5 Steps to Cloning a Website with HTTrack
Cloning a website can seem like an intimidating task if you don’t know where to start, but it doesn’t have to be difficult or take days to complete. HTTrack offers the perfect toolkit for quickly and easily cloning websites and maintaining their original URL structure, helping you grow your business and build your reputation in the process. Here are five steps to get you started on this process today.
Step 1: Download and install httrack
If you want to clone a website, the first thing you’ll need to do is download and install httrack. This is a free and open source website mirroring program that’s available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Once you have it installed, launch the program and click on the Add New Project button. Give your project a name like Website Mirror or Mirror Site. Next, browse to the site you want to clone and enter its URL into the web address field.
Step 2: Visit the site you want to clone
- Before you can clone a website, you need to know which website you want to clone. So, visit the site you want to clone in your web browser.
- Take a look around and get familiar with the layout and content of the site. Pay attention to any features that make the site unique or especially user-friendly.
- Once you have a good understanding of the site, it’s time to start cloning it! Head back to the command line (or if you’re on Windows or Mac OS X, open up a terminal) and use cd to change directories until you’re in the directory where httrack is installed. If this is your first time using httrack, this will be htdocs on Linux/Mac OS X or C:\Program Files\httrack on Windows.
- Type in httrack -o destinationURL –hfs –robots=off –nopermille http://sourceURL . Enter destinationURL for the new domain name and sourceURL for the URL of the original site. You’ll see how long it will take to download all pages from sourceURL; click OK when you’re ready to proceed.
- Let ‘er rip: Watch as httrack downloads every page from sourceURL and saves them into destinationURL.
Step 3: Copy the URL of each page on the site
- Find the website you want to clone.
- In httrack, select get files from an existing website.
- Enter the URL of the site you want to clone in the box that appears.
- Click on the advanced options button.
- Check Do not follow links and Do not check page links.
- Hit OK and wait for the download to finish!
Step 4: Run httrack
Once you have your settings configured, it’s time to run httrack! Just open up the terminal and type in: httrack followed by the URL of the site you want to clone. This will start the cloning process and will create a new folder in the directory you specified earlier. The contents of the website will be downloaded into this folder, so make sure you have enough space on your hard drive! You can use any name for the folder (even if it’s not what was on the original site), but when we ran our test case, we named ours Tutorial Site.
The next step is to find out where your html files are located. Open up Terminal and enter ls -a to see all directories listed. You should see a directory that says htdocs–this is where all of the html files are located!
Step 5: Run Google Chrome and open DevTools
- Open Google Chrome and go to the website you want to clone.
- Right-click on the page and select Inspect.
- Click on the Network tab.
- Select Save as HAR with Content from the Export as dropdown menu.
- Give your file a name and click Save.
