Webflow is one of the most popular no-code web development platforms, thanks to a broad array of features, the fact that it is easy to use, and a range of other reasons. As a result, many people are interested in migrating to this platform.
While that may seem like a daunting prospect, the truth is that you can accomplish it with relative ease as long as you have all the necessary information. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the steps involved, the reasons, and (as a whole) how to migrate to Webflow
Why migrate to Webflow?
The main reason why many people want to migrate to Webflow is that this platform offers a whole plethora of advantages that give them an edge over traditional platforms. This is particularly true for growing SaaS companies.
Let’s take a look at just a few of those advantages and benefits:
Webflow offers enhanced design flexibility
One significant advantage of the Webflow platform is that it offers you a much higher level of flexibility in terms of design. Thanks to the easy to use drag-and-drop interface, Webflow allows users to break free from template constraints in order to create pixel-perfect websites.
The high level of flexibility and customisability means that brands and businesses can easily create websites that meet their business needs without compromising their unique brand identity.
It has a user-friendly, native CMS
With many platforms, a secondary content management system is required in order to successfully manage the website’s content. Webflow has a native CMS incorporated directly into the platform. As a result, marketing teams can easily update content without relying on developers.
It offers great optimisation for SEO
Thanks to the plethora of built-in SEO tools incorporated into the Webflow platform, it makes it considerably easier to manage your website’s overall Search Engine Optimisation. These tools include things like metadata, headers, and image alt texts.
It offers seamless integration with third-party apps and integrations
Unlike many platforms, Webflow makes it considerably easier to integrate apps and integrations for other tools that you use as a brand, business, or individual. By integrating tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Zapier, it allows website owners to improve data collection and tracking, as well as overall user experience.
Webflow offers a collaborative design environment
Very few websites are a one-man show. For the most part, they involve multiple people who need to give input, discuss, and consider various website elements. Thanks to a unique approach that allows people to work together on a website, Webflow makes collaboration easy.
It allows real-time collaboration between designers, developers, and marketers, thereby ensuring efficient project management.
Types of Website migrations
It’s important to note that website migration as a whole is divided into several different types or approaches. These include the following:
- Platform Migration: This refers to moving your site to a new platform, like migrating from WordPress to Webflow (see the difference between WordPress and Webflow).
- Content Migration: This phrase refers to migrating your content (like blogs, images, and metadata) without compromising your website’s SEO value.
- Structural Migration: This phrase refers to the act of restructuring your website's URL structure or site architecture, generally in order to improve user navigation and SEO.
- Domain Migration: In some cases, it may be necessary to move your existing website to a new domain extension or a more brand-aligned domain name. This is called domain migration.
- Hybrid Migration: A hybrid migration is when your intended migration combines elements of different types, like platform shift, redesign, and URL restructuring, for a complete digital transformation.
In this article, we’ll focus mainly on platform migration since that is most often what you’ll be looking into when migrating to Webflow. For purposes of reference, we’ll be referring to WordPress as the platform we’re migrating the website from.
Part 1: Preparing for migration
The first part of the migration process consists almost solely of planning and preparation. It’s important to understand exactly what you’re dealing with before you start moving your website to a new platform.
As mentioned earlier, we’re going to be assuming that your website is migrating from WordPress, mainly because that gives us a uniform starting point to work with. However, most of what we’ll be sharing with you is applicable to any kind of website platform.
Step one: assess your current website
Whether your site is currently on Wix, WordPress, or an independent hosting platform, it’s essential to assess it before the migration process starts.
First, inventory the content, plugins, and custom functionalities on your website. This is an essential step as you’ll need to find matching plugins and functions for your new Webflow website. Alternatively, you’ll need to find workarounds that accomplish the same thing without access to the plugins or functionalities that you were using before.
Make a list of all the essential elements and functions that you’ll need on your new website as well.
Step two: plan your Webflow site structure
Before you even start migrating any of the content, you need to plan exactly how the new site is going to be structured. This means creating a detailed plan for information architecture, content hierarchy, and URL structure.
All of these characteristics are essential for providing the best overall user experience, so ensure that you work out the details before you start designing and migrating the website.
Step three: Create a comprehensive backup
Whenever you do any serious work on a website, even if you’re planning on migrating it to a new platform, you need to ensure that you have a full backup. This gives you a place to refer to in the future, and a starting point if something goes wrong with the new site.
Make a backup, and ensure that you can’t lose any of the hard work and effort that went into your existing content.
Part 2: Migrating the design
The next thing you need to do is start migrating your design to your new Webflow website. This means paying careful attention to aspects like the following:
- The website’s layout - Since you probably want people to have the comfort of familiarity, it’s a good idea to make notes about your current website layout. Doing so will allow you to replicate the layout on the new site.
- Typography - Sticking to the fonts and font sizes that people have come to associate with your brand is essential. Make a list of all the different fonts and sizes that you’ve been using for different types of headings, body text, and other website elements, so you can apply them to your new site as well.
- Colours - Maintain your colour scheme on the new site by paying careful attention to which colours you’ve used, and where, and bringing them over to the new site.
Once you’ve analysed your site design and noted the major design elements, you can start rebuilding the website in Webflow Designer. Thanks to the easy drag-and-drop user interface on the platform, you can easily replicate the layout and style of your original website.
Remember to leverage tools like flexbox, grid layouts, animations, and global styles to get the best possible results. Bear in mind that Webflow has built-in tutorials to help you master the new tools.
Thankfully, Webflow has built-in responsive design so you won’t have to finetune each page individually for top design on mobile devices. However, it would be a good idea to create a style guide to ensure consistency across all pages.
