How to Migrate from Webflow to WordPress
Even though WordPress might be the most popular content management system in the world, responsible for underpinning a huge percentage of all the websites that are online today, it’s not without competitors. The CMS or website builder market still has a lot of variety, and people routinely use tools other than WordPress to build sites. Some use Webflow, too. Some start using it, only to migrate from Webflow to WordPress after a while.
This phenomenon isn’t restricted to Webflow users alone. We’ve covered it in our articles about migrating from Medium to WordPress, or from Joomla, Blogger, Tumblr, GoDaddy, Wix, and Squarespace. If you have the time and the will to do it, you can migrate your website all around the web if you want. In this article, we’ll show you how to do it if you created the website on Webflow, and you want to move it to WordPress.
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If you’re a web designer who wanted to create a website without having to involve any web developers, it doesn’t come as a surprise that you decided to use Webflow. The web builder’s/CMS’s visual editor is one of its most striking features, and it gives you incredible control over how you want the website to look.
Webflow is also great at allowing you to build a fully-fledged website right out of the box, without any third-party tools. When you do need third-party tools, however, you’ll get to choose from the library of services that integrate with Webflow easily, whether they are form builders or scheduling tools.
However, if at any point you decide to take a look at what WordPress has to offer, you’ll notice that it has the lead over Webflow in a couple of key areas. For one, WordPress’ learning curve is not as steep – especially with the Gutenberg block editor that’s made everything from creating widgets to editing full sites much easier and visually oriented.
Next, even though Webflow has a decent number of integrations, it’s impossible to match WordPress’ third-party integration. And speaking of third-party additions, let’s not forget the unbeatable vastness of WordPress’ plugin library, as well as the whole WordPress theme ecosystem. Webflow has nice templates, sure, but it’s hard to match what you get even from free WordPress themes such as Qi.
Finally, there are also pricing differences to consider. WordPress is open source and free to use, but you’ll need to pay for hosting, as well as premium plugins and themes if you choose so. Webflow, on the other hand, takes care of the hosting for you, but it isn’t open-source, and it can rack up costs in no time.
When you’re ready to start migrating from Webflow to WordPress, the first thing you need to do is make sure that there’s somewhere for your content to go. In other words, you should first prepare your WordPress website for the migration process.
Setting up a WordPress website is fairly easy – the installation itself can take just a couple of minutes. A more complete list of the things you need to do when preparing to migrate from Webflow to WordPress includes:
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Decide which type of hosting you want to use – start by learning the difference between popular options such as shared and managed WordPress hosting.
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Find the best hosting provider for your needs – it’s much easier when you’re aware of your needs and know what to look for in a provider.
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Take care of the domain name – you can’t register a domain name at Webflow, so you’ll connect it to your new website the same way you did with Webflow, or outright transfer it.
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Install WordPress and set up the website – as mentioned before, it’s very easy to do, although managed hosting usually comes with WordPress preinstalled.
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Get familiar with your new website and make it your own – start by looking at the themes and plugins you think you’ll need.
Feel free to take your time with this part, but don’t worry about skipping something – you’ll always be able to change post layouts, install new plugins, or switch to a premium theme later on. For now, you must have a functioning website ready to take in your content. At the very least, you should have a staging site ready.
The good news is that Webflow allows you to easily export much of the content you used for your website. The bad news is that the type of content you can export depends on the Webflow plan you had. With the free plan, you’ll be limited to the things you can find in the CMS Collections panel – blog posts, categories, and authors.
If you want to export the code for the pages on your website, you’ll have to opt for the pricier plans. Even the entry starter plan doesn’t cover code exporting, leaving you with the choice to either upgrade to export or to take care of exporting the pages manually.
As for the things you’ll find in the CMS Collections panel, the procedure is fairly straightforward – navigate to the collection you want, find the Export button in the top right corner, and click on it. You’ll download a file that contains the content you can export.
Once you have the file, navigate to your WordPress website’s backend. The type of file you get from Webflow is a .csv file, so you’ll need a plugin to help you import it. The most popular solution for importing this type of file is the WP All Import plugin, so go ahead and navigate to Plugins > Add New and install it.
After that, all you have to do is run the plugin, and you’ll have your blog post content up on your new website in no time.
You might, however, notice that the images weren’t fetched automatically, or that the permalink structure isn’t what it should be. The plugin will import images with the premium version, but if you have the free one – you’ll need another plugin to do it.
Moving your website from Webflow to WordPress isn’t a completely automated process – there are some things you’ll have to do by hand. Still, you can rely on WordPress to offer some solutions, likely in the form of plugins.
The steps that await you after transferring your content from Webflow to WordPress include:
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Using the Auto Upload Images to add the images that are missing from your blog posts
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Making sure you transfer the domain name to your new host if that’s an issue for you
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Setting up the permalink structure in Settings > Permalink
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Going over all of the content to see if everything traveled over well – and fixing what didn’t
That’s all there is to it – when you’re sure that everything is as you want it to be on your new website, you can go ahead and perform all the website customization steps like choosing post layouts and setting up important plugins.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
Webflow can be an incredible choice for a web designer who needs a canvas to practice their craft. However, if you’ve tried Webflow and you feel it doesn’t meet your expectations, don’t worry. You can easily migrate Webflow to WordPress. The sooner you do it the better, though – so don’t wait for too long.
