Switching & import
Move in without retyping five years of a website.
Moving your club off the platform you are on now: build alongside your current site, bring the roster across by CSV, keep the web address that carries your reputation — and hear the honest version of what cannot move.
The reason a club stays on a platform it has outgrown is almost never the subscription. It is the retyping — a decade of news posts, a committee page, a documents shelf and a roster that lives somewhere else entirely, all of it landing on one volunteer on a Tuesday night. This page is about making that job smaller, and about being straight with you everywhere it cannot be.
No deadline
Build it beside the site you already have
Your ClubHelix site lives at its own web address from the day you start, so you can build the whole thing, show it to the committee, sleep on it and change your mind twice — while your current site carries on serving members exactly as it does today. Nothing about your existing site changes until you decide.
The switch is the moment you point your domain, and not a minute before. There is a free plan you can build on for as long as you like, and a 14-day trial if you want the paid features while you are deciding.
Coming
Your current website, read and rebuilt as drafts
This part is not switched on yet, and we would rather tell you that than take the order. Pointing an automated reader at somebody else’s web server is not something to do casually, so it stays off until we are satisfied it behaves.
What it will do: you give us the address of your current website, and we read what it publishes — page text and headings, your navigation, your images, contact details, social links, logo, colours and typography — and rebuild it inside ClubHelix as draft pages. Drafts, every time. A crawl will carry a committee list last updated in 2019 across perfectly, so a volunteer reads each page and publishes it, and publishing it is approving it.
- Your news archive arrives as real posts carrying their real publication dates, not one flattened page
- We ask your site’s robots file for permission first, and take one page at a time — a refusal is reported to you with the other routes offered, never crawled around
- You confirm in writing that your organisation owns or controls the site, and that confirmation is kept with the import
- A page that only assembles itself once a browser has run its code is reported as one we could not read, never as an empty page we imported successfully
- The categories and tags on your old posts come across, the images the import brings in are listed in your media library, and your old site’s own CSS is checked against our rules with every removed line explained. That CSS is applied only on Pro, and only if your new site has no CSS of its own
- The same screen will also let you download your website as one file: pages, sections, theme, menus, categories and tags, news, events and a list of your images, with no member details. A copy of your site is always yours to keep
Your roster
The members come across. The payment authorities cannot.
No amount of reading a public website produces a member list, and it should not — the roster is the part that is properly private. It comes across as an export file instead, and bulk import takes it from there: upload the CSV and a dry-run runs first and is not optional, showing what will be created, what looks like a duplicate of somebody you already have, and what will be refused — before a single record is written.
Then the part every platform should say out loud and most do not. Card numbers, bank account details, direct-debit authorities and password hashes never come across. That is not a gap we intend to close: a stored card cannot lawfully or safely move between systems, and a direct debit is an authority your member gave the old organisation’s merchant account, which nobody can reassign. Everyone paying by card or mandate re-authorises on ours, and there is a way to run that campaign so it costs you money you were owed rather than members you had.
Your web address
The domain carries the reputation, so it comes with you
A decade of search results and every link anyone has ever emailed point at your domain, so that is the asset worth protecting. It moves with you: custom domains walks you through the DNS records at your own provider, by name, verifies while you watch, and issues the certificate for you. Build first, point the domain last — that order is what stops a club losing its email along with its website.
Coming alongside the website import: a map from every address on the old site to where that page now lives, so an old search result or a link in a 2019 newsletter arrives at the right page instead of a dead end. Until it ships, the manual version is written up in plain English, and it is worth reading whichever platform you end up on.
The honest bit
What will not move, whoever you move to
Every list of migration features is really a list of things somebody decided not to mention. Here is ours, stated before you sign up rather than discovered in week three:
- Anything behind a login on the old site. Nothing public contains your roster, and the export file is the only honest route to it
- Stored cards and direct-debit mandates. A platform change is a merchant-account change; every recurring payer re-authorises
- Whether the content is still true. We can carry a five-year-old sponsor list across faithfully. Only you can tell us it is wrong — which is why it all lands as drafts
- The old site’s template. Your words and your photographs are yours; the layout they sit in belongs to whoever built it, so your pages are rebuilt in yours
- A social page doing the job of a website. Copying one by crawling breaks the rules of the platform it sits on and fails behind consent walls anyway — connecting to it properly is the better route, and the honest one
Or hand it over
None of this has to be your Tuesday night
If your committee would rather not do the typing at all, our done-for-you service picks a template, brands it to your colours, moves your content across and configures members, registration and your domain. And if you would rather read first and decide later — including the parts where the answer is "nobody can do that" — everything we know about moving a club is written down and free.
See it with your club's name on it
Spin up a fully-branded site in under 30 minutes, free — no technical skills needed.