Webflow to Astro Migration: Step-by-Step Guide (2026)
Leonardo SusnjaWebsite
- Webflow's code export gives you static files. It does not give you a working CMS, working forms, or your past form submissions.
- Most of the work isn't building the new site. It's mapping every existing URL so you don't lose your Google rankings.
- A typical marketing site takes one to two weeks. We moved our own site in a weekend because we already knew the content.
- The risk is concentrated in a handful of specific mistakes, and all of them are avoidable.
- Don't migrate because you're bored with your platform. Migrate because something is actually blocked.
We moved devolfs.com from Webflow to Astro over one weekend. We've since done it for clients, and we've stopped taking new Webflow work entirely — the full reasoning is in why we left Webflow.
This is what the process actually involves, written for the person deciding whether to do it rather than the person typing the code.
First, should you migrate at all?
Migration costs time and carries risk. It's worth it when one of these is true:
- You're hitting platform limits. Structural changes take days. The CMS caps out. Something you want simply isn't allowed.
- You want to own your code. No subscription, no vendor roadmap deciding what's possible on your own site.
- Updates have become a bottleneck. Every change goes through someone in an editor, clicking page by page.
- Performance affects your revenue. Astro ships no JavaScript by default. A Webflow site carries its own runtime whether you use it or not.
It's not worth it if your site is small, works fine, and nobody can maintain code afterwards. Webflow is a good product. The honest question is whether it still fits how your team works — and for plenty of companies it does.
What you keep and what gets rebuilt
This is where expectations usually go wrong. "Export your code" sounds like you get your website in a box. You don't.
The one in bold is worth repeating. We've seen a team cancel their plan and lose two years of enquiries because nobody exported the form submissions first.
The five stages of a migration
1. Measure the site you have. Before anything else, record every page that currently works: its URL, its title, its description, and how much traffic it gets. You cannot verify a migration you never measured. This list is also what decides which pages must not break.
2. Get everything out of Webflow. The code export, plus every CMS collection as a separate file, plus form submissions, plus your redirect list, plus the images that live on Webflow's CDN rather than in the export. Keep the Webflow site live throughout. It's your rollback.
3. Rebuild, don't convert. The exported files are a record of what the site looked like, not a foundation to build on. Rebuilding from the design is faster than untangling exported markup, and you end up with something maintainable. This is also where AI-assisted development earns its keep — the build is dramatically faster than it used to be, with a person reviewing every output.
4. Map every URL. The most important stage and the one most often rushed. Every old address either keeps working, or redirects properly to its new home. Where a page is genuinely gone, it redirects to the closest relevant page — not to the homepage, which Google treats as a dead end.
5. Launch, then watch. Deploy, switch your domain, resubmit your sitemap, then monitor for two weeks. A small ranking wobble in the first week is normal. A sustained drop on specific pages means a redirect was missed.
The five mistakes that cost sites their traffic
These are the ones we see, including ones we've made ourselves.
Changing URLs for no reason. If a page works and ranks, keep its address exactly as it is. Tidier URLs are not worth losing traffic over.
Redirects that aren't really redirects. This one is invisible and expensive. There's more than one way to point an old address at a new one, and some of them look fine in a browser while telling Google nothing useful. Every redirect needs checking at the technical level, not by clicking it.
Forgetting where the images live. CMS images sit on Webflow's servers. The site looks perfect until the plan lapses, and then it doesn't.
Shipping the test settings. Sites in development are deliberately hidden from Google. Push that setting to production and your site disappears from search. It's recoverable, but it makes for a bad two weeks.
Dropping the old redirect list. Those redirects are still catching links from across the web. Leaving them behind quietly breaks years of accumulated links.
How long it takes
The build is rarely what sets the timeline. Content decisions, account access and how quickly feedback comes back are what actually determine it.
What changes afterwards
Editing. If your team updates the site regularly, we connect a CMS so they still can. If changes are occasional, content lives in the project and we handle updates — usually faster than doing it yourself in an editor ever was.
Running costs. The platform subscription goes away and hosting replaces it, typically for less. The bigger change is that nobody else sets your pricing.
Making changes. This is the part clients notice most. On our recent build for Wring — branding, web design and development in four weeks total — changes that used to take hours or days now take minutes.
The bottom line
A Webflow to Astro migration isn't a hard engineering problem. It's a careful inventory problem. The new site is the easy half — protecting what the old one earned in Google is the part that needs someone who's done it before.
If you're weighing it up, we're happy to look at your site and tell you straight what's involved, what's at risk, and whether it's worth doing at all. Sometimes the answer is to stay where you are.
Book a call — or see what we've built recently in our case studies.
FAQ
Yes, on a paid site plan. You get the static files for your pages. You don't get a working CMS, working forms, an online store, or your past form submissions.
Not if the migration is done carefully. Keep your URLs where you can, redirect properly where you can't, and carry your page titles and descriptions across. Expect a small wobble for a week or two. A lasting drop means something was missed.
The content does. It exports as a spreadsheet per collection and gets loaded into the new site. The templates that display it are rebuilt.
Yes, if that's what you need. We connect a CMS for teams that publish regularly. For sites that change occasionally, we handle updates directly, which is usually quicker.
For different things. Astro gives you ownership, no platform limits and better performance. Webflow gives you visual editing in one place. Astro wins once you have development support and you're hitting limits.
Astro for marketing and content sites, which is most of what Webflow builds. Next.js when there's real application logic — dashboards, logins, complex state. We use both and choose per project.
It depends on page count, how many content types you have, and what integrations are involved. If you're currently on Webflow, we offer a discount to migrate. Send us your site and we'll tell you what it would take.
Have more questions? Reach out to us, we'll be happy to help.
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