Moving an established site to Webflow puts years of search equity on the table. Every URL that has earned links and rankings either carries across to the new site or disappears, and Google works out which within days of launch. The traffic losses that follow a bad migration trace back to a short list of causes: URLs changed without redirects, ranking content cut or rewritten, metadata left behind or a staging copy of the site indexed alongside the live one.
Each of those can be prevented with a sequence of work that starts weeks before launch and runs for three months after it. The ten steps below are the order we work in on a Webflow migration. They assume Webflow is already the right platform for you. If that decision is still open, start with what NZ businesses get wrong when they migrate to Webflow, and if you are coming from WordPress specifically, why businesses migrate from WordPress to Webflow covers the WordPress quirks in more detail.
Before the build: record what you have
Step 1: Benchmark search performance
Export twelve months of data from Google Search Console, covering clicks, impressions and average position by page and by query. Twelve months catches the seasonal peaks a three-month export misses. Pull organic landing page sessions and conversions from Google Analytics for the same period, then save both somewhere the whole project team can reach, because every judgement after launch is made against them.
From that data, build a priority list. Rank pages by organic clicks and by conversions, then flag any page that brings in enquiries or sales from search, however small the volume. A service page with forty visits a month that produces three qualified leads matters more to the business than a blog post with two thousand visits and none.
Step 2: Crawl the existing site and record its links
Crawl the live site with a tool such as Screaming Frog to get a complete URL list, including pages missing from the sitemap: old campaign landing pages, PDFs and pages linked only from inside other content. Record each page's title tag, meta description, H1, canonical tag and status code.
Then pull the backlink profile from Ahrefs, Semrush or the Links report in Search Console and note which URLs other sites point at. A page linked from an industry association or a news site needs a redirect even if it gets no search traffic of its own, because those links pass authority to wherever they land.
Step 3: Decide what moves, what merges and what retires
Give every URL on the list one of three outcomes. Pages that move carry across with their content intact. Pages that merge fold into a stronger page covering the same subject. Pages that retire have no traffic, no links and no commercial role, so they redirect to the closest relevant page or return a 404 and drop out of the index.
Be conservative with anything on the priority list. A page ranking well for a valuable search should move with its content, headings and structure close to intact, even when the design around it changes completely. Improve that content after launch once rankings have settled, when any movement can be traced to a single change.
During the build: map, rebuild and test
Step 4: Map every old URL to its new address
Build a spreadsheet with two columns, old URL and new URL, and put every URL from the crawl in the first one. Keep URLs identical wherever Webflow allows it. An unchanged URL needs no redirect and carries no risk.
Webflow's structure will force some changes. Static pages can sit inside folders, while CMS items live at the collection's path followed by the item slug, so blog posts end up at something like /blog/post-name. An old site that put posts at the root or under date-based paths will need a redirect for every one of them. Settle collection slugs early, because changing one after launch changes the URL of every item in that collection. Where whole groups of URLs change the same way, Webflow's redirect settings accept wildcard patterns, which keeps a large redirect list manageable. Test each pattern against real URLs from your crawl before trusting it.
Step 5: Carry across the on-page SEO
For static pages, copy each title tag, meta description and Open Graph image into the page settings. For CMS content, add dedicated SEO title and description fields to the collection and bind the template's settings to them, so every item carries its own metadata. If the old site used an SEO plugin, export its titles and descriptions and bring them in through Webflow's CSV import alongside the content.
Check that each template outputs a single H1, that headings follow the structure of the content and that images carry alt text. Rich text imported from another CMS can bring stray heading levels, inline styles and broken embeds with it, so review a sample of imported items on staging before signing the import off.
Step 6: Rebuild internal links and structured data
Links inside imported content still point at the old URLs. Redirects will catch them, but every internal link that runs through a redirect slows crawling, so update those links to their new addresses before launch. Rebuild the navigation and footer so the priority pages are as well linked on the new site as they were on the old one. If the old site output structured data through a plugin, add the equivalent JSON-LD to the Webflow templates with custom code, binding CMS fields wherever the data changes from item to item.
