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Why migrate your Wordpress site to Webflow?

Wordpress, an open-source software, created in 2003 is the leader on the website market(43% of websites worldwide). In the category of CMS (Content Management System), this figure rises to 63%. To give you an idea of what it represents, the number of sites on Wordpress is about 455 million.

Webflow is a new kind of CMS born ten years later in the United States. Much more user-friendly than its predecessor, it has about 0.6% of market share. The gap between the two tools is gigantic.

Many companies make the choice to migrate their website from Wordpress to Webflow. In this article, we will try to dissect the 3 reasons that push companies to make this choice.

1. Safety and reliability

  1. Integrated SSL certificate

Webflow manages the hosting, the SSL certificate and the CDN automatically for you. Indeed, an SSL certificate is directly integrated to Webflow. On Worpdress you have to do some manipulations to get one and thus have a site in https.

  1. No external plugins

It is a subject taken into account by Webflow, so it is one less thing for you to worry about. Webflow has a specific team on cybercrime issues

Almost a year ago, 1.6 million Wordpress sites suffered 13.7 million attacks in 36 hours. It is an attack of incredible magnitude and has impacted many companies.

It is because of plugins installed on Wordpress sites that the attack could take place. Indeed, the plugins are developed by third parties. Thus breaches can be inserted in the code and be exploited by hackers.

To avoid this kind of mishaps, you can update the wordpress theme and/or plugins. Nevertheless, these operations are always dreaded because they can change / break the design of the site.

On Webflow, there are no plugins or themes. So you don't have to worry about any update.

  1. High availability and performance

Over the last 90 days, Webflow has an uptime of 99.99%. This means that the websites on Webflow are available everywhere in the world all the time.

One minute of unavailability costs about $5,600(source Gartner, in 2014). It is therefore preferable to have a turnkey tool that has a very high uptime (and that you don't have to worry about).

Regarding performance, whether it is on Wordpress or Webflow, it will depend on the quality of development. However, it will be easier to obtain a powerful site with Webflow thanks to a certain number of elements of which :

  • The lazy laod of default images
  • The possibility to have images in Webp format (= very light images)
  • The ability to import custom fonts (and apply a font-display: swap property to them )
  • The fact that there is no external plugin
  • Ability to defer all scripts (live or via Google Tag Manager)

The fact of having control over everything allows you to have a powerful site. On Wordpress, it sometimes takes a plugin to speed up a site that has too many... plugins.

You can also use Cloudflare as a CDN which allows you to have a caching of your site.

Below is a graph showing what you should do to secure your Wordpress:

2. CMS & SEO

To have a quality natural referencing, there are 3 essential pillars: the content, the backlinks and the technique. The latter is related to security and performance, but also to a set of technical aspects.

  1. Technical aspects

All of the following are natively supported by Webflow:

  • Title and meta description tags
  • Open Graph
  • File sitemap.xml
  • Robots.txt file
  • Alt tags
  • Canonical tag
  • Easy implementation of schema.org rich snippets

If you are on Wordpress to do this you need to use a plugin, the most famous being Yoast SEO. Once again, you are dependent on a potentially vulnerable third party tool.

Example:

I take here the example of a customer that we accompanied for the migration of his site to Webflow.

He had a Wordpress site with weekly content. Despite this, his pages were not positioned. Indeed, this content was not indexed because too many technical errors were present on the site:

  • Dozens of 404s (pages not accessible)
  • Duplicate content
  • Pages without any link to them
  • No robots.txt file
  • No canonical tag

A redesign was done on Webflow and the launch took place on July 1, 2022.

Just here a video screenshot of the number of keywords and organic traffic. We can see that it went from 0 keywords in June to 162 positioned keywords in July, and the traffic is also going up.

  1. CMS and scalability

One of the most important aspects of Webflow is that there are built-in databases called collections. These are linked to template pages. They allow you to create the design of a page only once. Then a page is automatically generated as soon as an element is created in the CMS.

You will never need to install a separate CMS plugin or configure a database server.

This operation allows you to publish dozens of pages quickly and easily.

Let's say you work at Zapier and you want to create one page per supported connection.

You'll want to make a page for the login:

  • between Webflow and Airtable
  • between Airtable and Carrd
  • or between Notion and Calendly.

It's very simple. 3 steps are enough:

  1. Create a "Tools" collection that will be used to store all connections
  2. Create some items like the ones above
  3. Create a template page with a design that will be the same regardless of the tools

In a short time, you will have many pages. These will allow you to position yourself on long tail queries.

3. Flexibility

  1. High customization

The flexibility of Webflow is one of its greatest assets. You can easily implement a complex design.

In particular, you can add animations and custom interactions. It will be more difficult to do the same with Wordpress unless you move from development.

WordPress has limitations for customizing themes and structures.

However, the companies that will stand out tomorrow will be those that have a strong identity. The website is often the gateway to transmit its identity and values to prospects.

The design and the experience of your site must be taken care of. Webflow will be your ally on this aspect since it allows you to make 100% customized sites. The fact that you have complete control over the HTML and CSS of your site is a real plus.

Finally, Webflow offers the possibility to add code easily. This can be useful to add external libraries like GSAP for example.

  1. Editor mode

The Designer mode allows you to have access to everything on Webflow and to build what you want. Nevertheless, one of its strengths lies in its editor mode which is aimed at non-technical people.

This mode allows you to access the site toadd / modify content without changing the structure. The access to the structure is not possible thus preventing to break the design.

This is ideal if you have a person dedicated to content creation in your team. They will be able to modify all the following elements on static pages: texts, images, videos, links etc...

All fields of the CMS will also be accessible.

This offers the possibility to design and create content at high frequency.

Conclusion

Using Webflow for your migration from Wordpress has many advantages.

It is easy to use and offers great flexibility, so you will be able to create the website of your dreams.

Your site will be more secure because there are no entry points through which hackers can attack it.

SEO is also natively managed in Webflow due to the integration of the CMS system.

Finally, the community is incredible. There are many ways to improve your site, add features or find help. I invite you to look at Finsweet, Relume or the slack of NoCode France.