Help & documentation

Getting started

There are two ways to create a site:

• Build with AI — describe your business and AI generates a complete, on-brand website. Start at Build with AI.
• Refactor an existing site — enter your current website URL and we rebuild it cleaner. You’ll confirm your email, then we generate a preview.

Both land you in the Customize editor with a live preview.

Customizing your site

• Sections — click a section to select it, then ✨ Edit (text, images, or AI-assisted changes). Drag the ⋮⋮ handle to reorder.
• 🎄 Holiday themes — in the Design panel, opt in and pick holidays (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's, July 4th, Easter): your site automatically wears matching colors from about a week before until just after, then reverts — republishing itself both times.
• Add / remove — + Add section adds a section and lets you choose its layout; the 🗑 button removes one. Header & footer are site-wide.
• Pages — add pages with the + Page tab and move sections between them.
• Gallery — open a gallery’s editor to drag-reorder, replace, remove, or add individual photos (no AI re-roll needed).
• Design — the 🎨 Design panel switches the whole-site theme, colors, and fonts at once.

Logo & branding

Give your site a real brand mark from the ✨ Logo & Brand panel in Customize:

• Generate with AI (paid plans) — optionally add style notes (“a fox, warm orange tones”) and get 4 logo options per run (10 credits). Click one to apply it.
• Or upload your own — PNG, JPG, WebP, or SVG; square images work best. Available on every plan.

Your logo is applied everywhere at once: the site header, the browser-tab icon (favicon), and as the fallback share image when your pages are linked on social media. Re-publish to put it live. You can remove or replace it anytime.

Note: AI-generated marks aren’t checked against existing trademarks — review before commercial use.

Publishing

Click Deploy Website in Customize. Your site goes live on a free address like yourbusiness.caddisfly.app, and we show you a clickable link. Re-deploy any time after making changes — re-publishing on a paid plan also removes the “Built with Caddisfly” badge.

QR code for your site

Every published site has a free QR code that links straight to your live address — perfect for flyers, menus, business cards, and shop windows. On your Dashboard, click QR code on a live site’s tile.

• Download PNG for everyday use, or SVG for print — it scales to any size with no blur.
• It encodes your custom domain if you’ve connected one, otherwise your caddisfly.app address.

Available on every plan — no credits needed.

Online store

Sell on your site with your own Stripe account — payments go directly to you; Caddisfly never holds your money and adds no transaction fee (Stripe’s standard processing fees apply). Available from the Starter plan.

1. Connect Stripe — open 🛍 Store on your Dashboard (or from Customize) and click Connect Stripe. One click — no keys to copy.
2. Add products — name, price, type (physical / digital / service). Let AI write the description (✨) and generate a product photo (🖼). Already selling on Stripe? ⬇ Import from Stripe pulls your catalog in one click.
3. Publish — your site gets a Shop page and menu link automatically. Visitors add to cart and check out securely on Stripe (Apple Pay / Google Pay included); physical products collect a shipping address.

After each sale, the buyer lands on a receipt page (saveable as PDF) and gets a confirmation email; you get a “new order” email and the order appears under 🧾 Orders on the Store page. Buyers can revisit their purchase history anytime via My orders (secure email sign-in link). Product limits: Starter 10 · Pro 50 · Agency unlimited.

Feature products anywhere: in Customize, + Add section → 🛍 Shop products drops your newest items (with add-to-cart) onto any page — the home page is a great spot. It updates automatically as you add products.

Subscriptions: sell recurring plans from a Pricing section — edit the section, attach one of your Stripe recurring prices to a plan card (or create one right there), and its button becomes a live Subscribe checkout. Renewals, invoices, and receipt emails are handled by your Stripe account.

Courses & training

The Courses plugin lets you build and sell online courses on your site — lessons, videos, PDFs, and self-check quizzes. It's a $5/mo add-on on any paid plan; enable it from Plugins.

1. Create a course — open 📚 Courses from the editor's Manage ▾ menu. Build it by hand, or click ✨ Generate with AI, type a topic, and get a full course (sections, lessons, and quizzes) in about 20 seconds.
2. Add lessons — each lesson is a video, rich text, a PDF, an external link, or a self-check quiz. Group them into sections, set a price (or leave it free), add a cover image and instructor, then publish.
3. On your site — published courses get a Courses page and menu link automatically, with a built-in player: a lesson sidebar, video/PDF/text content, and quizzes that grade instantly in the browser. Feature courses anywhere with + Add section → 📚 Courses.

Paid courses use your own Stripe account (the same connection as the store). Buyers sign in with a passwordless email link and are enrolled the moment they pay, then watch every lesson right on your site — they also get a private backup access link by email. Free courses stay open to everyone. Want the catalog private too? Turn on 🔒 Members only in the Courses manager so visitors must sign in to browse (requires the Members plugin).

Members & sign-in

The Members plugin lets visitors create a free account on your site and unlocks members-only content. It's a $5/mo add-on (also in the Creators & Coaches bundle); enable it from Plugins.

