Import a real website
Point at a URL and 3dCMS crawls it, pulling pages, images, copy, and links into rearrangeable 3D panels. A fast starting point; how much comes through depends on the site.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
This is the feature that turns "build a 3D site" into "point at a URL." Web import crawls a real website and lays its pages out as navigable 3D page surfaces: copy, images, links, and theme included. Find it under File ▸ Import Real Website.
Running an import
- Enter a URL
Type any address in Website URL (3dCMS adds
https://if you skip it). - Choose how deep to crawl
Crawl depth (1–5) sets how many link-levels to follow. Depth 1 is a single page; higher follows the navigation outward. Max pages caps the total.
- Pick a 3D layout
Hub & Spoke puts the home page at the center with others orbiting it; By Nav Section clusters pages by the site's top-level sections.
- (Optional) tune the advanced options
Panel aspect and width, spacing, how much HTML to keep per page, max images per panel, and more.
- Import
Click Import Website. A progress bar counts "Crawling… X / Y pages," then "Import complete!" The first page is selected and framed for you.
Changed your mind halfway through a deep crawl? The dialog's left button becomes Stop import while one is running: it aborts the crawl on the spot and leaves your scene untouched, so a 50-page import is never something you have to sit through or reload the editor to escape.
What gets harvested
For each page, 3dCMS pulls out:
- Copy: title, hero text, summary, meta description, content sections, FAQ, testimonials, reading time, and organization info.
- Images: the hero plus a gallery (capped by your max-images setting).
- The link graph: nav and links, with cross-page links rewired to the imported pages so navigation works in 3D.
- Theme: accent and background colors lifted from the page.
The crawl stays same-origin, skips non-content paths (login, cart, search, admin), and de-duplicates tracking-tagged URLs. Re-importing a site cleanly replaces its existing page surfaces (it asks first).
- Extraction quality varies a lot by site: clean marketing/portfolio pages harvest best; dense, app-like, or heavily-scripted sites yield much less, and brand colors or long text can come through rough.
- Imported images stream from the original site: they're not copied into your Asset Library. That one matters after you publish, because a picture living on someone else's server loads through a proxy that only answers a signed-in caller. You keep seeing it while you build; a visitor gets an empty panel. Upload the images you want to keep and re-point the blocks at your own copies.
- Pages come in as panels, not loose per-element objects.
- Images that the source site loads lazily via JavaScript may not be captured (the crawl reads the server's HTML).
- On the hosted app you'll need to be signed in: the crawl runs through an authenticated proxy.
- A crawl stops on its own at 100 pages or 24 MB of buffered HTML, whichever comes first, whatever you set Max pages to. A deep crawl of a large site used to hold hundreds of megabytes in the tab and take it down with it; now it finishes early with what it has.
- A URL that answers with something other than an HTML page (a PDF, an image, a JSON endpoint) is refused rather than parsed as markup. And if part of the site sits behind a sign-in, the import warns you that what came through may be the login screen rather than the content behind it.