Bringing your old site across

Moving from Pixieset, Flothemes, Squarespace, Showit or WordPress? The importer reads your existing site and copies your pages and photographs across, so you are not retyping and re-uploading everything.

You find it under Website → Bring a site across in your panel's menu.

From a template file

A template file (it ends in .json) holds a whole website's worth of pages, journal entries and search wording, laid out as the same sections the page editor uses. Bringing one in gives you finished, editable pages in a minute.

Go to Bring a site across.
Under A template file, choose the file and press Read it. Nothing

changes yet: you see every page it holds and which addresses are **already on your site**.

Tick Replace my pages that have the same address if you want the

template's version of those pages. Each page it replaces is first copied to a hidden draft called "… (before the template)", so your own words are never lost. Leave it unticked and your existing pages are kept.

Tick Publish straight away to put the new pages and journal entries

live, or leave it unticked to get drafts you can look over first. Your home page is always live.

Press Bring it across.

The template also fills in site details you have left empty, such as your town, social links, the places you work and what you photograph. It never changes a detail you have already filled in. Photographs are not inside the file: a template made for your site points at photographs already in your Media by their file names, and anything it cannot find is left for you to choose in the page editor. It's worth taking a download of your website first (Site settings → Site details → Take a copy of everything).

How to bring a site across

Go to Bring a site across.
Under Its address, type your current website address, for example

https://your-old-site.com.

Press Have a look. Nothing is copied yet. You see a list of the pages

found, each with a rough label (About, Contact, Pricing, Gallery, Journal, FAQ or Page), and often which platform the site looks like it was built on.

Untick any pages you do not want. Everything starts ticked.
Press Bring these across, and leave the page open until it finishes and

takes you to your pages.

In Pages, press Edit beside each new page to check it.
When a page looks right, set its Status to Published, tick **Show in

the main menu if it belongs there, and press Save page**.

The new pages arrive as drafts and are not in your menu, so no visitor sees anything until you publish it.

What comes across

Each page's title and its description for search results.
The headings and paragraphs you wrote.
Your full-size photographs. They go into your media library and are resized for the web exactly as if you had uploaded them yourself. Small images such as logos, icons and thumbnails are left behind.

What does not

Your old site's design. The layout, colours and lettering come from the Meridian style kit you have chosen. Only your words and your photographs move.

Client galleries behind a password. Bring those across separately — see bringing your work across.

Forms, shops and booking systems. These are set up here instead.

Limits

Up to twenty-five pages and a hundred and twenty photographs each time you run it. This keeps the job gentle on whoever hosts your old site.

The importer lists the pages that your old home page links to, and only pages on that same website. If a page you want is missing, run it again with the address of a page that links to it — a gallery index, or your blog's main page — and tick the ones you still need.

If a page comes across badly

Every platform builds its pages differently, and some are harder to read than others. If a page arrives empty or jumbled, delete the draft (open it and press Delete page) and rebuild it. That is usually quicker than fixing it, and its photographs are already in your media library either way.

Import only from a site you own

The importer can read any public website, but it is only for your own. Use it on your own site.

Would you rather we did it?

The importer handles a straightforward site well. What it cannot do is judgement — which twelve frames from a set of eighty belong in a collection, or how a home page should be built around the sessions you want to book.

If that is what you need, there is a migration service.