The Complete Guide to Migrating from Webflow to Code

Why Migrate Away from Webflow?

Let's be honest: Webflow is a beautifully designed product. It lets designers build responsive websites without writing code, and for a while, that's exactly what you need. But somewhere around month 18, you start noticing the cracks.

Your site has 47 pages. Your CMS collections are duct-taped together with conditional visibility. You're paying $42/month for hosting that a $5 VPS could handle. And every time you want to add a feature that Webflow doesn't support natively — a multi-step form, a dynamic pricing calculator, a proper search — you're embedding third-party scripts and praying they don't break on the next Webflow update.

But here's the real kicker in 2026: AI can now edit code in seconds. Tools like Claude Code can refactor your entire frontend, add new features, fix bugs, and deploy — all from a conversation. But they can't do that with a Webflow project. Your site is locked behind a visual editor that no AI tool can programmatically access.

That's the migration trigger. Not that Webflow is bad — it's that the world has moved on, and your site is stuck.

The "Easy on Paper" Myth

Every migration guide makes it sound simple. Export your Webflow site, clean up the code, deploy it somewhere. Three steps. What could go wrong?

Everything.

Here's what actually happens when you click that export button in Webflow:

• The HTML is not semantic. Webflow generates deeply nested div structures with class names like div-block-47 and section-3. It's valid HTML, but it's not the kind of HTML you'd write by hand — or that AI tools can reason about.
• The CSS is massive. A typical 20-page Webflow site exports 15,000+ lines of CSS. Most of it is unused on any given page. Some of it conflicts. None of it uses modern features like CSS Grid properly — everything is absolute positioning and flexbox hacks.
• Interactions don't export. All those scroll animations, hover effects, and page transitions you built? Gone. The export gives you static HTML. You have to recreate every interaction from scratch.
• CMS content comes as static HTML. Your carefully structured CMS collections become hardcoded content. No more dynamic filtering, no pagination, no API access.
• Forms break immediately. Webflow forms use their own submission endpoint. Export the site and your forms submit to nowhere.

We've done 50+ Webflow migrations. Every single one has hit at least three of these issues. Most hit all five.

What a Real Migration Looks Like

Forget the export button. A proper Webflow-to-code migration is a reconstruction, not a conversion. Here's the actual process:

Phase 1: Audit (1-2 days)

Before touching any code, you need a complete inventory of what you're migrating:

• Every page, its purpose, and its traffic (check Google Analytics)
• All CMS collections and their relationships
• Every form and where submissions go
• All custom code embeds and third-party integrations
• Every interaction and animation
• Current SEO performance — rankings, meta tags, structured data, redirects
• All assets — images, videos, fonts, downloadable files

This audit is where most DIY migrations fail. People start coding before they understand the full scope, then discover on day 14 that they forgot about the blog's pagination or the e-commerce integration.

Phase 2: Architecture Decision (1 day)

Now you choose your stack. For most Webflow migrations, we recommend:

• Next.js — React framework with server-side rendering, great for SEO
• Tailwind CSS — utility-first CSS that AI tools understand perfectly
• Payload CMS — headless CMS that gives you an admin panel without the lock-in
• Vercel or a VPS — deployment that scales automatically

Why this stack? Because every part of it is AI-editable. Claude Code can read your Next.js components, understand your Tailwind classes, query your Payload CMS, and deploy to Vercel — all programmatically. That's the whole point of migrating.

Phase 3: Design Extraction (2-3 days)

You're not recreating the design from scratch — you're extracting the design system from Webflow. This means:

• Documenting every color, font, spacing value, and breakpoint
• Identifying reusable components (buttons, cards, navigation patterns)
• Mapping Webflow's responsive breakpoints to your CSS framework
• Extracting and optimizing all assets (Webflow serves unoptimized images by default)

The trick here is not to replicate Webflow's design decisions pixel-for-pixel. Webflow forces certain layout patterns because of its visual editor constraints. In code, you can do better.

