Import an existing website

If you already have a website somewhere else, Solstral can read it and rebuild it here as draft pages made of the builder's own sections, elements and classes, so you can edit it like anything you built yourself. Nothing is published until you publish it. (Import is being switched on workspace by workspace, for the owner and admins, and each plan includes a number of imports a month.)

1. Start an import

Open the site under Sites and, on its Pages tab, find Import from a website. Type the address, then choose Just this page or The whole site. For a whole site, Find its pages lists what it would read (the site's sitemap first, then the links on the page you gave) with a tick box beside each: untick what you don't want. Tick that you own the site or have its owner's permission, and press Import.

2. While it reads

The import screen shows what it's doing: reading pages, bringing the images into your Library (in a folder called Imported from and the site's name), then making the builder pages. You can leave: you get a notification when the drafts are ready. Sites that ask crawlers not to read them (in their robots.txt) can't be imported until their owner allows SolstralBot.

3. Check each page

Each page shows a picture of the original beside a link to its draft. Open in builder to fix anything; Import again reads that page once more; Remove deletes a draft you don't want. A page lands at the same address it had (a page already at that address on your site is never replaced: the import's goes beside it, ending -imported).

What comes across, and what doesn't

• Comes across: headings, text, lists, links (to the other imported pages where they can), buttons, images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, the layout at desktop, tablet and phone widths, the header as a navigation bar and the footer.
• Styles become classes you can edit once for every page, and the main colours and fonts become site variables named brand, text, heading-font and so on. Your site's own brand colours aren't changed.
• Forms become a Form block waiting for a form: the import screen lists the fields the original asked for, so you can make a matching form in Forms and choose it.
• Fonts that Google Fonts has load straight away; for any other, the import screen tells you which to upload.
• Not copied: scripts, embedded widgets other than YouTube and Vimeo, logins, shops and anything that needs the original site's server.

With Let the assistant name the sections and styles on, the assistant gives the sections and classes names that say what they are, like Hero or feature-card. It uses one AI credit per page it names, twenty at most, and a page it can't name is free.

4. Finish

Press Finish when you're happy. The drafts stay for you to publish, and where a page's address changed (an old /about.html is now /about), the old address sends visitors to the new one.