Import an existing site
If you already have a website, you do not have to start from an empty page. Paste its address at
/import and it comes back as a Webkio site you can click through, edit and keep. There is nothing to
export, download or upload, and no account is needed to look.
Not sure it is worth the five minutes? The migration checker reads one page and lists what would come across first.
What actually happens
It rebuilds, it does not copy. We read the words and the structure of your pages - your headings, the paragraphs under them, your contact details, your logo and the colour your design is built around - and lay them out using Webkio's own sections. Your stylesheet, your markup and your layout stay where they are. The result looks like a Webkio site with your content in it, which is the point: it is the thing you would actually be using.
It reads up to twenty pages, following the links in your own navigation, in the order your menu lists them. A slow site yields fewer pages rather than a longer wait. A site with a two-hundred-post archive brings the pages your menu links to, not the whole archive.
Nothing is published and nothing on your current site changes. The rebuild lives on a Webkio address that search engines are told to ignore, and it deletes itself after 72 hours unless you create a free account to keep it.
Your page addresses stay the same
This is the part most moves get wrong. A page at services/dental-implants arrives at
services/dental-implants, nested paths and all. Where an address cannot be kept exactly - it ends in
.html, or its first word is one our own routes already use - the page takes the nearest address and the
old one redirects to it permanently. So the links other people published, the bookmarks and the search
results already pointing at your site all still arrive somewhere real.
What we do not promise is what Google does next. Rankings are its decision, not a setting. Keeping your addresses simply means you are not asking it to start again.
What does not come across
No importer moves these, ours included:
- Anything behind a login: member areas, client portals, customer accounts.
- Your old platform's own apps and widgets. They only exist there - whatever they were doing, there is a Webkio section that does it instead (bookings, a shop, forms, a menu).
- Enquiries and orders already collected. Those stay in the system that took them.
- Email accounts on your domain. Those belong to whoever provides them and are not affected.
- The domain itself is not copied. You point it at the new site when you are ready, which is one change made where you bought it - see connect a custom domain.
After the import
- Open it in the builder and fix what the reader got wrong. Check your prices especially: a price written inside an image arrives as the image, because on the page that is all it is.
- Add what was behind a widget before - bookings, products, a menu - from the dashboard.
- Publish when you are happy. Nothing is live until you do.
- Point your domain at it last, once the site reads the way you want.
If it does not work
- "We could not read that address." The page is behind a login, a cookie wall or a "checking your browser" screen, so there is nothing for the reader to see. Try a page that opens without any of those.
- Fewer pages than you expected. It follows your navigation, so pages reachable only from inside another page are not found. Build those few by hand, or add them to your menu first and import again.
- It looks plainer than your old site. That is the rebuild working as described: your words in Webkio sections, not a screenshot of your old theme. The design is then yours to change in the builder.