3 Easy Steps to Replicate SharePoint Pages

In SharePoint and almost all Microsoft products, there are many ways to serve the same purpose.

Creating a replica of a page is very common while using SharePoint. Sometimes when your client wants to replicate a particular design or layout to all subsites they might need this.

If you have trouble starting from scratch you can always make a copy of any page and change it to the required one.

Here you will see three ways in which you can copy or replicate SharePoint pages in SharePoint Online.

Copy Page from Site Pages Library

This is exactly the same technique as copying files from a document library by using the normal copy feature.

As I said earlier, there is a copy option on the Site Pages library to create a duplicate page.

Go to the Site Contents > Site Pages > 

Select the page and click on the Copy button.

Replicate from Open Site Page

The next way is to replicate the page from an open SharePoint page. It allows you to copy a page after opening the front-end of the page. This will create a better idea of which page you are copying and can reduce errors while copying . 

Go to Site Pages and open the page.

Next, click on the +New button > choose the option Copy of this page from the drop-down menu to make a copy of that page.

This option does not work on the Homepages created by default. You need to create a new page on the site first and then publish it to do this copying function.

Copy from Page Template

Save as a page template is also one of the best ways to replicate SharePoint pages. There are a few ways in which we can create templates as well. Let’s check how to create templates and then copy pages from those templates.

Create a Page Template

1. First, you create a new page and that page will be your reference template.
   
2. You can start on a blank page or use an existing page layout on your site.
   
3. Customize the page as you wish and Publish the page.
4. As soon as you publish the page, a pop-up appears on the sidebar. Click on Save as a page template.
5. Now, you can see that “This is a page template”. Name the page and click on the Save page template button at the top.
   
6. All such template pages created are saved inside a Template folder.

Create a Page from an Existing Template

If you want to create a new page from the previous created template, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Gear icon > Add a Page. You will now notice the regular (Basic, Visual, Basic text), out of the box page templates, along with the custom one that we just created.
   
2. Click on the template created and you will then see a preview of the page in the upper-right-hand-corner. Click Create Page to create the page based on that template.
   
3. The page based on the template is now complete. Name and Publish the page
   

Save an existing page as a Template

Here you will see how you can save a page created earlier  into a template  . The templates are stored in the Templates folder within the Site Pages library. For changing the page to a template, follow the below steps:

1. Use the Copy command to copy the page to the Templates Folder
   
2. Open the Templates Folder and verify the page that has been copied
   
3. Open the template folder, and you will see your template in the list
   

Edit Page Templates

Any time you can change the items inside the page template.

1. Go to the Site Pages library. Click inside the Templates folder, then open the page template you want to change.
   
2. Click the Edit Page Template button and make the change.
3. Once done with the changes, click the Save Page Template button.
   

Modified page template will only be available to the future pages and does not make any changes to the pages created before template change.