Exporting and importing a store

Duplicating a store and the template library both work inside one installation. When the source and the destination are not in the same place — your machine and the live server, two separate installations, or simply you wanting a copy on a disk — the thing that travels between them is a file.

Exporting

On the store's card on the dashboard, open the ⋯ menu and choose Export.

Your browser downloads a file named something like your-store.webbuilder.zip.

That file has the images inside it. It is the thing to remember on this page, because it only became true on 2026-09-10. Before that an export was a .json file that named the images without containing them — and a name only means something to the exact installation that created it. Carried anywhere else, every picture was lost.

An older .json file still imports perfectly well; it simply arrives without its images. If you want them, export again.

Who may export

The site.export permission, and it is a permission of its own rather than a corollary of being able to look:

Role	May export?
Owner	Yes
Admin (and an org manager on a store their organisation operates)	Yes
Editor, Viewer	No
A custom role	Only if you grant it

A viewer can already see all of that content, so seeing is not the question. Carrying the whole store out in one click, in a form that rebuilds it elsewhere, is. For staff that is something to grant deliberately — in a custom role, see Team and roles.

Every export is written into the store's activity history. Not as a gate, but so there is something to review afterwards.

Importing

On the dashboard press New site, then in the dialog choose Import from a file.

You still have to name the new store — the name inside the file is not reused, because importing one file twice would otherwise produce two stores with one name and nothing to tell them apart.

Create it, and the new store appears on the dashboard as building: it cannot be opened or published until it is finished. The work runs in the background, so closing the tab is fine.

The new store belongs to you. Importing needs no special permission — it is the same act as pressing "new site", which every account may do. The half that is gated is exporting, and that gate lives on the source store.

What is NOT in the file

Exactly the list you get when duplicating a store:

• Orders
• Customers
• The custom domain
• The team (site members)

An export carries the design and the content — pages, products, articles, images, menus, theme, fonts, custom code, settings — and not the trading history. Which is what you want: a store built for a new client must not show the previous client's orders.

When some images do not make it

Once the build finishes you may see a message:

"3 image(s) were not copied — This package came from another deployment, so those files are not in this one's storage. Everything else was imported — re-upload the images in the media library."

Read it literally: the store was built in full, minus those particular images. A single missing image used to fail the whole import and leave a half-built store whose only remaining use was to be deleted. Not any more.

It happens when the file you imported is an older .json one, or when an image was deleted from the library where it was exported before you pressed Export. The fix is to re-upload those images in the Media library and put them back where they belong — not to start the import over.

Which one to use

You want to	Use
A second copy of a store in the same account	Duplicate on the store card
One starting point for a whole organisation	The template library
An agency to run a store for you	Moving sites around
To move a store to another installation, or keep a copy on a disk	Export, then Import

Duplicating and the template library are faster and download nothing, so when both ends are in the same place, use those.

An export is not a backup you roll back to. It is a snapshot of the content at a moment, with no history in it. Going back to an earlier version of a page is Version history's job.