Every address the old site answers to gets a destination before anything moves: pages, posts, images, the PDF someone linked in 2019. On launch day each one lands somewhere real, and search engines see a site that moved, not one that vanished.
8of 8old addresses still answerEvery one lands on a real page with a 301.
/200stays //about-us/301to /about/our-team/301to /about/web-design-services/301to /services/web-design/blog/2021/03/pricing-guide/301to /blog/pricing-guide/category/news/301to /blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/brochure.pdf301to CDN · brochure.pdf/contact-us/301to /contactBuilt from a crawl of the live site plus your analytics and Search Console, so a page that ranks but nothing links to still makes the list.
Posts, case studies and team pages go into CMS collections by import, with their images, dates and authors attached.
Titles, descriptions, social images and alt text carried page by page, because a search result is built from them and a move is where they quietly disappear.
Old templates are read for what they do, then rebuilt as Webflow components your team can edit. Copying the markup would move the old problems too.
The old site gets scored before anything moves, so the new one is compared with a number. Chattermill went from 89 to 100 on accessibility across all forty nine pages.
Redirects tested on staging against the full list before the domain moves. After it moves, the new sitemap goes to Search Console and the error report gets read, so a missed address is fixed in days instead of found in a year.
A migration fails quietly. The new site looks finished on launch day, and the damage shows up weeks later as pages that stopped ranking, links in old emails that go nowhere, and a blog with half its images missing. All of it traces back to something nobody listed before the move.
The crawl finds them before the move does. Old campaign pages, a PDF from a trade show, the post a partner still links to: each one gets a line in the map or a decision that it can go.
Imported into collections, then checked against the old page side by side. Retyping is where a paragraph goes missing and nobody notices for a year.
Every redirect is tested on staging before launch, and the switch is planned for a quiet hour. The old site keeps running until the new one is proven.
On the Chattermill rebuild, forty nine pages came through with the content model the team already writes into, unchanged.
Most people who ask for a migration mean one of two jobs. A straight move rebuilds the existing design on Webflow, page for page. A rebuild uses the move to fix what the old site got wrong: the templates that fight the content, the structure nobody on the team can edit.
Which one it is gets decided before the quote, not halfway through the build. Changing course in the middle means paying for the first half twice, so the kickoff call looks at the old site with you and names the job.
What never changes between the two is the map. A straight move and a full rebuild get the same crawl, the same redirect list and the same check after launch. The design is negotiable. Losing an address is not.
From $2,000
Above that, the number comes from three things.
Chattermill
Customer intelligence, United Kingdom
Rebuilt around the thirteen CMS collections it already had. The content model the team writes into came through unchanged; the way pages assemble from it did not.
Not if every old address answers. Rankings belong to URLs, and an address that returns a 404 after the move gives up what it earned. A 301 hands it to the new page. Expect some movement in the first weeks while search engines recrawl. A map that covers every address is what keeps that movement from turning into a drop.
Yes. Posts, categories, authors and images go into Webflow CMS collections by import, not by retyping. The part that takes real checking is formatting inside old posts, because blocks and shortcodes have no direct Webflow equivalent.
No. The new site is built and checked on a staging address while the old one keeps running. The switch is a DNS change planned for a quiet hour, and the old addresses start redirecting as soon as it lands.
Only for the last few days, not for the whole project. Content is imported early, and whatever gets published on the old site after that is moved again in one pass just before the switch.
They get listed during the crawl and rebuilt one by one: form destinations, CRM connections, analytics, cookie consent. On Chattermill the forms stayed in HubSpot, so a lead never depended on the rebuild.