Changed the Design After Launch? How to Update an AI-Made WordPress Site Without Losing Your Edits

Here is a situation every designer meets sooner or later. The site is live on WordPress. The client has already rewritten the hero, swapped the team photos and added a paragraph to services. And now they want a new testimonials section and a different pricing layout.

You can ask your AI tool for the new design in minutes. The hard part is getting it onto the live site without wiping out everything that was edited in WordPress.

Why Re-Importing Everything Is Risky

If you simply import the whole new design over the old one, every page goes back to the words and pictures in the ZIP. The client’s edits disappear. Copying sections across by hand avoids that, but it’s slow and easy to get wrong.

How Kerf Updates a Design Section by Section

When Kerf imports a design, it remembers where each top-level section came from. When you upload a newer ZIP (or paste updated HTML) under Kerf → Update design, it lines up the old sections with the new ones and sorts every section:

Section is…	What Kerf does
Unchanged	Leaves it alone.
Changed in the new design (not edited in WordPress)	Ticked, ready to apply.
Added or removed	Listed with its own checkbox.
Edited in WordPress and changed in the design	Unticked by default, with a clear warning—so live edits aren’t overwritten by accident.

You tick or untick what you want, choose whether to update stylesheets, scripts and new pictures too, and click Apply selected changes.

A Workflow That Works

1. Keep the files you imported. Ask your AI tool to change the design in those same files, keeping file names and the sections you’re not changing as they are.
2. Ask for one change at a time when you can—“add a testimonials section after services”—so the comparison shows only what you meant to change.
3. Zip the whole site again and upload it under Kerf → Update design.
4. Read the list before applying. Anything marked as edited in WordPress deserves a look: apply it only if the new design should win.

And If You Change Your Mind: Undo

Every import and every design update can be undone. Undo last import / update restores the pages, header and footer, templates and asset settings to how they were just before. Read the Update design documentation →

For Client Sites: Client Mode

Fewer surprises start with fewer accidents. Give your client an Editor account and client mode keeps the layout locked—blocks can’t be moved, added or deleted—while words, pictures and links stay editable.

See it for yourself: try Kerf free in your browser, import a design, edit a section, then upload a changed version under Update design.