Part 3: Migrating content
The next step is to migrate the content from your initial website. This is typically the most time-consuming aspect as it demands recreating static pages manually.
Thanks to the simplistic yet sophisticated Webflow interface, this shouldn’t take too long and you’ll only have to do it once. On many pages, you’ll probably also be able to duplicate the design of an existing page and simply tweak it.
Fortunately, this arduous process is only true for static pages. When it comes to blog posts and dynamic content, you can take advantage of Webflow's CMS import feature and mapping fields to help you bring in content in bulk, rather than recreating them individually.
You also need to ensure that you’ve downloaded all the media files and assets that you need from your initial website. After doing so, organise them and upload them to your new website where they are ready for use as needed.
During the redesign and content migration process, remember to re-embed any embedded content or content you’ve added using shortcodes. If you don’t, there will be missing elements on your pages, worsening the overall experience.
Part 4: Setting up Webflow CMS
As mentioned, Webflow has a fantastic integrated Content Management System (CMS) which can play a significant role in the success and efficiency of the migration process.
Some of the most significant ways in which this tool can assist you is by allowing you to build collections( where you can define content types and fields) and helping you to import content in bulk from WordPress or another website platform.
You can also use it to create templates, configure how you display your dynamic content, and to create carousels and other features that rely on your collection lists.
Part 5: SEO considerations
As with any part of a website, there are a range of different SEO considerations as well. It’s absolutely essential to keep the webpages optimised for the best possible performance on SERP(Search Engine Result Pages) to ensure that your website gets as much traffic as possible.
In terms of website migrations, this refers mainly to a few different things.
First, you need to ensure that you’re preserving the SEO value already inherent in your website. This means ensuring that you set up 301 redirects that bring readers from your old links straight to your new website. It also means putting work into optimising meta tags, and maintaining the heading structure of your website.
While you’re busy moving and updating your website, it’s also a good idea to bring the keyword and image optimisation up to scratch. This means incorporating keywords into descriptions and ensuring that images have alt text where relevant.
The other relevant aspect here is ensuring that you generate sitemaps for your site (and upload them to Google Search Console) and also that you configure your site’s robots.txt file.
Part 6: Testing and launching
Once you’ve done all these things, you’re ready to test and launch your website. This consists of several different steps, starting with quality assurance and cross-browser testing.
This consists of visual inspection, functionality testing, and testing the website on various types of devices. Ensure that you check the website on an array of different browsers, as well as several different mobile devices and computers. Doing so will help to ensure that there aren’t any significant performance issues.
Next, make a list of any type of performance issues you notice during the testing phase. Pay careful attention to image optimisation, minification, browser caching, and CDN. You also need to ensure that the load speeds are good, and that the navigation is intuitive and easy to follow.
At this point, you are able to go ahead and launch your new website. Ensure that your DNS settings are updated to match your new website or domain. Also ensure that your SSl certificates are in place to protect users of your website.
You may also want to run through our pre-launch checklist to ensure that everything is in place before taking your website live.
Finally, publish your website and make it public rather than private. At this point, anyone can access the website. Ensure that you keep track of site performance, and make changes and improvements as needed over the weeks and months to come.
Best practices for Webflow migration
When it comes down to it, there are many different practices that you should be implementing in order to make the process as painless and straightforward as possible. Let’s take a closer look at several of the most essential practices that can help to make your Webflow migration a success.
Utilise the migration tools at your disposal
When migrating their websites from one platform to another, many website administrators don’t realise that there are many different tools at their disposal for this exact purpose. When you migrate your website, ensure that you use as many of these tools as possible to make the process easier.
For instance, you can leverage tools like WP CSV plugin for WordPress content migration or converters from Udesly for product migration from platforms like WooCommerce.
Ensure that you implement the key SEO elements
Whether you’re building a website from scratch, implementing appropriate Search Engine Optimisation is essential. Without it, your website simply can’t reach its full potential.
Thankfully, Webflow makes SEO management easy and gives you access to a range of different setting specific to SEO. When migrating your website to Webflow, ensure that you use all the available settings, like robots.txt editing, sitemap generation, indexing control, and page-level meta tags for optimal search engine visibility.
Remember to integrate Google Analytics with the Google Tag Manager
Over time, Google Analytics has improved and expanded significantly. Google has also released a range of other tools that can be helpful in managing your website and making it more successful.
For this reason, it’s important to integrate your website’s Google Analytics account with the Google Tag Manager. Not only will this help with the efficient tracking of user behaviour and website performance optimisation, but it will make it easier for you to manage analytics overall and get the information you need to improve.
Set up 301 redirects to improve user experience
Few things are as frustrating as trying to access something on a website and find it unavailable. Something that is more frustrating is when said website isn’t actually broken but the pages haven’t been redirected to the new domain.
For this reason, and to help maintain your website’s SEO value, ensure that you set up 301 redirects for URLs from your old website.
Ensure that you reset your domain’s DNS settings
When you migrate your website to Webflow, you need to ensure that your domain connects properly to your new platform. This makes it essential to reset your domain's DNS settings with your domain registrar to ensure proper connection to Webflow's servers.
Final thoughts
There are many different, unique benefits to Webflow as a platform, making it an ideal and beneficial platform to migrate to. From its flexibility in terms of design, to its excellent SEO tools, and even its native CMS, Webflow is an excellent platform for many different reasons.
As long as you take advantage of all the tools at your disposal, it’s not a particularly complex task either. However, if you do require help with migrating or developing a Webflow website, take a closer look at our Webflow services. We’d love to help you make a success of your Webflow website.
