Takes a little getting used to, but has been reliable for 100s of migrations

Bought many years ago after trying several alternative options (including one with a name starting with the letter ‘U’ I think).

Yes, this plugin might take a bit more technical knowledge than similar ones, but it doesn’t take long to learn — less time than it took me to learn how to use wordpress, it’s highly customizable, and it just works.

One thing I figured out early on was that I should change the encoding setting from utf8_general… to utf8mb4_unicode… to ensure unicode characters won’t get corrupted during the duplication process.

Also, I should select “‘Do nothing’ for the htaccess file” (and keep the original htaccess file in the destination folder). Otherwise, the source htaccess overwrites any existing destination one, which means you might then need to modify the htaccess file according to the destination site’s directory password protection settings for example.

Once you get used to front-end options (4 pages, 1 for each basic step), you can duplicate a site in under 5 minutes on autopilot (or 2-3 minutes if you’re quick). Most of the plugin’s settings can be left as is (default or empty) during the duplication process.

There was one small issue I started encountering after some time:
After successfully duplicating, the destination site’s admin dashboard would show a warning that the duplicator installation files were not successfully automatically deleted from its parent directory (which is a security risk).

The quick workaround was to click the button to create a new Duplicator package from the destination site’s admin page, and it would warn you about the files and give you a link to click to delete them before proceding any further.

Luckily, this glitch recently resolved itself somehow, ever since I recently updated several other plugins and deleted a couple of unused ones.

Highly recommended.