GoHighLevel AI Studio SSR: Migrate Without Breaking Forms

GoHighLevel AI Studio SSR is the new way AI Studio builds websites. SSR stands for server-side rendering, which means every page is put together on the server before it reaches the visitor. So Google, AI engines, and link previews all get the finished page. If you built your site in AI Studio a while back, it is still on the old setup, and it does not get moved over for you.

The good news is that HighLevel added a Migrate button, and it never touches your live site. It makes a copy, upgrades the copy, and you decide when to switch. It works the same way in your AlphaBlossom CRM or any standard HighLevel (GHL) account.

In this guide I move a real, live member site step by step: where the button is, what to check on the copy, how to move your custom domain, and the step most people will miss, which is pointing your form workflows at the new site so your leads keep coming in.

Watch "Migrating Your GoHighLevel AI Studio Site to SSR? Don't Miss This" on Youtube

What Is SSR, and Why Does It Matter for an AI Studio Site?

Sites on the older AI Studio setup look great to a visitor. But when the page is first sent out from the server, very little of it is there yet. With SSR, the server sends the whole page, with the text, the images, and the links already in it. That is what search engines, AI tools, and link previews read.

You can see the difference yourself. Search Google for a tool that checks a site for SSR. I used the one at punits.dev. You enter your site's address, and it shows the server version next to what a visitor sees. On the old version of this site, the server version came back completely empty, and the tool listed nine images and thirteen links that were not being picked up. That makes a difference for your SEO.

HighLevel covers what changed in its guide to SSR, server functions, REST APIs, and secrets in AI Studio.

Do You Need GoHighLevel AI Studio SSR?

Not everyone does. HighLevel's own advice is that you do not have to convert. If you are not worried about your site being indexed by Google or showing up in AI answers, you can leave it where it is. But if you do want it found, this is definitely the move.

This only applies to sites built before the change. New AI Studio sites are already built the new way. If yours is brand new and not live yet, start with how to publish your AI Studio site and set up SEO instead.

How to Migrate Your AI Studio Site to SSR

1. Go to AI Studio in the left menu and open your site.

2. At the top left, click the small down arrow next to the site name, then click Settings.

3. Scroll to the bottom of Project Settings. You will see Migrate to SSR, marked Advanced. Click Migrate.

4. Name the copy. HighLevel suggests your site name with (TanStack) after it, and you can change it later.

5. Read the notes, tick I understand and accept the above points, and click Migrate.

The notes in that pop-up are worth reading before you click:

• Cost: the migration is billed as a standard build, because AI agents do the work.

• Testing: the automated migration may not be fully accurate, so review, test, and fix the copy before you publish it.

• Workflows: if you use workflow triggers, update them to point to the migrated project.

• Publishing: your original stays live. You choose if and when to publish the new copy or move a domain.

The pop-up says it usually takes a few minutes. Mine was still going after six or seven, so give it time. Your live site keeps running the whole way through. HighLevel's changelog entry, AI Studio: Migrate Existing Projects to SSR, has the full details.

What to Check Before You Publish the Copy

When it finishes, the chat in the new project tells you the migration candidate is ready for final validation. Now go through it carefully.

• Open every page from the page list at the top of the preview, not just the home page.

• Look for missing pictures, text that looks off, and animations that stopped working.

• If you customized anything, like calendars or forms, test those the most.

• Run the SSR check again on the copy. This time the server version should show the full site. You can check the tablet and mobile views too.

• Check your page titles and descriptions. Hover over the browser tab to see the page title.

How to Move Your Custom Domain to the New Site

This is where the switch really happens, and the order matters.

1. In the new project, click Publish. The first publish goes to the temporary address HighLevel gives you. You cannot add a custom domain until you have done that.

2. Click Publish again, then Add custom domain, and enter your domain. If it is still on the old site, you will be told the domain is already connected to another project.

3. Go back to the original project, click Publish, open the menu next to your domain, and choose Remove domain.

4. Return to the new project, click Publish, then Add custom domain, enter the domain, and click Continue.

5. Click Verify DNS. Once it connects, your domain is showing the new site.

Between steps 3 and 5 your domain is not attached to either site, so there may be a little downtime. When I refreshed mine in that gap, it was not loading. Do this during off hours. I keep my DNS at Cloudflare, which I recommend, because HighLevel connects to it automatically and pushes the records for you. If domains are new to you, my GoHighLevel domain setup guide walks through every domain type.

The Step Most People Miss: Point Your Workflows at the New Site

Your forms look the same on the new site, but your workflows are still listening to the old one. Skip this step and a form submission on the new site will not start your automation.

1. Go to Automation and open each workflow that starts from a form on this site.

2. Click Add new trigger and search for AI Studio Form Submitted.

3. Click Add filters, choose AI Studio Project, then Is, and pick your new project. If it is not in the list yet, send one test submission from the new site first.

