Top 5 Tips For Migrating To Webflow

The Webflow platform impresses with its key features: a user-friendly visual editor of web pages, a built-in CMS for quick management of store content and products, stunning animation effects, and more. These advantages have motivated hundreds of website owners to migrate their web projects to the Webflow.

Although the process of migrating a site is not too complicated, there are still a number of aspects to pay close attention to. Otherwise, reworking the neglected aspects can turn out to be rather costly.

Here are the top 5 tips to ensure the effective migration of your website to Webflow compiled by our team.

1. Use special migration tools

There are certain tools designed to make the migration process easier. For example, if you wish to migrate your Wordpress project, you need to export your content and import it to Webflow. This is where WP CSV plugin will help - export your Wordpress content as a CSV file and import it to Webflow in just a few clicks.

There are more useful migration tools, such as converters from Udesly. With them, you can easily transfer your products from Woocommerce, Wix, Shopify, or Squarespace to Webflow Ecommerce.

2. Implement the major SEO elements

In order to maintain the website's position in the search results, it is important not to neglect the key SEO elements.

Each project has SEO settings: editing robots.txt, generating sitemap.xml, turning off sites indexing on temporary subdomains, as well as a request for verification of the site by Google.

For each page, you can set meta tags, titles, and descriptions of the content. There are options for the OpenGraph markup as well. Each blog post and store product contains SEO settings, therefore, it is important to use these opportunities to improve the overall SEO position of the site.

3. Integrate Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager

Next, we strongly recommend integrating your Google Analytics (GA) account with Google Tag Manager (GTM). This will help you a lot with tracking your analytics, optimizing user experience and increasing website conversions.

With GTM, you can store all the script tags, pixels and analytics codes within a single tag. One of the greatest benefits of this is managing your website integrations and tracking the performance without the need to actually edit the code.

4. Set up 301 redirects

To prevent users from landing on the broken pages (and to minimize the loss of backlinks), be sure to check the pages on your existing website and set up 301 redirects accordingly.

Webflow platform has got 301 redirects covered - you can set up redirects either for a single page or for an entire folder of pages. Just go to the Project settings section, fill in the fields “Old Path” and “Redirect to Page”, and then push the “Add Redirect Path” button. That’s it!

In order not to forget anything, you can pre-compile a list of all the pages you have. Of course, this will be time consuming in case of sites with a large number of pages.

5. Reset your DNS settings

As long as the Webflow platform does not provide domain registrar services, you cannot transfer your previously hosted domain to it. However, you can still link it to Webflow by pointing that domain to the platform servers using the DNS records.

To do this, you should reset your DNS settings first. This will help you prevent any issues that might require troubleshooting DNS settings in the future.

Your domain registrar may or may not allow managing DNS records; therefore, your actions will differ a bit in those two scenarios. Please see the detailed instructions for both cases here.

After you’re done with resetting the DNS settings, you can proceed with updating them. The potential pitfall on this step is that all the DNS hosts have their own ways of updating the settings, and the dashboards interfaces are not always that intuitive. So, you may want to check the help documentation of your DNS host and/or to reach out to their support service.

Summary

To sum up, you can migrate your website to Webflow either independently or with the help of an expert. If you decide to do it yourself, then you should find the tips we've provided above helpful.

First, the use of special tools for data migration will make the transition to Webflow quick and easy. Second, adding key SEO elements will prevent your website positions in search results from dropping. Third, integration of Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager will allow monitoring and optimizing the efficiency of your website performance. Fourth, installing 301 redirects will prevent users from landing on non-working pages. And finally, resetting the DNS settings will help you avoid the problems with them in the future.