The third way to create a site - clone makes a near-exact copy of a live site into a tenant, as drafts, with no keyword research and no generated copy.
Loading the guide...
Did this answer your question?
Help us make the guides more useful.
0 helpful · 0 not helpful
Cloning is the third way to fill a new client site, alongside porting and generating. It makes a near-exact copy of a live site into a tenant: real content, real chrome, real images, as drafts you own and can edit.
The three ways to fill a new client site - Port, Generate, and Clone - all producing draft pages you own that you then review, publish, and deploy.
Reach for clone when you want a plain, faithful copy of a site into the platform quickly, without the parity-report takeover workflow of a port and without the keyword plan and rewritten copy of a generate run.
What Cloning Does
Given a live URL and a target tenant, cloning brings over:
The real page content, with semantic headings, as native builder elements
Images, imported into your own media storage
Brand and logo - the site's colors, fonts, and mark
Navigation and business details (name, address, phone)
The site chrome - header and footer, rebuilt in the builder
Internal links relativized so pages point at each other, not back at the source
Every page lands as a draft. The tenant is created for you if it does not exist yet.
What It Does Not Do
Cloning is deliberately plainer than the other two flows:
No keyword research and no page plan. You get the source's pages as they are.
No generated or rewritten copy. The real prose comes across unchanged. Writing copy in the client's voice is the generate flow.
No parity scoring. There is no coverage report to work through; if you want the measured, gap-by-gap takeover workflow, port the site instead.
No forms. As with porting, a scraped form would still post to the old host, so re-add each form as an embed.
The tenant is found or created by slug, the pages are captured and persisted as drafts, and the capture workspace is discarded afterward.
There is no bare seedly command on your machine; the CLI runs through pnpm from the platform folder. Clone signs in as you with a session token in PAYLOAD_TOKEN and stops without one. SETUP/operations/adding-a-tenant.md in your download shows how to copy that token from your browser, including the Windows form of the command.
Choosing Between Port, Generate, and Clone
You want to
Use
Take over a client's existing site with a measured, gap-by-gap review
Make a quick, faithful copy of a live site as editable drafts
Clone
After a Clone
The cloned pages are ordinary builder pages from here on. Review them, adjust anything the capture did not carry perfectly, re-embed forms, set the brand and custom domain, then publish and deploy on your own schedule. Nothing goes live until you deploy.