Import a website

Importing reads your existing website and fills a Smileline website with its words, so you don't start from a blank page. It is for practices in the United Kingdom and the United States and needs Connect providers, manage lead forms & draft campaigns. On pay-as-you-go it is part of the full system (not the SEO & Social plan), and the AI that fills your pages is billed per AI call, from under 1p (1¢ in the US) depending on the task. On the older price list, starting an import needs the SEO & Ads add-on; Retry, Discard and Leave as it is keep working if the add-on ends, so an import that stopped can always be sorted out.

Start an importCopy Anchor Link

What it importsCopy Anchor Link

Smileline follows every link on your website from the address you gave, page by page, staying on that website — even links on a page whose words can't be imported. Everything your website sends back is kept exactly as it arrived before anything is taken from it, error pages and files included. Then Smileline's AI places your own text — headings, descriptions, treatment details, your story — into the pages of your Smileline website, and works out which old address matches which new page. A page that many old pages feed is filled from all of them, a few at a time.

• Only your own headings, paragraphs, lists and tables go to the AI. Testimonials, reviews, quotes, star ratings, sections headed as patient stories or reviews, anything written as "I" or "my", and any text that could be a patient's own words never do: they are listed under Left out for you to add by hand, so you can add the ones your patients agreed to share yourself.
• Imported text arrives in drafts. Nothing goes live until you publish, so check every page first.
• Claims in the imported text, such as offers and prices, still wait for your tick before they show.
• Smileline adds redirects from your old addresses to the matching new pages, so links, bookmarks and search results keep working once your domain points at the new website.
• Pictures come from your image library, not from the old website: add the photos you want there.

Smileline follows your website's robots.txt — the one for each address it visits (with and without www), before every page and before following every redirect. If an address has none, every page there can be read. If the file can't be read — your website answers with an error, or not in time — the import stops before reading any page there, says why, and Retry tries again.

Follow its progressCopy Anchor Link

The import shows how many pages it found, how many it has read and how many it has made into pages.

• Skipped pages are all listed with the reason — off your website, not a web page, blocked by your website's robots.txt, a duplicate of a page already read, or an address too long to import. Choose Load more to see the rest of a long list.
• Pages that couldn't be read are listed one by one with Retry and Discard. Retry reads the copy Smileline kept of the page again, or fetches the page again when what arrived was an error or cut off; every earlier attempt is kept too. Nothing is thrown away unless you choose Discard for that page.
• A page larger than 2 MB, or with more text than an import can read at once, is listed as one that couldn't be read (its first 2 MB are kept): copy its text by hand.
• If the AI's text for one of your new pages couldn't be used, the import stops and lists that page under Pages the AI couldn't fill, with what was wrong and the AI's answer. Retry asks the AI again; Leave as it is keeps the page as it is now so you can write that text yourself, and the import carries on.
• If the import stops for any other reason, it says why, and Retry carries on from where it stopped.

When it has finished, you can import again, for example after changing your old website. The AI's answers that couldn't be used are kept with the import so they can be checked, and are deleted with the website.