How to Create a Custom WordPress Website That Looks Like a Copy of Another Website

Copycat websites are everywhere. From Aliexpress to Taobao, there’s almost no corner of the Internet that hasn’t been copied and pasted. Sometimes it’s for a better user experience, other times it’s just for the sake of it.

Usually when you get a site hacked or under attack, you find out the hard way that it’s not simply one thing that went wrong.

If you find that your site has been compromised, your first instinct may be to check the logs and trackback to see what happened. However, that’s probably the last thing you should do.

Instead, you should try and figure out what happened without revealing any sensitive information. One way of doing this is to look at the site’s front page and see what the visitor experience is like. This way, you can figure out whether you should just lock down the site or whether you should create a fresh copy of the entire thing.

Create a Fresh WordPress Installation

When you get a chance to analyze a compromised site, your first step should be to create a fresh WordPress installation and import all the content from the bad website.

This can be a real pain, especially if you have a lot of content or complicated plugins that you’ve built up over the years. You’ll either have to figure out the one-by-one process of importing each piece of content or take the long route and create a complete duplicate of the existing site — with all the content and configurations intact. Not only is the latter a lot more work, but it also creates a lot more room for errors. If you want to get everything right the first time, the former is the way to go.

Conduct An SEO Audit Before & After

After you’ve restored your site from the backup, you should take the time to do some serious SEO optimization. Even though your site may already be optimized for your main keywords, there are hundreds of other ways that someone could search for your product or service and discover your site. Once they’re on your site, it’s usually only a matter of time before they decide to leave and find what they’re looking for elsewhere on the Internet.

To find these keywords and optimize your content, you can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner, which will analyze the competition, current traffic, and pricing for specific keywords and phrases. From there, you can figure out what terms to target and how to optimize your content to reach your audience most efficiently.

Use Analytics To Its T

Your next step should be to set up your site to track traffic and lead generation through the use of analytics tools. Google Analytics is the gold standard when it comes to tracking website traffic and lead generation. Not only can you set up goals and benchmarks to track your audience’s behavior on the site, but you can even set up specific user personas to track the individual journeys of your website’s visitors. For example, you might want to set up a persona named Jane to track the activities of a user who’s on your site for a few hours and decides to leave without purchasing anything. From there, you can figure out what content they’re consuming, what triggers their decision to leave, and what you can do to retain them as customers.

Check Out User-Generated Content (UGC)

Finally, it’s time to put the pieces together and create your perfect copycat website. From there, you’ll want to pull in content from your old website and repurpose it for your new site. When it comes to content, nothing is more authentic or more valuable than user-generated content. You can either allow users to post content directly to your site or you can choose to repurpose pre-existing content (e.g., blog posts, press releases) from your old site onto your new one. In either case, make sure that you have permission to do so and that you are identifying the source of the content.

As for the look and feel of your website, this is where things get tricky. When we talk about the appearance of a website, often we’re referring to the styling of the webpages in your site. However, there’s more than one way of styling a website, and oftentimes this can give the appearance that your site is more of a copycat rather than an authentic representation of the source website. To truly create a custom-look website, you’ll have to go the extra mile and apply some additional CSS (cascading style sheets) and perhaps even some JS (JavaScript) to give your site the unique flair that makes it recognizable as your own.

On the topic of JavaScript, it’s important to note that even though the vast majority of users will have JavaScript disabled, it doesn’t mean that all visitors are going to be the same. For instance, if you have a significant amount of JavaScript-enabled content on your site, you might end up with a significant load of JavaScript files that can put additional strain on your site’s performance if not configured correctly. This is one of the main reasons why you should avoid using JavaScript where possible. With this technology, your visitors won’t be able to fully take advantage of what your site has to offer. On the other hand, if performance is a concern and you absolutely must use JavaScript, then you might want to consider a JavaScript CDN (content delivery network), which will dramatically improve the performance of your site.

Publish Your Website

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that you publish your site. When we say “publish,” we mean that you’ve thoroughly tested and validated your work. Now that you’ve got content, performance, and SEO all sorted out, it’s time to showcase your work to the world. To do this, you’ll want to make sure that you have a URL (uniform resource locator) or alias for your site. Once this is done, all that’s left is to activate the blog and publish your first content.

As a general rule, you’ll want to make sure that you keep your old URL for at least three years to ensure that your redirections don’t break in the future. After that, it’s best to start fresh and choose a new one.

In conclusion, creating a custom WordPress website that looks like a copy of another website can be a tedious process. However, it’s one that’s worth it in the end, provided that you’ve laid the groundwork properly. From there, all you have to do is populate it with content and start gathering traffic.