In this article we are going to talk about the main reasons why you should migrate your Wordpress site to Webflow and what are the keys in the process to avoid mistakes, loss of organic search engine optimization (SEO) and errors.
At minimum we have 120 projects and one of the main categories we have worked on is the migration of current Wordpress sites to Webflow, that's why we have developed a process to make sure this migration works correctly.
Why should I migrate from Wordpress to Webflow?
Although Wordpress is one of the main tools for creating websites nowadays, (more than 15% of the world's websites use this platform) it is not the perfect tool for all cases.
Building a basic version of your website is really easy, but when the team scales and you need to create campaigns with their landing pages, create and distribute new content by people who do not have so much technical knowledge. Also, as more plugins are added, the performance gets worse and can result really low in Pagespeed Insights scores.
To achieve customized designs it is necessary to resort to custom developments that can be complex to iterate or choose a visual builder, such as Elementor, with its learning curve, often making the technical team responsible for making modifications to the website, slowing down the speed of learning and iteration.
Precisely keeping the site updated, with backup management and all plugins up to date is something that consumes a large part of the technical team's time to avoid security problems and vulnerabilities.
This ends up resulting in a monthly maintenance cost for the technical team available for small updates, server management, bug fixes and possible attacks.
That's why Webflow provides a solution that is easy to edit by anyone - technically savvy or not - much faster to create landing pages and new pages within the site and without worrying about maintenance and security management.
How is the migration process from Wordpress to Webflow?
Once you have decided to migrate to Webflow from Wordpress, it is necessary to understand very well how the process is going to be, so that there are no SEO drops in case you want to keep the generated positioning, make the content migration and make sure to redirect the key pages.
The process can be divided into 5 phases:
- Definition and setup
- Design (if necessary)
- Layout
- Data
- SEO
Definition: The most important phase in a migration
Before facing a migration it is necessary to make a good definition of what you want to achieve from the beginning, since the workload may change when including things like multilanguages, forms or structures that need to be modified at URL level.
These aspects to consider are:
- Ask the client if they want to maintain their search engine rankings.
- Ask the client if they have any SEO strategy they are following and how they are getting traffic, to take into account when configuring Webflow.
- Ask if there are any content requirements within the website that we need to maintain such as titles, listings or paragraphs.
- To know if they have a marketing team and their functions, in order to have a point of contact in the whole SEO process.
- To know if they have a technical team that is currently maintaining their website and if they can provide the content of the blog/news/etc in a csv file or in a spreadsheet.
- Ask for a list of all the urls you have that should be on the new site.
- Ask if they can give us titles and meta descriptions in a spreadsheet or we will have to extract them from their website.
- If they have multi-language, know how their current system works, if it is necessary to maintain its operation and if it is important for them the positioning in different languages.
URL architecture: A critical point when migrating a site
Sometimes the architecture (the pages that make up a site) may change or be modified to take advantage in the migration.
Once the architecture of the new site is defined, check with the client the list of urls they want to keep and how it corresponds to the new architecture.
It will be necessary at this point to define the urls of the new site and define the necessary redirections, preparing a spreadsheet with them.
Once the objective and needs of the migration process are understood, it is time to move on to the design and construction phase of the site, which follows the usual process that we tell you about in our handbook, to finish the migration.
Migrating Wordpress or other CMS content to Webflow
At Minimum.run we face acritical point when taking a site from Wordpress to Webflow is to make sure that we have all the content that the client has, which is usually included:
- Blog with their articles
- Team
- Custom Post Types
To do this, it is necessary to export all the content of Wordpress in a .csv file that will then be imported into Webflow. This can be done manually, but there are plugins like WP All Import PRO that makes this process much easier.
It is very important that the structure of the Collections in Webflow is similar to the one they had in Wordpress, although it may be necessary to modify it depending on the requirements and limitations of Webflow.
How to maintain SEO when you migrate from Wodrpess to Webflow?
At Webflow we don't have any Yoast SEO or RankMath type plugins to help us with the configuration.
However, there are several things we can do to make the site maintain SEO.
- Titles
- Meta descriptions
- Opengraph
- Change titles H1, H2, H3, etc.
- Schema or microdata manually
- Breadcrumbs or limited breadcrumbs
- Redirects
Likewise, there are certain things we cannot currently do in webflow.
- Keyword suggestions
- Keyword count and keyword percentage suggestions
- Schema or automatic microdata
- The structure of urls in collections is limited - Problem solved by Polyflow.
These points need to be addressed from the Definition phase, to ensure that the client who migrates the project is aware of the limitations or alternative paths to be taken to ensure a correct migration.
The most important thing to maintain SEO, therefore when you do a migration is:
- Map the architecture of both the current and the new site.
- Collect the URLs of all the pages of the client's site.
- Map all content URLs to the new structure.
- Prepare the list of redirects (if necessary).
- Ensure that all pages are correctly configured for SEO in Webflow, managing things like OpenGraph, H1, H2, H3, titles, meta descriptions...
If this process is followed, the migration should work correctly, maintaining (or even improving) the SEO of the site and helping to generate more sales, more business and better web performance.
It is possible and normal that at the beginning, the organic visits data will drop, but if all the steps have been followed correctly, it will recover. Also, if the website was not well optimized, migrating to Webflow will generally make the site go faster - positioning it better because this is a very relevant factor in terms of positioning.
Examples of projects migrated from Wordpress or other CMS to Webflow
Migrate your Wordpress project to Webflow
If you want to migrate your project, there is nothing better than putting you in the hands of an expert team, Webflow Enterprise Partner that will manage all this for you.
You can contact us from our website and we will make sure to give you a budget that allows you to forget about worrying and get your site in weeks, not months.
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