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Cloning a Live Site
The third way to create a site - clone makes a near-exact copy of a live site into a tenant, as drafts, with no keyword research and no generated copy.
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Cloning is the third way to fill a new client site, alongside porting and generating. It makes a near-exact copy of a live site into a tenant: real content, real chrome, real images, as drafts you own and can edit.
Reach for clone when you want a plain, faithful copy of a site into the platform quickly, without the parity-report takeover workflow of a port and without the keyword plan and rewritten copy of a generate run.
What Cloning Does#
Given a live URL and a target tenant, cloning brings over:
- The real page content, with semantic headings, as native builder elements
- Images, imported into your own media storage
- Brand and logo - the site's colors, fonts, and mark
- Navigation and business details (name, address, phone)
- The site chrome - header and footer, rebuilt in the builder
- Internal links relativized so pages point at each other, not back at the source
Every page lands as a draft. The tenant is created for you if it does not exist yet.
What It Does Not Do#
Cloning is deliberately plainer than the other two flows:
- No keyword research and no page plan. You get the source's pages as they are.
- No generated or rewritten copy. The real prose comes across unchanged. Writing copy in the client's voice is the generate flow.
- No parity scoring. There is no coverage report to work through; if you want the measured, gap-by-gap takeover workflow, port the site instead.
- No forms. As with porting, a scraped form would still post to the old host, so re-add each form as an embed.
Running a Clone#
From the platform repo, with your CMS running:
seedly clone https://the-source-site.com client-slug \
--cms https://your-cms.example.comThe tenant is found or created by slug, the pages are captured and persisted as drafts, and the capture workspace is discarded afterward.
Choosing Between Port, Generate, and Clone#
| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Take over a client's existing site with a measured, gap-by-gap review | Port |
| Build a fresh site from a client's brand inputs, in their voice | Generate |
| Make a quick, faithful copy of a live site as editable drafts | Clone |
After a Clone#
The cloned pages are ordinary builder pages from here on. Review them, adjust anything the capture did not carry perfectly, re-embed forms, set the brand and custom domain, then publish and deploy on your own schedule. Nothing goes live until you deploy.
Frequently asked questions
- How is cloning different from porting?
- Porting reproduces a site and hands you a parity report of the remaining gaps, meant as the start of a full takeover. Cloning is a faster, plainer near-exact copy - real content and chrome as drafts, with no keyword research, no generated copy, and no parity scoring.
- Does a clone publish anything?
- No. Every cloned page lands as a draft in the target site. You review, publish, and deploy yourself.
- Does a clone rewrite the copy or the brand?
- No. Clone keeps the real content and brand as-is. Rewriting copy in the client's voice and building a keyword page plan are the generate flow, not clone.