Thank you,
John-Paul

Thanks for the feedback and good question. I always recommend creating a full cPanel backup, prior to making any changes like this to your live site.

For assistance in moving the “staging”/cloned (subfolder) site to the main (root directory) site, you can follow the directions in our guide, How to Move WordPress from a Subfolder to the Root Directory. In the “Prepare your WordPress installation for the move” section, be sure to login to the website at the URL the cloned site is at currently.

As a tip (before Step 3 in the “Moving your WordPress from a subfolder to your main folder” section), rename the directory your site is in, instead of deleting it in preparation to copy the cloned site files into place. For instance, if your directory for the live site is currently public_html, rename it to something like public_html.bak. Note that if the cloned site (or any other site) was inside the public_html directory (for example: public_html/add-on-domain.com), it will now be in the public_html.bak directory, until you create a new public_html directory and copy the files from (now) public_html.bak/add-on-domain.com into (an empty) public_html (as that section instructs). This will help preserve the old site files and can easily reverse the transition (if something doesn’t work correctly afterwards). You can simply rename the public_html directory to something like public_html.broke and then rename public_html.bak to public_html to easily “undo”. It is important to COPY, rather than MOVE the files, to ensure you do not lost important data.

Also, you may need to update the details in Softaculous to update it with the new configurations/locations of the sites. You can always remove the installations (be sure to uncheck the boxes to not delete the files and database) from Softaculous and then “import” the websites (after you have moved them) to update Softaculous with the new locations.

I hope this helps! I wanted to give you as much insight into the task at hand because as big of a task it is, in my experience, this goes well as long as those things are addressed. Please feel free to leave an additional comment if you need clarity on this at all or have any more questions. We are always happy to help!

In theory, what you ask is possible. But, as always, it is best advised to have a backup or rollback plan in case of any unexpected errors.

My question is, though, after getting the site right in the staging area, can I clone it again/repeat the clone to replace the original site? If yes, any tips?

Sounds like the old site had an SSL and was HTTPS and the new site does not. You might have to go into the home and site_url settings to change them.

Using the same credentials to sign in works. 

Hello Bill,

After you cloned your website did you modify your config.php file to reflect the sub-domain instead of your main websites url?

Best Regards,
TJ Edens