Step 7: Keep staging out of the index, then test it
Webflow publishes work in progress to a webflow.io staging subdomain. Turn off search engine indexing for that subdomain in the site settings so Google never finds a second copy of your site. Then test the staging build against the priority list: each page exists, carries the right metadata and heading, loads quickly on a phone and has its forms connected and tested end to end.
Launch day
Step 8: Go live in the right order
Load the full redirect list into Webflow before the domain points at the new site, so redirects work from the first request. Connect the domain and set the default version (with or without www) so the alternative redirects to it. Publish, then test a sample of old URLs from every section of the redirect map and confirm each one returns a single 301 to the right page.
Submit the new XML sitemap in Search Console and use URL Inspection to request indexing for the top ten priority pages. Check that analytics and conversion tracking fire on the live domain, because broken tracking leaves you unable to tell a ranking problem from a measurement one. Pick a launch date outside your busiest trading weeks, so any fix happens while the stakes are low.
The same cutover discipline applies on any platform. When we moved Advintage from Magento to Shopify, with more than 5,000 SKUs, wholesale pricing and an ERP connection to carry across, everything that had to work on day one was loaded and tested before the switch, and customers saw zero downtime. A Webflow move of a service business is smaller in scale and follows the same order.
After launch: twelve weeks of monitoring
Step 9: Watch the priority pages ahead of total traffic
Some movement in the first two to four weeks is normal while Google recrawls the site and processes the redirects. Total organic traffic is too noisy to read in that window, so track the positions and clicks of the priority pages week by week against the benchmark. A page that slips a few places and recovers within a fortnight is settling. A page that falls off the first page and stays there has a cause you can find.
Step 10: Work the Search Console reports
Check the Pages report weekly for new "Not found (404)" entries, which are old URLs the redirect map missed, and add redirects for any that had traffic or links. Watch for "Duplicate without user-selected canonical", which points to URL variants serving the same content, and for pages that were indexed before launch now showing as "Crawled, currently not indexed". Re-crawl the live site monthly for the first three months to catch redirect chains and broken internal links introduced by edits after launch.
Keep the old site's export and the redirect spreadsheet once the project closes. When a page loses rankings six months later, the first thing anyone needs to know is what that page looked like before the move, and those files hold the answer.
Common questions
Will migrating to Webflow hurt my Google rankings?
A migration with a complete redirect map, intact content on ranking pages and carried-over metadata should hold its rankings, with some movement for a few weeks while Google processes the change. Lasting drops come from missing redirects and from ranking content that was cut, rewritten or stripped of its metadata. The steps above prevent each of those, and Search Console shows quickly when one has slipped through.
How do I set up 301 redirects in Webflow?
Redirects are managed in the site settings, where you enter the old path and its new destination for each one. Webflow also accepts wildcard patterns for groups of URLs that change in the same way, such as a blog moving from date-based paths into a single folder. Load the redirects before the domain points at the new site, then test a sample of old URLs from every section once it is live.
Should I keep the same URLs when I move my site to Webflow?
Keep them wherever the platform allows. An unchanged URL needs no redirect, keeps every external link pointing at it and carries no risk. Webflow places CMS items under a collection path, so some URLs will change on most migrations, particularly blog posts and project or case study pages. Map each one to its new address, redirect it and settle collection slugs before launch, because changing them afterwards changes every item's URL.
Do I need to redirect old pages that get no traffic?
Redirect any page with backlinks from other sites, even without search traffic, because those links carry authority to whichever page they land on. Pages with no traffic, no links and no commercial role can return a 404 and drop out of the index, which is a clean way to retire old content. Where a close equivalent exists on the new site, a redirect costs nothing and helps anyone arriving from an old bookmark.
How long should I monitor SEO after a website migration?
Plan on twelve weeks of structured monitoring. Check priority page rankings and the Search Console Pages report weekly for the first month, when most redirect gaps surface, then fortnightly. Most sites settle within four to eight weeks. A priority page still well below its benchmark after that has a specific cause, such as a missing redirect, changed content or lost internal links, and needs investigating straight away.
