How to import a snapshot in GoHighLevel

There are two different actions people call “importing a snapshot” and conflating them is the reason half of all snapshot support tickets exist.

Accepting a snapshot puts somebody else’s snapshot into your agency’s library. Loading a snapshot takes one from your library and applies it to a sub-account. You do the first once, and the second every time you onboard a client.

Before you start

Three things save an hour of confusion later.

• You need agency-level access. Snapshots are an agency feature. A user with access only to one sub-account cannot manage a snapshot library.
• Use a fresh sub-account if you can. Importing into an account that already has funnels and workflows works, but name collisions produce duplicates and you will spend the afternoon deciding which copy is the real one.
• Know what the snapshot expects. A well-documented snapshot comes with a list of custom values that need setting. Read it before the import, not after.

Accepting a shared snapshot

Most third-party snapshots, including every kit we sell, arrive as a share link rather than a file. There is no download and no zip.

1. Log in to the agency account, not a sub-account. This is the single most common mistake.
2. Open the share link in the same browser session.
3. Confirm the agency it should be added to, if you manage more than one.
4. The snapshot now appears under Agency view, Account Snapshots.

If the link says you do not have permission, you are almost certainly logged in as a sub-account user. Log out, log back in at agency level, click the link again.

Loading it into a sub-account

1. Go to Agency view, Account Snapshots.
2. Find the snapshot and choose to load or push it.
3. Select the target sub-account.
4. Choose whether to assign the snapshot, which links the sub-account to it for future updates, or apply it once.
5. Confirm and wait. Ten to fifteen minutes is normal for a snapshot with twenty or more workflows.

The account will look busy while this happens. Assets appear in batches and it is entirely normal for workflows to show up before the funnels they reference.

The seven things to check afterwards

Do not switch anything on before you have checked these. Every one of them is a real support ticket we have answered.

1. Custom values. Business name, address, service area, pricing, booking link. Empty values render as blank space in live messages, which is how a client discovers your import before you do.
2. Calendars. Availability, buffers and team member assignment do not carry the connection to your actual Google or Outlook calendars. Reconnect each one.
3. Phone numbers. Numbers belong to the sub-account. Buy or port them, then set the forwarding.
4. A2P registration. Not part of any snapshot. Brand and campaign have to be filed for this sub-account before a single SMS sends.
5. Sending domain. Set up the domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Otherwise every email in the kit sends from a shared address and lands badly.
6. Payments. Reconnect Stripe or your processor. Any funnel step with a payment element is inert until you do.
7. Workflow status. Most snapshots ship with workflows in draft on purpose, so the import does not start messaging real contacts. Publish them deliberately, one at a time, once you have tested.

Testing before you go live

Create one test contact with your own email address and phone number, then push it through each of the three main paths in the snapshot: the primary enquiry, the booking, and whatever the recovery or reactivation path is.

Watch for the two failures that account for most of them. Nothing fires, which is usually a workflow still in draft or a trigger filtered on a tag the form does not apply. And everything fires, which is usually a missing exit condition, so the contact who just booked is still being chased about booking.

When the import fails

• Stuck at zero percent. The sub-account may still be provisioning. Wait ten minutes and retry before doing anything more dramatic.
• Partial import. Some assets appear and others do not. Reload the snapshot rather than hand-building the gap. Half an import is not a state worth keeping.
• Permission error. Agency level, not sub-account. It is nearly always this.
• Assets present but disconnected. A form exists, a workflow exists, but the workflow is not triggered by the form. This happens when a snapshot was built badly rather than imported badly, and it is worth knowing that no amount of re-importing fixes it.

Updating a sub-account you already built

Loading a newer version of a snapshot over a live sub-account will overwrite customisation. That is not a bug, it is what an import does.

The safe pattern is to treat updates as a change list rather than a re-import: read what changed, then apply only the parts you want, by hand, to the accounts that need them. It is slower and it is the only version of this that does not eventually destroy a client’s edits.