• Passwordless sign-in — visitors enter their email and get a magic sign-in link (no password). Add a + Add section → 👤 Member sign-in box anywhere so people can log in, see their account, and log out.
• Members-only pages — in the Pages panel, tick 🔒 Members only on any page. Once published, that page shows only a sign-in box; the real content is delivered to signed-in members and never appears in the public page.
• Members-only sections — want to gate just part of a page? Open a section's editor and tick 🔒 Members only; the rest of the page stays public.
• Your member list — see everyone who has signed in under Manage ▾ → Members: export to CSV, or block and remove people.

"Members only" means visitors must sign in — anyone can create an account, so it isn't invite-only. Pair it with Courses to run a private learning area.

Bookings

Let visitors book appointments right on your site — services, time slots, confirmations, and cancellations are built in (free on every plan, with per-plan limits).

• Set up — open Bookings from your dashboard: add your services (duration, optional price, ✨ AI description), set weekly hours and your timezone, and close holidays with one click (＋ Add holidays).
• Add to your site — in the editor, Add section → 📅 Bookings on any page, then publish. Visitors pick a service and a time; both sides get a confirmation email and the visitor gets a one-click cancel link.
• What your visitors get — a confirmation email with an add-to-calendar file and one-click reschedule and cancel links, a reminder ~24 hours before, and times shown in their own timezone at selection. Self-service cancel/rescheduling stops at your cancellation cutoff (Booking settings) and always once the appointment has started — after that, only you can cancel (and refund) from the inbox.
• Stay in the loop — the upcoming-bookings inbox lives in the Bookings page, you can mirror new-booking alerts to Discord, Slack, or Telegram (Booking settings → New-booking alerts; uses the same connections as auto-share), and the 📆 calendar feed (Booking settings) drops every confirmed booking into your own Google/Apple/Outlook calendar via subscribe-by-URL.
• No double-booking — slots are claimed atomically; lead time, buffers between appointments, and max-per-day are all configurable.
• Get paid at booking (paid plans) — give a service a price and tick 💳 Require payment: visitors pay in Stripe Checkout (your connected Stripe account, like the store) before the slot confirms, and cancellations are refunded automatically. Set an optional deposit to charge only part upfront — the rest is settled at the appointment, and the emails spell out the remaining balance for both sides.
• Set up your Stripe account for receipts & taxes — payments land in your Stripe account, so its configuration is yours to manage:
  • Email receipts — in your Stripe Dashboard go to Settings → Emails and enable "Successful payments" so customers get Stripe's official card receipt (Caddisfly's confirmation email also shows the amount paid + a receipt link). Stripe never sends receipts in test mode.
  • Tax collection — enable Stripe Tax (or configure tax rates) in your Stripe Dashboard if you must collect sales tax/VAT on bookings.
  You are responsible for configuring your own Stripe account correctly — including receipts, tax collection, and remittance — in line with the laws that apply to your business.

Blog, email & social

Open 📝 Blog on your Dashboard (or from Customize). Give the AI a few sentences about what the post should say — it drafts the full post in your site’s language; you edit and publish. Publishing adds a Blog page and menu link to your site (re-publish from Customize to put new posts live).

• 🖼 AI cover — generate an on-topic cover image for any post.
• 📧 Post by email (paid plans) — generate your private “post by email” address in the Blog manager. Email it a subject and a few sentences and AI turns it into a draft post (with a cover image) waiting for review — nothing goes live until you approve and publish. For your security, only emails from your account address are accepted.
• 📣 Auto-share to socials (paid plans) — connect Discord, Slack, Telegram or Mastodon in the Blog manager (a webhook URL for Discord/Slack; a bot token + chat for Telegram; your instance + an access token for Mastodon). New posts are announced to those channels automatically when you re-publish, or hit Share on any published post; a “Shared ✓” mark shows what’s already gone out. By default the AI writes the announcement copy tuned to each platform (2 credits per post; if you run out of credits it falls back to a plain title + link) — untick “✨ AI-write the announcements” in the panel to always use the plain version.
• Social pack — one click writes ready-to-share variants for X, Instagram and LinkedIn with share buttons. Nothing posts automatically here — you stay in control.

Contact form & inbox

The contact form on your published site just works — no setup. Every message is stored in your Inbox (Dashboard → Inbox, with an unread badge) and emailed to you; replying to that email answers the visitor directly. Spam is filtered automatically.

Versions, backups & export

• Save a version — in Customize, open 🕘 Versions to save a named snapshot of your pages, sections and design before big changes.
• Auto-save — while you edit, Caddisfly auto-saves a version every hour (toggle it in the Versions panel). Restoring first backs up your current state, and your live site only changes when you publish.
• Retention — versions kept: Free 2 · Starter 5 · Pro 10 · Agency 30.
• HTML export — your site is yours: ⬇ Export on the Dashboard downloads your published site as a ZIP you can host anywhere. Your contact form and analytics keep working from the exported copy.

