Pantry Duplicate compared with Yoast Duplicate Post, Duplicate Page and Post Duplicator

Duplicating a post is a small job: copy a post or page to a new draft so someone can edit it without touching the live version. Most WordPress sites hand this job to one of a handful of large, general-purpose plugins that also do other things: role management, front-end cloning, bulk cloning at scale, multisite options. That extra scope sits in the plugin whether a site ever uses it or not, and in at least one case a basic control is sold separately.

This article compares Pantry Duplicate with the plugins most sites already have installed for this job, states plainly what each one costs a site owner who only wants the duplicate button, and says where Pantry Duplicate is not the right choice. The answer is not always Pantry.

The plugins most people install

Yoast Duplicate Post is the plugin most WordPress users mean when they say "duplicate post plugin." It has 3+ million active installations and is tested up to WordPress 7.1. It is maintained by Yoast, the company behind Yoast SEO, but it is a separate, free plugin with no paid tier of its own. It adds a Clone row action and a New Draft option to post lists, an admin bar link and a classic-editor button, bulk cloning from the list screen, a front-end template tag so cloning can be triggered outside wp-admin, and a Permissions tab for restricting the feature to certain roles and post types.

Duplicate Page, published by PickPlugins, also has 3+ million active installations and is tested up to WordPress 6.9.7. The free version duplicates posts, pages and custom post types in one click and lets you set the status of the new copy. A separate paid product, Duplicate Page Pro, sold from duplicatepro.com at $15 for one site or $99 for ten, adds the ability to restrict the feature by user role, choose which post types it appears on, control where the duplicate link is placed, redirect the user after cloning, and customise the link's title, prefix and suffix.

Post Duplicator, by developer metaphorcreations, has 200,000+ active installations and was last updated in August 2026, tested up to WordPress 7.1. It is free with no paid tier. Beyond single-post duplication it offers bulk duplication, up to fifty copies of one post in a single action, a settings screen split across five tabs (General, Defaults, Post Types, Permissions and Advanced), and optional integration with WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, WPML and Polylang, none of which are required for the plugin to run.

Where the big plugins cost you

The clearest cost is Duplicate Page's paywall. Restricting who can duplicate content, and which post types the feature applies to, are exactly the settings a small site or agency wants configured from day one: a client account should not be able to duplicate every custom post type on the site. Both sit behind the $15 Pro licence. The free version duplicates for anyone with edit access, on every post type it is enabled for, and there is no free way to narrow that.

Post Duplicator's settings screen has five tabs before a single item has been duplicated: General, Defaults, Post Types, Permissions and Advanced. That separation exists because the plugin covers more ground than the core job, with per-post-type overrides, per-role limits, and behaviour tied to WooCommerce and ACF. None of that is a fault in a plugin built to cover many use cases, but it means five screens to answer one question: who can click Duplicate, on which post types. The plugin also shows dismissable admin notices when it is upgraded, a small, recurring interruption a single-purpose plugin does not need.

Yoast Duplicate Post is the most restrained of the three on settings, but it still carries scope beyond the row action and the draft copy. A front-end template tag lets a theme trigger cloning outside wp-admin, a capability few sites want exposed and one more thing to account for when auditing what a theme or plugin can do to content. Getting the basics right also depends on a Permissions tab; the plugin's own documentation advises checking it to be sure duplication is enabled for the roles and post types intended, which is one more setting a site owner needs to know to look for, not a scope the plugin lacks.

What Pantry Duplicate does instead

Pantry Duplicate does the one job. A Duplicate row action and a matching bulk action sit on the list screen of every post type you enable. A Copy to new draft link sits in the classic editor's publish box, and the same action sits on the WordPress admin bar on any singular edit screen, which covers the block editor without shipping any editor JavaScript. A duplicate always lands as a draft owned by the person who made it. It copies the title, with an optional prefix and suffix, the content, excerpt, taxonomies, featured image, menu order, page template, parent, and every custom field except the ones listed to skip. Four internal WordPress keys, _edit_lock, _edit_last, _wp_old_slug and _wp_old_date, are always skipped whether they are listed or not. Every duplication runs through WordPress's own edit_post capability check and a nonce, so a user can only copy what they could already edit; there is no separate role-management screen, because that check already does the job.

The exclusion list matters more than its length suggests. _edit_lock and _edit_last record which user has a post open and when; copied onto a new draft, they would mark it locked by someone who has never opened it. _wp_old_slug and _wp_old_date are WordPress's own redirect history, pointing visitors from an old slug or date to the current one; a brand-new draft has neither to redirect from. Skipping all four keeps the duplicate accurate, not just complete.

