This article will guide you on how to clone a website and edit it free of charge. You may have been surfing the internet and come across a website with a great design that you wanted to get it for yourself. However, not many people know that it is possible to copy a website and make it your own! So I will show you how simple it is to get it in minutes.
Please understand that this is for educational purposes only! Cloning a website is not illegal but uploading it to the internet as it is without making the necessary changes could lead to copyright issues and DMCA takedowns. But if you follow the steps below, you have nothing to worry about. So let’s get started!
How to clone a website and edit it using GNU Wget
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS, the most widely used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive command line tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, and terminals without X-Windows support.
Download the GNU Wget from the link below:
You will download a zip file that you will extract to a location of your choice on your windows PC.
Now follow these steps carefully;
- Click on the Windows icon and search for cmd. Right-click on it and run as administrator.
- Now go to the exact location where the contents of the zip file you extracted are, for example, mine was, C:\wget-1.21.3-win64. Simply right-click on the bar at the top and click on Copy address.
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- Now return to command prompt (cmd) window and type the following command, cd ‘the copied address’ , which in my case will be, cd C:\wget-1.21.3-win64 , without the apostrophes.
- Now you can proceed by pasting the following code, wget –mirror –convert-links –wait=2 ‘the addrss of the website you would like to clone’. I am going to use the website freextech.xyz , which is a website I am still developing. Therefore in my case, it will be wget –mirror –convert-links –wait=2 https://freextech.xyz/
The wget application will now start the cloning process and add the files into a new folder where it was extracted. The process will take several minutes depending on the size of the website you are cloning.
The following are the contents of the folder where the website files have been cloned:
By clicking on the index.html, you are able to open the website on your local machine.
Now edit the extensions of the pages to .html in order for them to run. For example,
By editing the file .html, I can run it and do the necessary edits. Simply right-click on it, click on rename and add .html to the end of the name.
By opening it, I can now see the album downloader webpage.
Editing the Cloned Website
To edit the contents, you will need an understanding of HTML or you can also open the code in an editor and look for text that is visible on the webpage, and replace that text with your desired text. It is very easy to do that. Once the editing is done, you can upload the files to the root of your domain in your hosting file manager, reload the domain, and boom, your site is up and running!
Conclusion
The article above will guide you on how you can clone a website for free and edit it. We have made it as simple as possible for you to follow through. Consider sharing the article and leaving us a comment below.