SEO & getting found

Every site you publish is search-ready out of the box — no setup required. Caddisfly automatically adds:

• Page titles & meta descriptions for each page, drawn from your business name and content.
• Social share cards (Open Graph / Twitter) so links look great when shared.
• Google business markup (LocalBusiness structured data) using your name, description, phone, and address when available.
• A canonical URL, a per-site robots.txt, and a sitemap.xml so search engines can crawl every page. On a custom domain, your own domain is treated as the canonical one.

Fine-tune any page: open Customize → the 🔎 SEO panel. Edit the page title and meta description (with a live Google-result preview), and set a site-wide social share image. Leave anything blank and we use the smart auto values. Changes apply the next time you publish.

After publishing, submit your sitemap.xml in Google Search Console to get indexed faster.

Speed & performance

Every Caddisfly site is built to be fast automatically — there's nothing to configure. Published sites score 90+ on Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile), which means a quicker experience for your visitors and a ranking signal Google rewards. Under the hood:

• Next-gen images — every photo is resized to the size it's actually shown and served as AVIF/WebP, typically 85–90% smaller than the original — no work on your part.
• No layout shift — images reserve their space so the page never jumps while it loads (a perfect CLS of 0).
• Instant text — fonts load without blocking the page, so your words appear right away.
• Smart loading — the main hero image is prioritized while below-the-fold images load only as needed.
• Clean, accessible structure — proper landmarks and headings that pair with the Auto-SEO above.

You get all of this on every plan, on the free caddisfly.app address and on custom domains alike.

Buying a domain

Don’t have a domain yet? Buy one right inside Caddisfly and we connect it to your site automatically — no DNS setup. Open 🌐 Buy a domain from your Dashboard.

1. Search a name; available options show with their yearly price.
2. Choose a site to connect it to (optional but recommended) and enter the contact details ICANN requires (kept private — free WHOIS privacy is included).
3. Pay securely; the domain is registered to you and we set the DNS for you (www → your site, with the root redirecting to www). Your SSL certificate issues automatically — your site is live on your own domain within minutes.

⚠️ Verify your email (required by ICANN): right after your first registration, the registry emails you a verification link (check the inbox for the contact email you entered, and the spam folder). You must click it within 15 days or the domain gets suspended until you do. It’s a one-time step per email address.

Auto-renew: domains renew automatically each year using your saved card so your site never goes dark. Toggle Auto-renew off on the Buy a domain page if you’d rather let it expire. If the automatic connection didn’t finish, use Re-run setup next to the domain.

Already own a domain elsewhere? See Custom domains & DNS instead.

Custom domains & DNS

On a paid plan you can point your own domain at your site. Open 🌐 Custom domain (in Customize or on your Dashboard) and enter a domain.

1. Use a subdomain like www.yourbusiness.com — it works at any DNS provider.
2. Add the single CNAME record we show you at your DNS provider (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Route 53, Cloudflare, etc.):
   www  →  sites.caddisfly.app
3. That’s it — your SSL certificate is issued automatically once the record is live (usually a few minutes). Click Check status; when it reads Active, you’re live over HTTPS.

Root domains: a bare yourbusiness.com can’t use a CNAME by DNS rules. If your provider supports ALIAS/ANAME or CNAME-flattening (Cloudflare, Route 53, DNSimple) you can use it; otherwise point www to us and redirect the root to www at your registrar.

Plans, credits & billing

• Plans — Free, Starter, Pro, Agency. Higher tiers add sites, AI credits, custom domains, and team seats. See Pricing.
• Caddi Credits — spent on AI actions. Each plan includes a monthly allotment (resets monthly); one-time top-ups never expire.
• Manage — upgrade, change plan, or cancel anytime from Billing.

Team members

Invite teammates from your Dashboard → Team. They get an email link that signs them in and joins your team, where they can work on your websites.

• Roles — the owner is admin; admins can invite, promote (member ↔ admin), and remove members.
• Seats (including you): Starter 5 · Pro 15 · Agency 50.
• Per-site access — when you invite someone, choose All sites or pick specific sites they can work on, and set their role. Change it anytime from the member's row. Members only see and edit the sites you give them.

Transferring a site & access

Move a whole website to someone else's account — handy for agencies handing a finished site to a client. Open the site in Customize and click ⇄ Transfer (Pro and Agency plans).

• How it works — enter the recipient's email; they get an invite with a sign-in link. Once they accept, they own the site — it's billed and gated entirely by their plan (plugins, AI credits, limits). Nothing carries over from your account.
• Requirements — if the site uses a custom domain or paid plugins, the recipient needs a matching plan. The accept page lists exactly what's needed and offers one combined checkout to set it all up before finishing.
• Keep Builder access — tick this to stay on as a Manager after the transfer: you can still edit and publish the site (it appears under Sites you manage on your dashboard) and it counts toward your own plan's site limit. The new owner can remove you anytime from their site's Builder access panel.
• Over your plan's limit? — if a downgrade or an incoming transfer leaves you with more published sites than your plan allows, your live sites stay online but you can't publish more until you're back within the limit. A banner shows what to do — unpublish a site or upgrade.

FAQ