Measured on the 1.0.0 release: an 18KB zip, 1,170 lines of PHP, one option (pantry_duplicate_settings), no custom database tables, no post meta of its own, no front-end assets and no external requests. The admin screen loads one shared CSS file and one shared JS file from the Pantry core, and only on the plugin's own settings screen. There is one settings screen: which post types get the Duplicate link, title prefix and suffix, whether to keep the original publish date, and the meta-key exclusion list. Nothing is metered, nothing needs a licence key, and the plugin never shows a notice trying to sell anything.

Two design choices are worth naming. There is no dedicated block-editor sidebar panel or button; the admin bar link does that job in both editors, which is why the plugin ships no editor JavaScript at all. And custom fields are copied by exclusion rather than by an allow-list tied to a specific plugin: any custom field on the original post carries over unless it is named to skip, so Advanced Custom Fields values and WooCommerce product meta duplicate correctly without Pantry Duplicate needing to know either product exists.

What it does not do, and who should stay with the big plugin

Pantry Duplicate does not do scheduled or recurring duplication, cross-site copying, templates or merge fields, and it keeps no log of who duplicated what. It also does not copy comment status, ping status or post format; a duplicate takes the site's defaults for those, because the plugin's scope is copying content, not every attribute a post can carry.

Anyone who needs duplication gated by role or by post type, without editing PHP, free and out of the box, should use Yoast Duplicate Post or Post Duplicator rather than Pantry Duplicate. Both ship that as a free setting, while Pantry Duplicate leans on the capability WordPress already has, which is coarser by design. A site that wants to trigger duplication from the front end, or from inside a template, should use Yoast Duplicate Post's template tag; Pantry Duplicate is admin-only and has no equivalent. A publisher that genuinely needs a record of who duplicated what, for editorial accountability, needs Post Duplicator or a dedicated audit-log plugin; Pantry Duplicate keeps no log by design, in line with the Pantry Standard's limit on what a plugin may store. A site running heavy bulk-duplication workflows, cloning the same listing thirty or fifty times in one action the way Post Duplicator supports, should stay with Post Duplicator; Pantry Duplicate's bulk action duplicates each selected item once, not into multiple copies.

Moving over

A worked example makes this concrete. Duplicating a published page with a featured image, a taxonomy term, a parent page, a page template and three ACF fields produces a draft that keeps all of it: the taxonomy term, the featured image, the custom fields, the menu order, the page template and the parent. Three things change regardless of which plugin the site used before: status is always draft, never published; the author is always whoever clicked Duplicate, not whoever wrote the original; and the date is the moment of duplication, not the original's publish date, unless Pantry Duplicate's copy-date setting is switched on.

Most sites moving to Pantry Duplicate are moving from Yoast Duplicate Post, the plugin most already have installed. Deactivating and deleting it is safe: it does not write a tracking meta key onto posts it has already duplicated, so drafts it created earlier stay in place as ordinary posts, needing nothing exported or migrated. What does not carry over is configuration. Yoast's Permissions tab, and its settings for which elements to copy, live in that plugin's own options and are not read by Pantry Duplicate. After switching, open Plugin Pantry > Duplicate and set the post types the Duplicate link should appear on (Posts and Pages by default), a title prefix or suffix if used, whether duplicates should keep the original publish date, and any meta keys to exclude beyond the four WordPress keeps back automatically.

Anyone relying on Yoast's front-end template tag to trigger duplication outside wp-admin has no equivalent in Pantry Duplicate; that workflow needs to stay on Yoast Duplicate Post or be rebuilt as custom code. Coming from Duplicate Page or Post Duplicator, the same pattern applies: neither plugin's settings are read by Pantry Duplicate, so post-type selection and any title formatting need re-entering. Anyone who paid for Duplicate Page Pro's role restriction has no licence to carry across; Pantry Duplicate's equivalent control is simply who WordPress already lets edit each post, set through the site's existing roles and capabilities rather than a plugin setting.

The short version

Pantry Duplicate is worth installing when the job is copying a post to a draft and nothing more: no role matrix to configure, no licence to buy for a basic control, and a plugin small enough to read in one sitting. It is not worth installing when a site needs bulk cloning at scale, a front-end trigger, or a permissions system finer than "can this user already edit this post type." Those are real, common needs, and Yoast Duplicate Post, Duplicate Page and Post Duplicator each cover one or more of them in ways Pantry Duplicate deliberately does not.

Measure	Pantry Duplicate
Zip size	18 KB
Lines of PHP	1,170
Options	1 (pantry_duplicate_settings)
Tables	0
Front-end assets	None
External requests	None
Tracking	Never
Locked features	None. No Pro version, and none planned