specific questions:

  Can we just copy the CSS and it works in the WordPress page?

  No. On our Premium Plan and higher you can add custom CSS to modify an existing theme, but the CSS will have to target the selectors available in the theme active on the site, so it won’t just work as you have it now. You’ll likely need to tweak your existing CSS extensively to apply the same effect to an existing WordPress theme.

  We also have multiple tabs. Can i copy the html, paste it in WordPress and the tabs are there?

  In WordPress the site menu forms part of the theme, not part of the content. So you’d first copy the content into new pages, and then you’ll add the pages to a menu which you assign to one of the menu areas available in your chosen theme.

  If you use a theme’s default menu, any new page you publish should automatically get added to the menu, but you can also create a custom menu which allows you to control stuff like the order and nesting of menu tabs, and also allows you to add other items like custom links, posts or categories to the menu, in addition to pages.

  Menus

  I think I need to see it or at least experiment a bit with it. Does the business plan have a trial time?

  We don’t offer free trials, but on all our plans we offer a full refund for 30 days after purchase.

  But as I said above, you don’t necessarily need our Business Plan here – with the exception of custom CSS that requires our Premium Plan, you’ll be able to get a feel for how things work, setting up posts, pages, menus, etc, on our free plan. You’ll be able to migrate all your existing content to us on a free site.