4. Add the site name to the trigger name so you can tell which site it belongs to, then click Save trigger.

5. Delete the old trigger, then save the workflow.

My old trigger was an External Tracking Event. That used to be the only way to pick up AI Studio forms. HighLevel has since added a trigger made for them, so I replaced it. I go deeper on that trigger in How To Trigger Automations From AI Studio Forms In GoHighLevel.

Then test it for real. Open the live site, do a hard refresh (Command, Shift, R on a Mac), and submit the form. Here is a tip: add a plus sign and a word to your email address, like [email protected], so it counts as a new contact. Then open Contacts, find the test contact, and make sure the choices you made on the form came through too.

That is the whole move to GoHighLevel AI Studio SSR. Keep the old project for a while as a backup, have a few real people test the new site, and you are done.

Related Links

• How To Trigger Automations From AI Studio Forms In GoHighLevel

• How To Publish Your AI Studio Site and Set Up SEO in GoHighLevel

• How to Use the AI Studio Visual Editor in GoHighLevel

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Video Transcript

[0:00] If you built a website on AI Studio a while back, it's still on the old setup. HighLevel now lets you move it over to the new system, which every page gets built on the server. So Google, AI, and link previews all get the finished page. I'll show you how to move it without touching your live site. And stay to the end, I'll show you the very important step that most people will miss. Hey guys and gals, Tony here from AlphaBlossom. I've been working with HighLevel for over six years, and I've been a HighLevel certified admin for over two years. Let's jump right into it. So inside of our AlphaBlossom CRM, or if you're using HighLevel inside of your own GHL Dash, we're gonna head into our AI Studio here in the left menu, and this is a site that we built for one of our members.

[0:48] So this is an actual live site. I'm gonna click on this here. And so this was built on the old system. The new system is built and rendered using SSR, which means server-side rendering. It's going to show the live site, all the HTML and everything, so that Google can index your site, AI engines can index your site to reference it, and if you share the site with links and things like that, it's properly previewed. So the new version builds every page on the server, so it's just a much better system, and we want to make sure we're moving our sites over to that. And HighLevel's only advice is you don't have to convert to the new system.

[1:24] If you're not worried about your site being indexed by Google or shown in AI, things like that, don't worry about switching it over. But if you do want it indexed, then this is definitely the move, and we're gonna show you exactly how to do it. And again, stay to the end. I'm gonna show you very important step that you must take to make sure your forms don't break and a couple other things. So we are inside of the site, and I'm just gonna go to the top left here, and I'm gonna click on the little down chevron where it has the site title, and you can see I've got settings here. And if you scroll down towards the bottom, you'll see migrate to SSR advanced.

[2:00] So it says we'll create a separate version of your project with faster page loading and better link previews. The original project stays unchanged, so it's very important. They're gonna make a copy of this, and it doesn't change over until the end when you're sure everything's working, and then you can switch it over. So I'm gonna click migrate. I'm gonna give it a copy here. So I'm just gonna leave it as it is, TanStack, and then later we can change the names. It has some additional notes here. So they do bill you as a standard build. So with AI Studio you're billed for token usage and things like that. Keep that in mind, it might not be fully accurate, so we're gonna make sure to test it when you're done.

[2:37] This one I have really did some customization on the calendars and things like that, so we're gonna need to test that thoroughly before we make the final switch. And it reminds you about the workflows. We're gonna show you how to do that at the end to make sure your forms are not broken. And then once it's done, your original site stays live. You choose if and when to publish this new version by moving your domain over. So you just want to check that and then migrate, and then it's going to just plan the transition here. So it takes a few minutes, it's been a couple minutes, it's still going. Quick note if you're new to HighLevel, I have a 30-day free trial down below, and I also have a free five-day boot camp.

[3:14] Check the link in the comments. And checking back in, it's been probably about six or seven minutes, it's still going. But while we're doing that, I thought I'd show you one more thing here. So this is the actual current site, the live site here. But if we scroll down, you can see the site looks fantastic on the front end. You can actually Google: I want to check my site for SSR. This one is punits.dev, and you just enter the URL here and you can check for server-side rendering. And you can see this one shows the server-side rendering version, it's completely empty, and then it shows the regular rendered version here. But the important thing is when you look over here, you can see the nine images, they are not being picked up at all.

[4:00] And the links on here are not being picked up, so none of these are server-side rendered. So the server, when these are on the server and sent out, they're not being picked up initially, and so it's gonna make a difference for your SEO. So this is why we're making this transition, and this is why HighLevel has gone to what they call their TanStack, which uses much better technology to make sure the site gets rendered properly Okay, so now we're back, and you can see the site is showing now. We've got some notes here that says that everything is done, and we can preview the migration candidate ready for final validation. So it's all done and we're good to go.

