Starting from an existing website

If you already have a website — an old one you've outgrown, one you can no longer edit, one built on a platform you'd rather leave — you don't have to describe it from scratch. Give the assistant its address and it rebuilds it here.

This is a replica, not a redesign. The goal is a site that is hard to tell apart from the original: the same sections in the same order, the same words, the same fonts at the same sizes and weights, the same colors, the same photos in the same places, the same behavior on a phone. Once it's here you can change anything you like.

With one deliberate exception: where the old site is plainly broken, the rebuild fixes it rather than copying it. See "What gets fixed along the way" below.

Doing it

In the builder's starting-point dialog, choose Start from a website, type the address — example.com is enough, you don't need the https:// — and select Capture website.

Three things happen, and the dialog shows each as it goes.

1. The snapshot

We open the address in a browser and take a full-page picture of it, top to bottom. It appears in the dialog within twenty seconds or so, and you confirm it's the right site before anything is built. If the page didn't load properly, or a cookie banner is covering half of it, choose Try a different site and try again — perhaps with a different page.

Websites don't always answer the first time — one that's slow to wake up, or busy for a moment, often answers a few seconds later. So if the address doesn't answer, we ask again on our own, up to three times, and the dialog tells you which try it's on. If none of them gets through, you'll see a warning rather than an error: the address is probably fine, and the website may just need a few minutes. Wait, then choose Try again in the warning — it becomes available after about 30 seconds and captures the same address, so there's nothing to retype. If it keeps happening, check the address opens in your own browser. Some answers aren't worth repeating — an address that isn't a public website, a page that doesn't exist, a site that redirects in circles — and the dialog says what's wrong with those straight away.

Some sites can't be photographed — a page that never finishes loading in our screenshot browser, for instance. Then the dialog says there's no snapshot to show and lets you carry on anyway: we still read the site's pages, images, and fonts, and the rebuild works from those. Check the address is right before you choose Build my website, since there's no picture to confirm it by. If the pages can't be read either, there's nothing to rebuild from, and the dialog asks you to try a different address or describe the site instead.

2. The capture

While the snapshot renders, we read the site itself — all of it. We ask the site for its sitemap, the list of pages most websites publish for search engines, and follow every link on every page we read, so the capture finds the pages your menu shows and the ones it doesn't: an old landing page, a service page you only link to from an ad, a blog post that has dropped off the listing. Your site doesn't need a sitemap for this — every entry in your menu's dropdowns is a link we follow, even though the menu hides them until you point at it. The dialog counts what it finds: pages read, images and graphics brought across, font files brought across.

Every page's words come across, word for word. A handful of pages — your home page and one of each kind of page, such as one blog post, one service page, and your contact page — are also opened in a real browser and measured, because pages built from the same layout look the same; the rest of your pages are rebuilt in the layout they share.

Measuring is what makes the rebuild close. For every part of those pages we record the exact values the browser used — font family, size, weight and line height, colors, spacing, sizes — along with the site's own stylesheets, its real copy and contact details, and the things a picture can't show: the menu with every entry in every dropdown and how it opens, what a button does when you point at it, what the header becomes once you scroll down the page, the widths the layout changes at, a menu that collapses on a phone, an accordion, every slide of a slideshow. We also take a phone-width snapshot, so the assistant knows how the original stacks on a small screen.

A picture of a website only shows it standing still, at the top, in one state. Reading the site itself is what lets the rebuild move the way yours does.

A video that plays on your pages — a looping video behind your headline, say — comes across too, exactly as it was, when it fits in a single website file (up to 50 MB), and plays in the same place on your new site. A larger video can't be copied, so a still picture taken from it takes its place in the same layout, and the assistant tells you the motion is missing.

Every image is imported into your media library, where you can see, rename, move, and reuse it like any photo you upload yourself. There is no set number of images and no total size a website has to stay under: every image the capture finds comes across, the images on your main pages first. Photographs are resized and converted the same way an upload of your own is, so your new site loads quickly; logos are kept exactly as they were. If the original hosts its own fonts, the font files come across too, so the rebuild uses the actual typeface rather than a lookalike. Fonts from Google Fonts are linked the same way the original linked them.

Some servers we know hold nothing but a website's files — media.cmsmax.cloud is one. When your old site keeps files on one of those, every file its pages use there comes across: images, documents such as a PDF menu, video and audio. The rebuild links your copies, never the old server.

Anything still on another server after the first build — a brochure on a file-sharing site, say — is listed in Remote File Search, which opens by itself the first time you come back to the builder and lets you move those files in too.

Your old website's favicon — the little icon in the browser tab — comes across as well, into the Favicon slot on your Branding page, so the new site opens in a tab that looks like yours. If you had already chosen a favicon for this website, yours is kept. A favicon only available as an SVG can't be brought across; the capture uses the site's favicon.ico instead, and if there is none you can add one on the Branding page.

The capture usually takes one to three minutes, and up to about eight for a large site with hundreds of pages. A very large site — a store with thousands of product pages — is read up to its first 300 pages, and the assistant tells you which pages it found but didn't get to. When you choose Build my site before it has finished, the dialog waits for it — you'll see what it's doing — and starts the build as soon as it lands. If you'd rather not wait, Skip and build from the snapshot starts right away with the pictures alone; the result will be less exact.

