Contentful to Webflow:
step-by-step guide

What this Contentful to Webflow migration guide covers

Flow Ninja's in-depth website migration manual covers the entire transition process, from auditing your legacy setup to monitoring your new Webflow site after launch. But before we show you how it's done, let's see if moving from Contentful to Webflow is right for you.

Who this guide is for

If you're tired of Contentful's developer-centric approach and want to empower your marketing teams to create and update content visually, this migration guide is for you. It's also intended for site owners and businesses that want a more unified platform.

When migrating from Contentful to Webflow makes sense

Webflow's marketing-friendly platform stands in sharp contrast to Contentful's headless CMS, which is primarily built for developers and has no native front-end. In that sense, switching from Contentful to Webflow is the right choice if you want:

• An all-in-one CMS with integrated hosting
• Greater design control and a more powerful visual editor
• Cleaner code and built-in SEO features

What's included in this guide

In addition to the migration process itself, our comprehensive guide also includes:

• Top reasons marketers make the switch
• A handy pre-migration checklist you can follow
• Common migration mistakes to avoid
• Site size-based timeline and complexity estimates

Step-by-step: How to migrate from Contentful to Webflow

If you're ready to say goodbye to developer-dependent content management and updates, Flow Ninja's migration manual has you covered. Below are 8 tried-and-tested steps that'll help you make the switch as seamless as possible, so let's explore them.

Step 1 – Audit your existing Contentful website

A proper migration begins with a complete audit of your existing website, and transitioning from Contentful to Webflow is no exception. An audit gives you a detailed overview of everything in your current setup, sets the scope of the migration, and ensures things flow smoothly. To conduct a full-size audit, you'll need to:

• List all existing website pages: Go through your entire setup and put all informational, engagement, marketing, and legal pages into a spreadsheet. In the following few columns, add each page's primary heading, metadata, and URL. While you're at it, separate static pages from CMS content.
• Flag high-value content: Use Screaming Frog, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to identify URLs that are attracting the most traffic and have the most backlinks. This will show you what to prioritize during migration.
• Review URL structures and internal links: Export a complete list of all Contentful URLs and evaluate the structure to see what can remain the same, and what you'll need to change. Then, apply the same approach to all links in navigation, footer, pagination, and body content.
• Document technical debt: Finally, use static analysis and team feedback to identify outdated pages and spaghetti code. This way, you'll know exactly what to focus on right after the migration.

Step 2 – Define your Webflow website structure

Once the audit is complete, it's time to plan how your Contentful items will be implemented in your new Webflow project.

Start by mapping structured data. Translate simple content pages like About Us, Contact, and Legal into static pages in Webflow. Meanwhile, blog posts, articles, news, and other content types with fields and unique entries should convert to CMS Collections.

We also recommend defining Webflow CMS Collections at this stage. Creating a blueprint for each collection ensures that your rebuild flows much more smoothly.

From there, recreate relationships for dynamic pages. Use Webflow Collection Templates to render dynamic content, and replace Contentful references with Webflow's Reference and Multi-Reference fields.

Next, clean up URL structures. Contentful URLs are generated by front-end routing, whereas Webflow relies on CMS slugs. So, remove unnecessary nesting and standardize slugs to ensure consistency across the board.

Finally, refer to your audit data and decide what not to migrate. In our experience, it's best to retire low-value pages and unused content types to keep the new Webflow site fast and clean.

Step 3 – Map SEO, URLs, and redirects

With the content model done, this next step is all about preserving search visibility. Here's how you can do that:

• Use a URL mapping document: Export all legacy URLs from your Contentful-based website into a URL spreadsheet. Then, map old paths to their Webflow counterparts, paying close attention to any structural changes, as these will need to be handled with extra care.
• Map SEO elements: Bring over metadata such as page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, and image alt texts into Webflow. You can then map these either directly to the platform's SEO fields or to CMS collection fields.
• Plan 301 redirects: Take advantage of the existing URL mapping spreadsheet and set up 301 redirects for any changed or removed URLs.
• Resolve duplicate content issues: Check whether URLs overlap and whether paginated content results in duplicates, and address them before launch.

