There are many reasons that you might want to copy a website. Some of these reasons are malicious, but some are very legitimate. For example, before doing a major update on a WordPress website, you may want to remember what the site is supposed to look like. Sometimes an update looks like it was successful, but if your child theme is not properly configured or if there are issues with your theme, the update may break certain design elements.
Before updating WordPress, you of course backed up your files and database, but having an html copy of the site is also helpful for quick and easy reference. To make this backup, I recommend WinHTTrack. To get it to work correctly:
- Open WinHTTrack Website Copier
- Set a New Project Name
- Choose a base path
- Click Next
- Action should be “Download web site(s)
- Click Add URL and choose your domain name. Consider including the “www” portion of your domain name.
- Click set options
- Under the Limits tab, change Max transfer rate to something higher than 25kb. If you are malicious or being sneaky and don’t want to be caught, you may keep this low. But if you are pulling from your own site, you are probably fine with bumping this up to 25MB.
- Under the Spider tab, change follow robots.txt rules to no robots.txt rules.
- Click Next
- Click Finish and the process will begin.
Good luck!
