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Copying your website

If you sell through WooCommerce, Bottle can copy your website into your shop: its pages, blog posts, menus and pictures. Bottle then sets up your shop’s look and home page from them. You start with a shop that already reads like yours, ready to check and publish.

Your products come across separately, when you bring in your products from your shop. See Connecting your shop.

Do it once, at the start

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Copying your website replaces your shop’s look, home page and menus. Do it when you first set up your shop, before you make changes of your own. Shoppers see none of it until you publish.

If your shop already has work in it, Bottle asks you to confirm first.

Copy your website

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  1. Connect your WooCommerce shop in Connections, if you have not already. See Connecting your shop.
  2. Open Bottle Shop. On Overview, find Copy your WooCommerce website. If your shop is not set up yet, it is under Sell online with Bottle Shop.
  3. Press Copy my website. If you have more than one WooCommerce shop connected, choose which one first.

Copying takes a few minutes. You can leave the page and come back. Bottle shows each step:

  • Reading your website
  • Copying pictures
  • Making your pages and blog posts
  • Setting up your look and home page

When it finishes, Bottle says what it copied, for example: “Copied 12 pages, 30 blog posts, 2 menus and 48 pictures.” Press Open Design to check everything, then publish.

What Bottle copies

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  • Pages: every published page, as a draft. Bottle splits each page into sections at its headings: words, words beside a picture, and pictures. Columns on your website stay side by side.
  • Blog posts: your newest published posts, as drafts. Each keeps its date, its author’s name, its picture and up to five tags.
  • Pictures: the pictures in your pages and posts, your logo and your site icon. Pictures from your own website come first.
  • Menus: your website’s menus, when WordPress lets Bottle read them. Most WordPress websites keep menus private, so Bottle usually makes new ones from your pages: a main menu with your top pages and the pages under them, and a footer menu.
  • Your look and home page: colours from your website, a pair of fonts, a headline from your website’s name and tagline, banners, words about your business, your delivery promise, questions from your FAQ page, and the products to show first.

Links between your pages go to your new pages. Links to your old basket, checkout and account pages go to your shop’s own.

What Bottle leaves out

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  • Forms, sliders, videos and maps. Bottle takes out plugin codes in square brackets and keeps the words around them.
  • Password-protected pages, and WooCommerce’s own pages (shop, basket, checkout and account). Your shop has its own.
  • Anything that could run on a shopper’s screen, such as scripts.
  • Pages beyond the first 60, blog posts beyond your newest 100, and pictures beyond the first 80.

After copying, Bottle lists anything you should check, such as a picture it could not copy.

Your own pages are never changed

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Bottle never changes a page or blog post already in your shop. If a copied one has the same address as one of yours, Bottle adds a number to the copy’s address, such as about-us-2, and tells you. If a copied page had to take a new address, its old address still works and takes shoppers to it.

Everything comes in as a draft

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Pages and blog posts come in as drafts, so you can check each one before you publish it. Publish them one by one from Pages and Blog, and publish your look, home page and menus with the shop’s own Publish, from Design or your home page under Pages.

How Bottle sets up your look and home page

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Bottle’s AI reads a short summary of your website: page titles, the start of each page, what your pictures show, and your products’ names. It suggests your look, home page and menus, and how to lay out each page. Bottle uses only the suggestions that fit your shop. If the AI is not available, Bottle sets everything up itself from your website.

Nothing goes on your shop until you publish it.

If copying stops

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If your website stops answering, Bottle says what happened. Press Carry on copying to continue from where it stopped. Nothing is copied twice.

If you change your shop’s look, home page or menus while copying, Bottle keeps your changes and still copies your pages and blog posts.

Undo the copy

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After copying, press Undo the copy to move the pages and blog posts Bottle copied to the Bin, and to put back your shop’s look, home page and menus as they were.

  • A page or blog post you have changed or published since stays as it is.
  • If you have changed your shop’s look, home page or menus since, they stay as they are.

Pictures stay in your shop’s pictures.

How often

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One copy runs at a time, and you can copy your website up to five times a day.

Who can do this

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Owners and admins, signed in. It cannot be started with an API key or by an assistant.