Free and GPL licensed

Enterra Quick Clone

Copies a post, page or WooCommerce product you already have, so a second near-identical listing is a click rather than a rebuild. The copy arrives as a draft, with its content, categories, images and product variations intact.

Download from WordPress.org How it compares

Version 1.3.1. WordPress 6.5 or later, PHP 7.4 or later.

What it copies

Everything except the parts that make it one of a kind.

A copy carries the title, the body, the excerpt, the author, the parent and the menu order. On a post or a page it also carries the categories, tags and custom fields. On a WooCommerce product it carries the price, stock settings, tax class, featured image, image gallery and every variation, with each variation's own attributes and price.

A few things are deliberately left behind. A copied product has no SKU, because a duplicate SKU is a product WooCommerce refuses to save. Sales totals and review counts start again at zero. Meta fields that another plugin uses to mark an item as already imported are skipped, so a fresh copy does not arrive looking finished.

How it compares

If you only sell products, WooCommerce already does this.

WooCommerce ships its own duplicate. It sits under Copy to a new draft in a product's publish box, it copies a variable product with its variations, and it gives the copy a new SKU of its own so it saves straight away. It works, and for a shop that only deals in products there is no pressing reason to install anything else.

The line it will not cross is post types. WooCommerce's duplicate is written for products only, so a post or a page has no equivalent at all. That is the gap this fills, and it is the gap that matters most on a page built out of blocks, because the layout is the tedious part and the wording is what changes.

On a product, the two differ in one decision. WooCommerce invents a unique SKU so the copy saves immediately. This plugin leaves the SKU blank, because a plugin distributed to other shops should not invent stock codes inside somebody else's catalogue. Fill it in when the copy is ready. If you would rather keep WooCommerce's behaviour on a product, use WooCommerce's own duplicate for that product.

Where WooCommerce's duplicate is more thorough is the product data it understands. It saves the copy through WooCommerce's own model, so every field WooCommerce knows about comes across as WooCommerce defines it. This plugin copies the stored custom fields.

In the list

Two links on every row.

A hovered WooCommerce product row showing Edit, Quick Edit, Trash, View, Clone, Clone & Edit and Duplicate. — Clone and Clone & Edit sit with the other row actions, on posts, pages and products.

Clone makes the copy and leaves you on the list. Clone & Edit makes it and opens the copy in the editor, which is the one you want when the point of the copy is to change it.

The Products list after cloning, showing a green notice reading Content cloned successfully, and the new copy listed at the top as a draft. — The list comes back with a confirmation, and the copy is already at the top as a draft.

The copy

A draft, ready to change.

Nothing is published by cloning. A copy is a draft, so it cannot appear in the shop or on the front end until somebody publishes it. That also means a copy made by mistake costs one click to throw away.

A product

The WordPress editor showing a copied product titled with (Copy), its full description and its featured image, with the status set to Draft. — A copy of a variable product, description and image in place, saved as a draft.

A post

A post is the same idea, and the useful part is the scaffolding rather than the words. The columns, the image block and the excerpt come across, so a second piece of writing starts from a layout that already works instead of an empty editor.

The block editor showing a copied post titled with (Copy), its two-column layout, image block, heading and both paragraphs in place, with the status set to Draft. — A copied post in the block editor, two-column layout and image block still in place.

A page

Pages are where a copy saves the most work, because a page is usually a layout rather than a paragraph. A landing page, a product page or an about page built out of blocks is tedious to rebuild and easy to copy, and the copy keeps every block in the order it was arranged.

The block editor showing a copied page titled About Us (Copy), its styled heading and paragraphs preserved, with the status set to Draft. — A copied page, styled heading and body copy intact, saved as a draft with a new slug.

Install

Search for it in WordPress.

In WordPress, go to Plugins, then Add New Plugin.
Search for Enterra Quick Clone and install it.
Activate it. Clone and Clone & Edit appear on every post, page and product row.

Or install it from the command line.

wp plugin install enterra-quick-clone --activate

The plugin is distributed through the WordPress.org directory, so updates arrive through the normal Plugins screen.

Changelog

What changed.

1.3.1

Removed two custom field names belonging to an unrelated plugin from the skip list.
Corrected a code comment that gave the wrong reason for the order a copy's taxonomies and custom fields are written.

1.3.0

Variable products now copy with their product type and every variation. Before this release they copied as simple products with none.
The SKU is cleared on every copy instead of having a suffix appended, so a copy can be saved.
Backslashes in content survive the copy. Block markup, code samples and Windows paths were being stripped.
Sales totals, ratings and other plugins' import flags are no longer copied.
A copy that fails partway is removed rather than left half-built.

1.2.0 and earlier

Clone and Clone & Edit for posts, pages and products.