A website migration goes wrong when something gets missed: a page nobody redirected, a form that stopped sending, a tracking tag that vanished, an email record that was overwritten during the DNS change. None of these are hard to fix once you know about them. The damage comes from finding out weeks later, after search traffic or leads have already dropped.
Use this checklist as a migration plan for moving to Webflow from WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or custom code. Work through it in order and keep it in a shared document so nothing is left to memory. Each step explains why it is there, so you can judge how much effort it deserves on your site. For a longer narrative of the whole process, read my ultimate guide to website migration to Webflow, and for the search side in depth, WordPress to Webflow SEO covers what protects your rankings.
Before You Start: Decide What the Migration Is
Be clear on the goal, because it changes how cautious you need to be. A like-for-like move, where the design and content stay roughly the same, is mainly a technical exercise and should preserve rankings almost entirely. A redesign with new copy, new structure and new URLs is a bigger risk, because several things change at once. If you can, separate them: migrate first, then redesign in stages. If you cannot, plan for a longer monitoring period and keep the URL map and redirects especially tight.
Also decide who signs off. A migration involves marketing, design, development and often legal or finance. Agree up front who approves the URL map, who tests forms and who gives the go-ahead to launch, so launch day is not a debate.
Phase 1: Before You Build
Benchmark your current site
- Export your top pages, queries, clicks and impressions from Google Search Console for the last 3 to 12 months.
- Note your traffic and conversion numbers in Google Analytics, so you can compare after launch.
- Record rankings for your most important keywords.
- Save a copy of your Search Console performance report and Core Web Vitals report before you change anything. You cannot recreate this data later.
Without a benchmark, you cannot tell a normal post-launch wobble from a real problem. This is the single cheapest step in the whole process and the one most often skipped.
Inventory everything on the old site
- Crawl the site (Screaming Frog or similar) and export every URL with its status code, title, description, H1 and canonical.
- Add URLs from your current sitemap, Search Console and analytics landing pages, because a crawl only finds pages that are linked internally.
- List every page type: pages, blog posts, landing pages, product or case study pages.
- List forms, integrations, embeds, popups, chat widgets and tracking tags.
- Note any gated content, logins, memberships or ecommerce.
- List the downloadable files and PDFs that other sites link to.
- Decide what to keep, merge, improve or remove. Cutting thin or outdated pages is easier before the move than after.
Create your URL map
This is the most important document in the whole migration. Build a spreadsheet with these columns:
- Old URL
- New URL (or “remove”)
- Page type
- Title tag and meta description
- Redirect needed? (yes/no)
- Backlinks and monthly traffic, so you can prioritise
- Status (to do, built, checked)
Keep URLs the same wherever you can. Every URL that changes needs a 301 redirect, and Webflow CMS items always sit under a collection folder, so plan for that early. For pages you are removing, decide where visitors should go instead. If a removed page has links or traffic, redirect it to the closest relevant page rather than the homepage.
Plan the Webflow structure
- Decide which content becomes CMS collections (blog, team, case studies, resources).
- Plan how fields, categories and references will map from the old content. See structuring content on a Webflow website.
- Choose a Webflow plan that covers your CMS items, form submissions and hosting needs.
- Decide who will edit the site afterwards, and set up roles and permissions accordingly. My post on handing off Webflow websites to clients covers the handover.
Check the risky bits early
Look for anything that cannot move across directly and find out what the replacement is before the build starts, not at the end. Typical examples are plugin functionality in WordPress, ecommerce, member areas, complex search or filtering, third-party widgets and custom scripts. Finding a gap in week five is far more expensive than finding it in week one.
Phase 2: Build and Prepare
- Build the new site on the webflow.io staging domain, and make sure it is not indexed by search engines.
- Import or recreate content, keeping headings, internal links, image alt text and structured data.
- Set a unique title tag and meta description for every page, from your URL map.
- Set canonical URLs, an XML sitemap and a robots setting.
- Create a custom 404 page.
- Rebuild forms and test that submissions reach the right inbox or CRM, including spam protection and thank-you behaviour.
- Reinstall analytics, Google Tag Manager and any ad or conversion tags, and test them.
- Compress images and check page speed and mobile layouts.
- Prepare your redirects as a CSV for the 301 redirects import. See the Webflow 301 redirects guide.
- Run a full QA pass: broken links, forms, interactions and every breakpoint.
Content quality checks that are easy to forget
- Search imported content for links to the old domain or old URL patterns and update them.
- Check that images came across, have alt text and are not hotlinked from the old server, which will disappear when it is switched off.
- Check for leftover shortcodes or formatting from the old editor in imported posts.
- Make sure each page has exactly one H1 and that headings are in order.
Run an SEO check before launch
Crawl the staging site and compare it with your original crawl. Titles, descriptions, headings and word counts should match unless you changed them on purpose. My Webflow SEO checklist lists the settings to confirm, and the SEO audit before and after migration shows how to compare the two crawls.