Phase 4: Build (5-10 days)

This is where the actual coding happens. Component by component, page by page. The order matters:

1. Global layout — header, footer, navigation
1. Design tokens and typography system
1. Reusable components — buttons, cards, form elements
1. Page templates — homepage, about, service pages
1. CMS integration — blog, portfolio, dynamic content
1. Forms with proper submission handling
1. Animations and interactions
1. SEO — meta tags, structured data, sitemap, robots.txt

With AI-assisted coding, the build phase is dramatically faster than it used to be. What took a developer two weeks in 2023 now takes 5-7 days with Claude Code or Cursor handling the boilerplate.

Phase 5: Content Migration (1-2 days)

If you have a Webflow CMS with blog posts, case studies, or portfolio items, each piece of content needs to move to your new CMS. This is tedious but critical:

• Export CMS data from Webflow (CSV export works for structured data)
• Transform data to match your new CMS schema
• Import via API or bulk upload
• Verify every piece of content rendered correctly — rich text formatting, images, embeds
• Set up URL redirects from old paths to new paths

Phase 6: SEO Migration (1 day)

This is the step most people skip, and the one that costs them the most. If your Webflow site has any organic traffic, a botched SEO migration can destroy months of rankings overnight.

• 301 redirects for every URL that changes
• Meta tags — title, description, OG tags — must match or improve
• Sitemap — auto-generated and submitted to Google Search Console
• Canonical URLs — prevent duplicate content issues
• Page speed — your new site should be faster (it will be — Webflow sites are notoriously heavy)

Phase 7: Testing & Launch (1-2 days)

Deploy to a staging environment. Test every page, every form, every interaction. Check on mobile. Check in Safari (it always breaks in Safari). Run Lighthouse. Run a broken link checker. Then, and only then, point your domain to the new site.

The Problems Nobody Warns You About

Even with a solid process, Webflow migrations have a set of recurring gotchas that will bite you if you're not prepared:

1. Webflow's Responsive Approach Is Backwards

Webflow designs desktop-first and cascades down to mobile. Modern CSS frameworks work mobile-first. This means every responsive style needs to be mentally inverted during migration. It's not hard, but it's easy to miss breakpoints and end up with a site that looks great on desktop and broken on tablet.

2. Rich Text Content Is a Nightmare

Webflow's rich text fields generate HTML with inline styles, Webflow-specific classes, and non-standard markup. If you have 200 blog posts with rich text content, each one needs to be cleaned up or you need a robust sanitization pipeline.

3. Custom Code Embeds Are a Black Box

That analytics script? That chatbot widget? That custom booking integration? They were embedded as raw HTML in Webflow, and you need to figure out what they do, whether they're still needed, and how to properly integrate them in your new stack.

4. Webflow's Image Handling Is Deceptively Complex

Webflow automatically generates responsive image variants and serves them via their CDN. When you migrate, you lose all of that. You need to implement responsive images, lazy loading, and image optimization in your new stack — or your Lighthouse scores will tank.

How Long Does It Actually Take?

For a typical Webflow site (10-30 pages, blog, a few forms):

• DIY with no experience: 4-8 weeks (and you'll probably cut corners on SEO)
• DIY with development experience: 2-3 weeks
• With AI-assisted coding: 1-2 weeks
• With MigrateLab: 5-10 business days, fully managed

Is It Worth It?

Here's the math. A typical Webflow site costs $42-$84/month in hosting alone. A Next.js site on Vercel or a VPS costs $0-$20/month. Over three years, that's $750-$2,300 in hosting savings alone.

But the real value isn't cost savings — it's velocity. Once your site is in code, you can ship changes in minutes. AI tools can add features, fix bugs, update content, and deploy — all without a designer or developer manually clicking through a visual editor. That's not an incremental improvement. That's a fundamental shift in how fast your business can move online.

The question isn't whether to migrate. It's whether you do it now — or six months from now, when your competitors already have.