90°S · Migration · Webflow

Moving off Webflow

A real professional tool with real design control and clean output. Of everything here it is the one we most often tell people to keep, and a well-built Webflow site is a good website by any measure.

Stay on it when: A designer maintains it, the site is mostly marketing, and you are inside the CMS limits.

If that describes you, close this tab — you have your answer and it cost you nothing. What follows is for everyone else.

Depth · 20M · What a Webflow export contains

Press export and see what arrives.

The code export is clean, and it is a snapshot without the CMS. You get the HTML, CSS and JavaScript of the pages as they stood — but collection pages come out as flat files with the collection itself left behind, so what you have exported is not the site you were running. It is the strongest export on this list and it still is not a migration; the content has to come out through the API instead.

What comes with you

  • Markup and styles, useful as a faithful reference for the rebuild
  • Collection content, pulled through the API rather than the export
  • Assets, at the URLs the export references
  • The URL structure, including collection page paths

What gets rebuilt

  • Collection templates, which become real templates rather than snapshots
  • Interactions and animations, rewritten rather than exported
  • Forms, which stop depending on Webflow's submission handling
  • Anything that was working around a CMS limit

Deliberately no item counts, plan tiers or quoted limits anywhere on this page. Those change on somebody else’s release schedule, and a stale specific is worse than no specific on a page whose whole claim is that you can check it yourself.

Depth · 40M · Where it starts costing

What Webflow charges you that isn’t on the invoice

Pricing scales with what you actually use, the CMS has hard item and collection limits you will meet before you expect to, and the code export is a snapshot without the CMS — so the exported version is not the site you were running.

Time to leave when

You hit a CMS ceiling, need logic the platform will not host, or the bill stops matching what you get.

And the four reasons people actually go

01

It is slow, and nobody can say why

Usually plugin sprawl, uncompressed images, or a builder rendering everything client-side. Measurable before and after, which makes it the easiest of the four to justify.

02

Nobody can change it without calling somebody

Either the platform makes editing dangerous, or the person who built it left. This is a structure problem, and it is fixed by deciding who should be able to change what before anything is rebuilt.

03

The annual bill keeps growing

Plugin licences, platform tiers, seats you are not using, a retainer for changes you could make yourself. Worth adding up over three years before comparing it to a one-off build.

04

You have realised you cannot leave

The most expensive one, and the one people discover latest. It is also the only one on this list that gets worse the longer you wait, because everything you publish in the meantime is published into somebody else's database.

Depth · 400M · How the move runs

What a Webflow migration actually involves.

Collections come out through the API and become a content model rather than a set of exported pages. The design carries over faithfully because the export is a reliable record of it — this is the one platform where the rebuild can be visually exact without guesswork. What changes is that the ceiling comes off: the limits that shaped the site stop applying, and the parts built to work around them can be removed rather than reproduced.

  • Every URL, redirected

    Old addresses 301 to their new home, generated from the crawl rather than typed — so the rankings and inbound links you already paid for survive the move.

  • Measured on both sides

    Load time, Core Web Vitals and accessibility recorded on the existing site before anything is touched, and again after. It is the one project where the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.

  • Instrumented on arrival

    Named conversion events wired at build, so the new site can tell you which page did the work — which the old one almost certainly could not.

  • In your accounts

    Repository, hosting, domain and analytics in your name. If the reason you are leaving is that somebody else held them, the migration is not finished until that is not true.

Most sites should not migrate. If yours should, it is a known job at a known price.

A migration is $4,800 and takes 2–3 weeks, published like every other figure on this site. The free assessment can also tell you to keep what you have — that outcome is on the page too.