The capture is best-effort. If the site blocks it, or is slow, or is built in a way that hides its content, the flow carries on with the snapshots and says so.

3. Every page, one after another

You confirm, and the assistant builds its first version: your layouts, your header and footer, and as many pages as fit. A website with a few dozen pages is more than one go, so the assistant keeps going on its own — after each update it checks which of your old site's pages the new one still doesn't have, and carries on with the next of them. You never have to type "continue". It keeps going until every page it found is there at the same address it had on your old site.

If a page can't be brought over — your old site refused to show it to us, or a link on it leads to a page that no longer exists — the assistant says which one and why in its final summary, rather than guessing at what was on it.

Keep the builder open while this runs. It works through your pages one update after another from the open page; if you close it part-way, just come back and say "carry on with the remaining pages" and it picks up where it left off.

4. The compare passes

Once every page is there, the assistant checks its own homework.

We take snapshots of the draft it just built, at desktop and phone width, and hand them back beside the original's snapshots with an instruction to compare them section by section — sections, type, colors, spacing, images, copy, the phone layout — check each difference against the capture, and fix all of them. This runs twice by default, so what you first see is usually the third attempt, not the first.

Those passes look at your homepage. One more pass then looks at your other pages — the contact page, the about page, and each other kind of page we measured, up to five — with the original and the rebuild side by side in one snapshot per page, so a form laid out differently or a heading that lost its weight gets fixed too.

The compare passes run automatically and only on this flow. From then on you're in a normal conversation.

Your website appears before it is finished

The first version fills the builder with a whole website, and it is easy to read that as done — the rest of your pages and the compare passes are still to come, and between them there are quiet stretches where we're taking the snapshots for the next one.

So while that is happening, a banner sits across the top of the canvas with a pulsing amber dot: We're still putting the final touches on your website. It stays there until the last pass has finished, and it means what it says — the page under it is going to keep changing, so it's worth waiting before you start editing. While your pages are still coming across it also counts them — 12 of 50 built so far — so you can see how far along it is. Keep the builder open until the count reaches the end; after that, the update that is running finishes on our servers even if you close the tab. If you pressed Email me when ready while it was building, the email comes after the last pass, not the first.

What gets fixed along the way

Copying a fault faithfully still leaves you with the fault, and you're leaving the old site for a reason. So the rebuild corrects three things as it goes, and nothing else:

• Text you can't comfortably read. Pale grey on white, white on a light brand color, a caption sitting straight on a photo. The color keeps the same hue — it just goes lighter or darker until the text is readable, which is also what accessibility rules require.
• Things that don't line up. A card a few pixels narrower than the two beside it, a heading that misses the column below it, three "equal" boxes with three different amounts of padding, a row that hangs over the edge of the page. These get snapped to whatever the rest of that section already does.
• Layout that's actually broken. Text overlapping or cut off, a page that scrolls sideways on a phone, a photo squashed out of shape, a button too small to tap.

Everything else is left exactly as you had it. Your colors, your fonts, your type sizes, your spacing, your section order, your photos, your words — none of that is second-guessed, even where the assistant might have chosen differently. Taste isn't a fault.

When it corrects something it tells you, in the summary at the end of the build. If you preferred the original, say so — "put the footer text back to the grey it was" — and it goes back.

When it can't reach the site

The address is checked before anything expensive happens, so a problem shows up quickly and says what it is. The usual causes:

• A typo, or a site that isn't public. Staging sites behind a password, intranets, and local addresses can't be captured.
• The site is down or refusing connections. Try opening the address in your browser first.
• The page is heavily protected. Some sites block automated visitors outright.

You are never stuck. Choose Describe it instead and tell the assistant what the old site had — or take a screenshot yourself and upload it under Start from an image, which gives the assistant the same visual anchor by another route.

What to check afterwards

• Proofread. The rebuild starts from your site's real words, so anything out of date on the old site is now out of date on the new one — a good moment to fix it.
• Open the menu. Point at each item that had a dropdown on the old site and check the entries are all there and go where they should; then do the same on a phone. If one is missing, "the Services dropdown is missing its third entry" is enough.
• Click through on a phone. The menu, the buttons, the forms. A form on the old site that posted to a server becomes a link to your email or phone number here; say if you want something different.
• Check every page came across. The assistant works through every page it found, and its last summary names any it couldn't bring over and why. Pages that aren't in your site's sitemap and aren't linked from any other page can't be found on their own; tell the assistant the address — "you missed /spring-open-house" — and it reads that page from your old site and builds it.
• Look for what's missing. A photo that was hidden behind a slideshow, a section that only appears after a click. Tell the assistant — "the third hero photo" — and it can read the original again for exactly that.
• Read the summary. It lists anything the rebuild corrected — a color darkened so the text could be read, a section straightened up. Ask for any of it back if you'd rather have the original.
• Small differences are what the conversation is for: "the header should be a little taller," "that heading was bolder on the original."

Only rebuild sites you have the right to copy. Pointing at a competitor and taking their site wholesale is their work, not yours; pointing at one for the layout you admire, then telling the assistant to use your own words and photos, is a different thing.

Next

• Plans and the free trial — what's included before you pay.
• Chatting with the assistant — how to close the last gaps.