Moving your settings to another site

Settings → Import / Export.

Set the plugin up once — the design, the colours, the wording, the launch email, the rules about who gets in — and take that to your other sites instead of doing it all again from a screenshot. Export settings gives you a small .json file; Import settings on the other site reads it.

It carries settings and nothing else: no subscribers, no statistics, no licence key. The file is plain text and you can open it.

The Mailchimp API key, the page's password and the preview links are left out of the file as well, because a file is made to be emailed and shared, and each of them lets somebody in. The links stay behind whole, names and end dates too: a name without its address lets nobody in, and new addresses made for a site nobody was sent would be links to nothing. Importing a file never changes the ones a site already has; on a new site you set the key and the password again, and the site starts with a preview link of its own.

One thing does not travel. Display rules that name a particular page, post or category, and the products and categories a shop closed for orders keeps on sale, name them by their numbers, and the page that is number 412 here is something else on the other site — so those lists are left as they were rather than quietly pointed at whatever holds those numbers there. The message after the import says so, and you set them again. A file re-imported into the site that made it keeps everything, because there the numbers still mean what they meant.

An imported value goes through exactly the same checks as one you typed into the form, so a hand-edited file cannot put anything into your settings that a screen would have refused.

The file carries the mode and its switch too. Imported while your page is up, a file with the mode off or with Shop closed for orders takes the page down. An import emails nobody itself, so with anybody waiting the message after it says how many people were not emailed, and Send to … not yet emailed on the Subscribers screen tells them. With the launch email on while WooCommerce hides your store, the email is held for when you set the store live instead, as on any launch, and the message after the import says so: the Dashboard's Set Site visibility to Live sends it after asking, and once the store is set live in WooCommerce's own settings, which ask nothing, the Dashboard offers Send the launch email, which asks first. Such a file imported after the switch-off time has passed, but before WordPress cron has switched the mode off, is handled the same way: your page came down at that time, and nobody has been told yet. A file whose own Switch off at time has already passed, with Switch off automatically at that time on, switches the mode off with the import, and the message after it says so. A file that keeps coming soon or maintenance mode on with a Switch on at time still to come takes the page down only until that time. That is not a launch, and nobody is told. A file that picks Shop closed for orders, or whose Switch off at time comes before its Switch on at time, takes the page down for good, so it is a launch.