By Mehdi HassanWhat is this WordPress to Webflow case study based on?
This WordPress to Webflow case study is a hypothetical example. The company and every detail below are illustrative, built to show how a B2B migration is planned, launched and measured. It isn't a real client project, and it makes no claims about traffic or conversion results.
We wrote it this way because most published migration case studies show a chart and skip the decisions. The decisions are what you can reuse. For the full process, read our SEO-safe WordPress to Webflow migration guide. For the platform question, start with migrating from WordPress.
Who is the hypothetical company, and why did it leave WordPress?
A hypothetical example: a Series A B2B SaaS company with a 60-page marketing site and a blog of around 200 posts on WordPress. The site was built on a page builder theme three years earlier. Marketing wanted to launch campaign pages weekly and couldn't, because every new page went through one contract developer.
- Editing: marketers couldn't create pages without breaking layouts.
- Maintenance: plugin updates were delayed because they broke the theme.
- Design: a recent rebrand never made it onto the site.
- Speed: mobile pages failed Core Web Vitals in Search Console.
There was nothing WordPress-specific to keep: no membership area, no store, no complex plugins. That made Webflow a good fit, with a CMS that marketers could edit visually. Before choosing, the team checked the cost against the alternatives using our WordPress to Webflow migration cost guide.
What did the team measure before the migration?
Before touching design, the team recorded a baseline: rankings, traffic, Core Web Vitals and demo requests by page. Without a baseline, a 90-day review compares memories, not data.
Baseline item | Source | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
Clicks and impressions by page | Search Console, last 12 months | Shows which URLs carry traffic |
Tracked keyword positions | Rank tracker, key queries | Spots ranking movement per page |
Pages with backlinks | Backlink tool export | Old URLs with links need exact redirects |
Core Web Vitals | Search Console report | Measures speed before and after |
Demo requests by landing page | Analytics conversion events | Ties traffic to pipeline |
AI answer citations | Manual checks of key questions | Shows which pages answer engines quote |
The last row is newer. Answer engines quote pages, and a migration can break those citations as easily as rankings. Keeping the same answers on the same topics, at redirected URLs, is part of the plan.
Which redirect decisions made the difference?
The redirect decisions that mattered most were how to handle blog date URLs, category and tag archives, and pages being merged. Each one was a choice between keeping a URL, redirecting it to its closest match, or letting it go.
Blog date URLs
WordPress served posts at /2022/04/post-name. Webflow uses a collection path such as /blog/post-name. Every post got a one-to-one 301 from the old date path to the new slug, with the slug kept identical.
Category archives
Six categories with real traffic were rebuilt as Webflow collection pages and redirected one to one. Thin categories were redirected to the blog index.
Tag archives
Most tag pages had no clicks and thin content. They were redirected to the closest category instead of being rebuilt.
Merged pages
Three overlapping feature pages became one. Each old URL redirected to the matching section of the new page, and the new page answered all three questions.
Media and PDFs
PDFs with backlinks were uploaded and their old wp-content paths redirected. Images were re-hosted rather than hotlinked to the old server.
Chains
Older redirects from the Redirection plugin were merged into the new map so that no URL needed two hops.
How was the Webflow site built to keep rankings?
The Webflow build kept every ranking page's title, main heading and core answer, and rebuilt metadata, schema and internal links from the old site before launch. The design changed. The content that ranked did not, unless it was being improved on purpose.
The blog moved through a CSV import into a collection with fields for title, slug, author, category, SEO title, meta description and featured image. The team checked rich text for images that had turned into placeholders and for leftover WordPress shortcodes. Our walkthrough of moving a WordPress blog to Webflow CMS covers the field mapping.
Why the team didn't rewrite every post during the move
Rewriting content and changing URLs at the same time makes it impossible to tell which change caused a ranking shift. The team kept post copy as it was, fixed only broken formatting, and scheduled rewrites for after the 90-day review.
Key landing pages were the exception. They got new copy as part of the rebrand, but each kept its URL (or a one-to-one redirect), its main topic and the questions it already answered.
What happened to Core Web Vitals after the move?
In a move like this, Core Web Vitals usually improve, because the new build drops the page builder's extra code and serves from a CDN. They only improve if the new design doesn't add back weight with large videos, heavy animation or extra scripts.
In this walkthrough, the team set rules up front: one hero image or a short compressed video, animations triggered on scroll rather than on load, and a single tag manager container. Then they measured. Lab tests in PageSpeed Insights gave fast feedback during the build, but the field data in Search Console is what counts, and it takes weeks to update after launch. Field data, not a single lab score, was the number the team reported at day 90.
What happens to traffic and conversions in the first 90 days?
After a WordPress to Webflow move, traffic usually wobbles for a few weeks while search engines recrawl the new URLs, then settles. Conversions depend on whether tracking survived. The 90-day review checks that the dip was temporary and that demo requests were measured the same way on both sites.
Window | What the team checked | What would signal a problem |
|---|---|---|
Launch day | Top redirects, forms, tracking events | 404s on high-traffic URLs, missing events |
Week 1–2 | Crawl errors, indexing, sitemap | Old URLs still indexed, new ones not |
Week 3–6 | Clicks and positions by page | A page that keeps falling, not recovering |
Day 90 | Same pages, queries and events as baseline | Lower demo requests with steady traffic |
Demo requests were the number leadership cared about. Before launch, the team recreated each conversion event in Webflow, submitted test forms, and confirmed they arrived in the CRM with the right source. That way, a change in demo requests could be read as real, not as a tracking gap.
What would the team do differently next time?
Next time, the team would build the redirect map in the first week instead of the third, and test tracking on staging before design sign-off. Both were done in time here, but both were rushed.
The broader lesson applies to any platform. The same plan works for WordPress to Framer, and teams that move translated sites need the extra steps in our WPML and Polylang migration guide. For a code destination, compare this walkthrough with our Webflow to Next.js case study.
