How to Copy an HTML Website into a WordPress Blog
There are many reasons why you might want to copy an HTML website into a WordPress blog. You might want to use WordPress as a convenient way to write up some content for your website, or perhaps you just want to experiment with the platform. Whatever the case, you can do so by using the WordPress Cloner plugin, which is a free and open-source software that can be downloaded from the WordPress repository. Once you have the plugin installed on your computer, you can use it to easily copy and paste the code of any website you want into a fresh WordPress blog.
Step 1: Select the HTML Site You Want to Clone.
The first step is to navigate to the HTML site that you want to copy. You can do this by clicking the website’s URL at the top of your browser. When you reach the website, you will see a giant blue squiggle. This is the WordPress “robots.txt” file, and it needs to contain the line:
User-agent: *
If you cannot access the original source code of the website, you can either try and work out what the User-agent string should be, or you can use a code debugging service like [W3C HTML Checker][1] to identify any errors in the markup. Once you have corrected these errors, you can re-test the site to see if it is now valid HTML.
Step 2: Install the WordPress Cloner Plugin.
The first thing you need to do is install the WordPress Cloner plugin. This plugin allows you to create a blank WordPress blog and import the content from any other website into it. So, once you have installed the plugin, go to the Dashboard and click on Create New (this is the WordPress equivalent of clicking the “Create New” button on a website).
Next, you will see a form with a button labeled ‘Clone this site’. Click on this button and you will be presented with a form that allows you to select a website you want to copy content from. You can either paste in the URL of a site you want to copy content from, or you can use the search bar to look for specific websites.
Once you have found the website you want to copy, click on the Select button and you will be presented with a preview of what your clone will look like. Before you start making any changes to the copy, take a quick glance at the preview to see what you are dealing with.
Finally, click the Start cloner button to begin the process.
Step 3: Customise Your New Blog.
Once the plugin has cloned the HTML site for you, you need to customise the blog. Go to the Dashboard and you will see a screen that looks like this:
This is the default WordPress dashboard. You will see a few links to different parts of the site. On the right side of the page, you will see the name of your blog (in this case, “WPCLONER”), followed by a small link. Click on this link to go to the settings page for your blog.
On this page, you can change the name of your blog, set the WordPress theme that will be used, and decide what should happen when a new post is published. For our example, let’s change the name of our blog to “How to Easily Copy An HTML Website Into a WordPress Blog” and let’s use the default “Twenty Four” WordPress theme.
Once you have set these options, click on the Publish button to send the blog post to your site.
You can also set yourself up with Twitter, Facebook and Google+ pages, as well as a LinkedIn profile for those who are interested in getting involved in online marketing.
Step 4: Add Meta Descriptions & Headers To Your Posts.
The next step in the process is to add the descriptions and headers to your blog posts. Go to the Dashboard and click on the Posts button. You will then see a list of your blog posts. To add a description to a post, click on the post title to open it up for editing.
From here, you can either type a description for the post or click on the little pencil icon next to the post title to open up a box where you can type a customised description for the post.
To add a header to a post, click on the post title to open it up for editing. Then, scroll down to the area at the very bottom of the page and you will see a box with your blogger header in it. Simply click on this box and you will be presented with a menu that allows you to choose which header you want to use for that post.
Step 5: Import posts from Your HTML Site.
Finally, you can click on the Import button on the WordPress dashboard to bring in your posts from your HTML site. After you have done this, you can click on the Preview button to see how the posts will look on your WordPress blog. At this point, you can make any changes you want to the layout of your posts. When you are happy with the way everything looks, click on the Publish button to send the posts to your site.
As you can see from this tutorial, it is very easy to copy an HTML website and paste it into a WordPress blog. Of course, this is not always the case, as you may need to make some small adjustments to the code in order to get it working on your new WordPress blog. However, once you have done this, you can simply continue building out your blog as you would with any other WordPress blog.