[4:42] So the important thing now is we want to preview this and make sure that it really looks the way it's supposed to look. And if we click right here, we can see I've got several pages. Make sure you preview every page and just make sure it's properly rendered and looks like it's supposed to before you switch it over. Right now I'm on the home page, I'm gonna click that and we're gonna just come in here and check the page, make sure I'm not missing any pictures, make sure the text looks good, the animations are working as they're supposed to, and so it looks great, looks perfect. One other thing I'm gonna do is we're just gonna plug this in here and then I'm just gonna do Googlebot desktop and we're gonna render that.

[5:24] You can also check for tablet view and mobile view. And if we check here, now you can see the server side rendering shows the full site. You also want to check things like your page title. So if you hover over your tabs, you can see the page titles and descriptions, make sure those match up, and you can see they do. So yeah, you just want to go through and check everything very thoroughly before we get to the next step. I'm just gonna click publish, and first we gotta publish it here using the temporary domain that they provide. And then once that's done, I'm gonna click publish again, and I'm gonna add a custom domain. And you can see we can't use the same domain in two places.

[6:04] So let's see what happens here. If we continue, we're going to connect our domain. So I'm using Cloudflare, which I recommend using to host all of your DNS records, and HighLevel has an automatic connection directly to Cloudflare using an API. And so it's just talking to Cloudflare on the back end, and it says here it's gonna update it and verify the DNS. And the domain is already connected to another project. That means we have to disconnect it first from the previous project. So we'll close this and we're gonna go back out to the original, which is this guy here. So you can see here's our TanStack. So we're gonna click on this one here, and then we're gonna publish, we're gonna remove the domain.

[6:46] Keep in mind while you're doing this, there may be a little bit of downtime, so you might want to do it during off hours or things like that. So now if we come back here and refresh, we see it's no longer working. So now I'm gonna quickly go back out to my new one, publish, add custom domain, and then we'll add the domain there and continue. And again, this is gonna just connect to Cloudflare, check the records, and it's gonna push the records there, so we're good to go. And then once this is live, we'll do the final step. I mentioned you want to stay to the end because it's super important to make sure the forms are working.

[7:20] And so we've got it here. We're gonna just verify the DNS. And now if you check publish, you can see we've got it here. If we click on it, it's working again. So now we have it switched over to the new version. So the last step we need to do is we're gonna go out into automations, and we want to make sure that we update the new form. So we're gonna go into this workflow here, and now here's something that's interesting. Also, you can see this trigger we have, it's called external tracking event. This was originally the only way to register forms. You'd have to use this trigger external tracking event. HighLevel has recently added a new one, which is called AI Studio form submitted, and so we're gonna replace the tracking event because we no longer need that now that we have one specifically for the forms, and then we're gonna add a filter.

[8:09] Now the form may not show up yet. We might have to run a test submission first. We got AI Studio Project is and actually it is there Vintage Clothing LP TanStack. So now we can save that. I'm just gonna put in the name here also Vintage Clothing LP TanStack so I can see this without having to click in here. So basically the filter is if this specific form from this website is submitted, it's going to trigger this event. I do have another one here also, which is for a different form, and then I'm going to actually delete this one now. We don't need this, and then I want to save this, and I don't need to make any other changes, I just need to change the trigger so that it's going to trigger from our new form that we just added on our new AI Studio site.

[8:55] So now we can go back out to the site. I'm gonna do a hard refresh, which on my Mac is command shift R, and then I'm going to check this form here. So I'm gonna do Tony testing, and I'm going to go info plus new AI Studio at alphablossom.com. Just having that plus in there allows me to treat this like a unique email because I'm probably already in here. So I'm just gonna do one of these and then submit. So on the front end it's working, but we need to make sure the contact was actually added. So you want to go inside to your contacts, and I'm gonna search AlphaBlossom. And you can see there's Tony testing, there's the email I just added new AI Studio.

[9:41] And one more thing I want to check is did my selections get through okay? And so you can see we've got it there. So yes, they did make it through as well. So that's it, everything's good. We are now using the new SSR stack with our AI Studio site. The new one has been transferred over. I'm gonna keep the old one for a while just as a backup, just in case we're gonna do some real live testing and have my members go through and test it. But it looks like it was a successful transition, and now we are ready to jump up in those search engine rankings. That's it. Your old site stays safe the whole time.

[10:19] So the only real work is checking your copy, moving your domain over, changing your automations to the new site, and making sure all of your forms and buttons are working. So tell me, have you moved your new AI Studio site over yet? Or are you still waiting? Let me know in the comments below. And don't forget, if this helped, give me a like and a subscribe and help support the channel so I can keep making more videos like this. And I will see you in the next one.