Step 4 – Rebuild design and layout in Webflow

Now's the time for the visuals. At this point, you'll be using Webflow's Designer tool to either recreate the look and feel of your old Contentful website on the new platform or to redesign everything from scratch. In any case, it's best to:

• Set up a design system early on: Define global styles for colors and fonts using Webflow variables, and create reusable components like buttons and navigation. This is the best way to achieve a consistent and professional look.
• Avoid adding too many custom elements: While taking advantage of Webflow's immense design flexibility can be tempting at this point, we recommend holding off on interactive elements and complex animations until your core pages are stable.
• Rebuild layouts responsively: Use Flexbox to recreate or improve upon your Contentful site's layouts in a fluid, breakpoint-sensitive way. And since Webflow handles responsiveness differently, you shouldn't try to carry over rigid widths from the front-end that you used with Contentful.
• Keep accessibility in mind from the get-go: Pay attention to how colors contrast as you rebuild visuals. It's also a good idea to include descriptive alt text for images here.

Step 5 – Migrate content and CMS data

At this point, you're finally ready to move the actual content from your legacy Contentful setup onto your new Webflow platform. While automatic content migration might seem like the obvious choice here, Contentful's headless CMS and Webflow's visual-first platform function quite differently — meaning you're looking at a lot of manual work either way.

Start by exporting your Contentful content. By default, the headless CMS doesn't support CSV exports, so you'll have to:

• Use the contentful-export CLI tool to extract data into a JSON format
• Download assets like images and PDFs from Contentful Media Library
• Extract URLs for assets in rich text fields as they're usually embedded as nested references

As Webflow only supports CSV imports, you'll also need to clean up the exported JSON file. In our experience, custom Python scripts work best for flattening nested Contentful content and converting asset links into ready-to-import URLs.

Once you're done, you should have a few clean CSVs for each content type. And if you're working with a massive content library, we recommend importing these CSV files to Webflow CMS Collections in batches and verifying each collection before moving on.

Step 6 – Reconnect integrations and scripts

With content migration out of the way, it's time to move from Contentful's headless backend processing to Webflow's built-in or third-party forms, Marketplace or external integrations, and custom code components.

• Rebuild forms: For native ones, use your new platform's Form Builder app, which stores submissions directly in Webflow. If you want to keep your existing backend, you'll need to replace your form's action URLs with the endpoint URLs from your provider.
• Reconnect integrations: In most cases, Contentful's API calls to third-party tools can be replaced with Webflow's native apps from the Integrations Marketplace (GA, Slack, Airtable). You can also use automation platforms like Zapier and Make to connect Webflow to CRM and marketing tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce.
• Take care of scripts: Move custom JavaScript and CSS from any Contentful frontend into Webflow's designated code areas. Site-wide scripts like GA, Hotjar, and Meta Pixel go into Project Settings, whereas page-specific scripts go into Page Settings.

Step 7 – QA, performance, and SEO validation

Before the big launch, ensure that your rebuilt site looks and behaves right. Here's how you can check that:

• Review layouts and breakpoints: Put your old Contentful-based website and your new Webflow project side by side and compare visuals like spacing and typography. Then, test the new website to see how it behaves across both desktop and mobile.
• Conduct CMS sample checks: Go through a few random items in each CMS collection to ensure there are no missing fields. Pay attention to image placement and internal links as well.
• Check performance and stability: Combine PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and GTmetrix with Webflow's own audit tools to test the new website's loading speed and page responsiveness.
• Test 301 redirect accuracy: Use a crawler like Screaming Frog to check whether your legacy Contentful URLs are resolving with 301 redirects or resulting in 404 errors.
• Run the final SEO audit: Screaming Frog also works wonders for validating page titles, meta descriptions, headings, canonical tags, and slugs.

Step 8 – Launch and post-launch monitoring

You're finally ready to launch your new Webflow site. Once you do, connect it to Google Search Console and submit your new sitemap as soon as it's up and running. This essentially guides Google to your new URLs faster and ensures proper indexation.

GSC also lets you monitor the migration's success, and that's precisely what you should focus on post-launch. Pay attention to the tool's detailed reports, which primarily include tracking indexing progress and Crawl Stats, which cover:

• Crawl request numbers
• Crawl rate
• Most-crawled pages
• Response times

Use third-party tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, as well as Webflow's Analyze tool, to measure the migration's impact on traffic. Stabilization can take a while, but consistently low numbers indicate that something went wrong during the migration. That's why it's crucial to tackle these launch issues as soon as possible.

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