What is a mirror site?
A mirror site is a static copy of your website on another server. It can be used as a backup, as an easy way to move to another server if you have lost the logins to your old hosting provider, or as a way to have an archive of your website as you plan a relaunch.
Another use case for a mirror site is distributing traffic across different web servers to avoid timeouts and improve performance. This is often done with a CDN setup where a copy of your website is delivered through different locations for faster page speed.
If you plan to use your mirror site within a CDN setup, you should configure your canonical tags accordingly to avoid duplicate content.
What is website mirroring?
Website mirroring describes the process of creating duplicates of your existing website. There are a couple of tools available to mirror your website. One of the most common ones is wget. It’s a command line tool that you can use to download an entire backup of your website.
The problem is that wget isn’t really flexible and doesn’t offer many options to optimize the output. You can’t:
- search & replace any URLs
- minify HTML/CSS/JS
- implement some search functionality
- rewriting links to be used on a static hosting environment
The same is true for a lot of other website ripper tools. We cover them in the alternative section of the blog. If you want to have a quick look check out the articles here:
Conclusion
Most tools require knowledge of the command line or installing and configuring software on your computer. Here is where webtozip.com can shine. It provides all the power you need but combines it with a modern and simple UI as an online tool – no technical knowledge required, no download and installation – add your URL and start downloading your entire website.