Is It Legal to Clone a Website? What You Can and Can't Copy (2026)
By Steven Van ·
MiroMiro's guide says layouts and common UI patterns are free to reuse, while copy, images, logos and distinctive code are not.
Cloning a website's structure to learn from it or to start a new design is generally fine, according to a guide published on the MiroMiro blog. Copying a site's content, brand or code wholesale and publishing it as your own is not. The post is general information from the maker of MiroMiro, and it says it is not legal advice.
Three kinds of cloning
The guide separates what people mean by "cloning a website", because the legal picture differs for each:
- Recreating the design: rebuilding a site's layout, spacing and components for your own project. The guide calls this how the web has always worked.
- Copying the code: using a site's real HTML and CSS as a starting point. How you use it decides which side of the line you land on.
- Copying everything: text, images and logos mirrored onto another domain. The guide says nearly every legal problem lives here.
What is and isn't protected
Copyright covers original creative expression: text, images and media, and code as written work. Large, distinctive code copied line for line is the risky case. Trademarks separately protect names, logos and branding, so using another company's logo in a confusing way is a trademark problem even if you wrote all the code.
Copyright does not cover ideas and layouts, common UI patterns (sticky navbars, card grids, pricing tables, accordions), design systems as concepts such as a spacing scale or type ramp, or short functional snippets like a flexbox centering rule.
Where it becomes a problem
The guide lists the actions that lead to DMCA notices or demand letters: republishing someone's copy and images, using their brand, shipping their code one-to-one in a commercial product, and breaking terms of service, for example through forbidden mass scraping. Cloning a bank, store or login page to trick people is phishing, which the guide treats as fraud rather than a copyright question.
Cloning safely
- Take the layout, components and spacing, then replace all text, images and logos with your own.
- Treat extracted code as a starting point and rename, restructure and restyle it. When passing it to an AI coding tool, ask for your own content and brand in the same prompt.
- Do not use the original brand in any form.
- Label learning projects as studies and use placeholder content if you publish them.
- Your own sites, or a client's with permission, can be cloned or migrated freely.
On whether a website cloner is legal to use, the guide says yes: it is a tool like a screenshot or DevTools, and the rules apply to what you publish afterwards. Its one-line rule is "Borrow the structure, bring your own content, never borrow the brand."
