If you already have a website somewhere else, you do not have to build yours here from nothing. The app reads it, shows you what each page becomes, and brings it over when you say so: its pages, its look, its menu, its search details, its blog posts, its products and a redirect for every old address. Nothing on your site changes until you choose Bring it over. Open it from Website & App, under Import. See Your website and app for the builder itself.
Reading your site
- Open Website & App, then Import.
- Type your site's address, such as yourbusiness.com, and choose how many pages to read (a site here holds twenty pages besides its home page).
- Choose Read the site. It takes up to half a minute. The app reads the home page and the pages your menu, footer, links and sitemap lead to, the way a search engine does: it skips what your site's robots.txt asks robots not to read, and stops after half a minute.
A site that asks for a password, or turns robots away, cannot be read. Take the password off while it is brought over.
The report
Before anything changes, the report says what was found:
- Pages: each page, the address it will have here (/p/ and its name), and the sections it becomes: banners, writing, pictures beside writing, columns, galleries, questions and answers, quotes, videos and forms. What was laid out by guess is noted under the page. Switch a page off to leave it out.
- What cannot carry over: what runs on the old site and cannot be rebuilt as sections, named plainly with why: tracking code (Google Analytics, a Meta pixel), chat windows, other services' widgets (a booking calendar, an Instagram feed, reviews from a Shopify app), the old checkout, visitors' accounts, and the platform's own code. For each one that can run anywhere, choose Keep as code or Leave it out. Code you keep goes to the top or bottom of every page, or into a section where it was, and runs only at your own domain (see Code and the cookie notice under Policies).
- The look: the fonts the site uses with the builder's nearest to each, its main colors, and its logo. Switch them off to keep your site's look.
- The menu: the menu as it was and where each word leads here.
- Forms: each form, where what was typed in it went, and the builder's form it becomes. Messages sent through it here arrive in Messages and your email. A question the builder's form does not ask is named.
- Products: a Shopify store's or WooCommerce shop's products, with their options, prices and pictures. Check looks at all of them against your store first, then Bring in adds them in the background with their pictures, as a file of products does: one already here at the same address is left as it is, and the whole lot can be undone as one while none has been sold or changed (see Bringing your records over). They do not wait for the rest of the site.
- Blog posts: from the site's feed. They come over as drafts, to read before they go up.
- Pictures: listed, not fetched yet. They are brought into your website's pictures when the draft is built.
- Search and sharing details: each page's title, description and sharing picture are kept.
- Old addresses: every address found and what becomes of it: the same here, sent on by a redirect, or not carried over (a file kept on the old site, such as a PDF menu, which you can add to a page).
The draft
Choose Build the draft. The pictures are fetched and the site is laid out as it will be. Your site still has not changed.
The draft opens beside your site as it is now, page by page: Side by side on a computer, or Your site and Imported one at a time. Change the choices goes back to the report.
When it looks right, an owner, admin or manager chooses Bring it over, then Bring it over now. Your site's pages, look and menu are replaced; your site as it was is kept under Code, Earlier Versions, to put back. Whether your site is published does not change. The redirects are made, the blog posts arrive as drafts under Blog, and the logo becomes yours if you had none.
Moving your domain
When your site here is ready, open Domain. Move My Domain Here has the steps for the platform your site is on: where its DNS records are kept, the two records to add, and the old platform's records to take away. Email keeps working, because only the records for the site change. Once your domain points here, the redirects send every old address on to its new one.
Keep the address map (Download the address map): every old address and what became of it, to hand to whoever looks after your domain.
Best practices
- Read the site again after a big change to it, before you bring it over. A new reading puts the earlier report aside.
- Look through every page in the editor afterwards. The layout is a good guess, not a copy.
- Keep tracking code only if you still use it, and switch on the cookie notice if it sets cookies.
- Leave the old site running until the domain says Connected, then cancel the old platform's plan, but keep the domain itself.