Hatchik help → Bringing a site you already have

Bringing a site you already have

You have a website somewhere else and you want it here. Say so in your chat and your AI will do it: Hatchik reads the site from its address, takes the pages, the photographs, the styling and the fonts, rewrites the addresses so they work under the new name, and puts the result on your locked draft.

Your old site is not touched and stays up the whole time. Nothing public changes until you look at the draft and say go.

It has to be your site

Hatchik copies a site you own, or one you have permission from the owner to copy. Not somebody else's site, not a competitor's, not one you admire.

That is why the import stops and asks you. Your AI cannot answer it for you — it gets a link, you open it in your browser and sign in to Hatchik, and you tick one box:

This website is mine, or I have permission from whoever owns it to copy it.

Your answer is written down with your name and the time, and said back to you in the chat. There is nothing clever about that box. It is there because the question is yours to answer and nobody else's, including the assistant doing the work for you.

If it turns out not to be true, the copy comes down. Ask your AI to delete it.

When a site says no

Some sites carry a note asking automated tools to leave their pages alone. It is a file called robots.txt, and Hatchik goes by it — including when the person asking is the owner, because the site itself is the only thing Hatchik can hear from at that moment.

If your site says no and it really is yours, there are two ways on:

Change the note on the old site to allow it. The line stopping Hatchik is a Disallow one. Change it, wait a minute, and ask again.
Skip the copy entirely. Ask your AI for an upload link, save your site from your old provider as a file, and send that instead. It lands on your draft the same way and the note does not apply.

Two ways in

From its address. Best, when the old site is still online: it gets the real photographs at their real size.

As a file. For when there is nothing live to copy from — an export from wherever the site lives now, or a folder on your computer. Ask for an upload link, open it on whichever device has the file, tick the box and pick the zip. The link works once. An export often leaves the photographs behind, so use the address if you have one.

What does not come across

A copy is a copy of the front of a website. Anything that was talking to the old host's machinery stops working, and the report you get says which:

Forms. They will look right and go nowhere. Ask and Hatchik will wire them up to land in your email instead.
Sign-ins and accounts. Passwords live in the old system's database and cannot be copied. That part has to be rebuilt, and everyone would set a new password.
Shops and baskets. Products, orders and payments all stay behind.
Booking tools. A builder's own booking feature stops. An outside service like Calendly keeps working exactly as it did.
Pages that draw themselves in the browser. Some pages are built by code that runs as you open them. Those may come out empty. The report names them — check those first, and if one is wrong, describe what should be on it and your AI will write the page properly.

Do not cancel the old site yet

This is the one mistake with no undo. Several website builders keep your photographs on their own servers and make them vanish when you cancel — weeks after the move looked like it had worked, on a site that is already live.

Keep paying for the old one until the new one has been live for a while and you have looked at every page.

The limits

60 pages, 600 files, 250 MB in total, 80 MB for any one file, and 45 seconds of fetching. A site that runs past one of those still arrives — Hatchik publishes what it reached and names what it did not, so you can ask for the rest.

Checked, like everything else

Everything published on Hatchik is checked automatically, by software and never by a person, for the two things that would take the platform down: fake sign-in pages and programs being handed out. An import gets the same check. If a project is taken offline says what happens then and how to put a site straight back.

The same page as plain text, for an AI or anything else that prefers it: /docs/bringing-a-site-over.md