Wix is an Israeli website hosting and building platform that was first launched in 2006. With about 3.8% of all websites on the internet running on Wix, it is one of the most popular such platforms in the world.
Wix's popularity is in large part due to its simple, streamlined website building application. Users can start with templates and use drag and drop elements to produce what they need.
While this system is great for smaller websites that are largely just informational, many businesses using Wix find that they have needs that far outpace the platform, leading to a need to migrate to a more robust system like Webflow.
The process of moving from Wix to Webflow can be complicated, and depends heavily on the idiosyncrasies of your website. It's best to rely on an expert design agency for website migration services.
Here's what we'll cover:
- Reasons for Migrating
- Step-by-step Migration Guide
- Best Practices
- Common Challenges
Wix vs Webflow: Reasons for Migrating
At first glance, Wix and Webflow are similar platforms. Both offer:
- Website building software
- Domain name registration
- A built-in CMS
In general, however, Webflow's features are more powerful and robust than those offered by Wix.
Advanced customization. Wix is geared towards using pre-built website templates with slight modifications. With both code-based development and drag-and-drop interfaces, Webflow offers more options for customizing your website to fit your needs.
Streamlined integration with marketing tools. Through direct embedding, third-party tools, or built in functionality, Webflow makes it easy to integrate external tools like HubSpot Forms or Marketo.
Complex Animations and Interactions. Using Webflow's animation editor, you can quickly create complex user interactions and animations with ease.
Collaboration features. Webflow offers built-in collaboration features for facilitating collaboration with your entire team.
Less reliance on external plugins. Webflow is entirely self-contained. Users do not need to rely on third party plugins, many of which can introduce unnecessary complications or security issues.
Advanced security. Webflow makes security a top priority. The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified by an independent, third-party auditor, and Webflow is constantly looking for ways to improve security.
Easier to modify and export. Wix websites are tied to the Wix website builder, making it difficult to move them around. Webflow, by contrast, is much easier to export and to modify without depending on external developers or tools.
Step-by-step guide to migration
There is no way to immediately move your Wix website to Webflow with a single click. Instead, every aspect of your website has to be carefully handled and moved separately. We can therefore split the migration process up into three parts:
- Migrating the Design
- Migrating the Content
- Migrating SEO and Marketing Automations
Each should be handled separately, with close awareness for how they will intersect.
Migrating the Design
There are unfortunately no automated tools that can simply take your existing Wix site and convert it to Webflow with one click. While there are individual tools that can help convert one aspect of your site at a time, it takes human experts to competently put it all together. The best practice for Webflow development is to generate clean code and to build your new site from the ground up.
Pay close attention to these aspects of the design during migration:
- Layout. Rebuild the core structure of the website, making sure that the user experience is preserved.
- Visual elements. Headers, footers, navigation menus, and other content sections should be recreated or updated within Webflow.
- Interactivity and animations. Webflow supports creating custom animations and interactions without writing code. You can add sophisticated effects for improving user engagement, such as scroll animations, page transitions, and hover effects.
- Responsive design. Use Webflow's tools to make layouts, images, and content feel responsive and look great on all devices.
Be sure to take advantage of Webflow’s existing components to accelerate page development. These components look great, and can greatly cut down on the time it takes to build new pages.
Redesign best practices
Use migration as a chance for improvement. It's a great time to make little tweaks you've been putting off for months, as well as trying new experiments you haven’t tested before.
Explore Webflow's design tools. Webflow comes with tons of built in design tools that let you do everything from building clean looking websites to fine-tuning fonts, without needing to write your own code.
Create a style guide, and use a utility class system with a naming convention (like Client-First or Lumos). This will help keep your website looking clean and consistent over time, and make it easier to maintain. It will also help with onboarding any new design hires you have in the future by giving them a resource to look at.
Focus on responsive design, using responsive units like REMs for browser accessibility. Responsive design enhances the user experience on all devices and can improve SEO rankings, too. Migration is a good opportunity to examine any issues you may have, and to test how well your site works for different screen sizes.
Do performance tests before and after. Good tools for this are Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals.
Take advantage of Webflow's compression to easily mass-compress site assets in your asset library and CMS. The alternative could be overly slow loading times, which will affect user experience and SEO performance.
Migrating the Content
Your needs here will vary based on the size and variety of your content library.
First, take inventory of all content and assets. Check your Wix CMS for linked collections to make sure your reference fields will come across in the export. Lists that are referenced frequently like categories and authors should be imported first to make it easier for Webflow to automatically reference the right collections and avoid manual data entry.
Second, export content as a CSV file in Wix, and check for data quality before proceeding. Webflow includes several meta data fields in CMS that are not visible in the collection settings, like publish date, created on, and last edited dates, which may be used for sorting, and should be considered.
Finally, import the CSV file into Webflow and make sure everything renders properly. Use this time to make small tweaks and adjustments while looking for anything that seems off.
Migration Best Practices
Seek help from a design agency. Digital transformation is hard. Relying on a team that specializes in providing digital solutions is often the best approach.
Back up any data you have, especially data in CMS collections on the Webflow website that will be receiving the new CMS data. Importing content can write over current collection items, so it's better to combine your new data with Webflow CMS data in a spreadsheet first if you need to keep current Webflow content.
Benchmark your website before making changes, so you can detect performance issues. Measure factors like the number of active users, keyword rankings, time spent on site, load times, and more. You might miss small details during migration that will affect performance later on. The best way to find such issues is to keep track of how your website is performing before and after migration.
Use 301 redirects for pages that have changed URLS. These pages are like forwarding addresses, in that they show when a page has permanently moved to a new location, so that any incoming links will be redirected there. Create a 1:1 mapping of all former pages in the sitemap to the new pages, so that you can keep your existing URL structure, or set up redirects as needed.
Prioritize accessibility as you move to Webflow. All accessibility features you have on your Wix site- such as descriptive alt-text or adjustable contrast- should show up in Webflow as well. This is also a great opportunity to consider any new accessibility features you could add.
Test all links individually to ensure that they are not broken.
Best Practices for SEO
Changing platforms can easily impact SEO rankings, and if you are not careful, you could quickly lose web traffic. Some Wix users rely on third party SEO plugins, and there will be a need to make adjustments to accommodate.
Keep in mind these considerations for on-page, off-page, and technical SEO:
- On-page factors include title tags, meta descriptions, and the actual content of your website. Migrating this information properly comes down to migrating the actual content of your site correctly.
- Off-page factors cover content not on your site, such as backlinks. Use 301 redirects if you are changing any URLs on your website. Test any backlinks that you know you have before and after the migration.
- Technical factors include page speeds, responsive web design, image optimization, and other things that affect how your page will load. These should be tested before and after migrating your design. Pay close attention to factors such as schema markups, canonical urls, RSS feeds, and meta tags, as you migrate.
Be sure to watch SEO performance afterwards for at least several months. Sometimes changes can take a long time to go into effect, and if you notice a significant decline over time, that's a sign that something went wrong.
Common Challenges with Migration
Steep learning curve. Migrating from Wix to Webflow is not something that you can easily master by reading a few blog posts. The process requires care and attention from experts who have seen all the little problems that can come up, and know how to solve them.
Different integrations and plugins. Many Squarespace sites rely on third party plugins to help with all kinds of things. Webflow, on the other hand, is extremely self-contained, and does not rely on external vendors.
Content migration can be complicated. Wix doesn't make it easy by default to take your existing content library and move it to a new platform. The whole process can be highly idiosyncratic, depending on the nature of your content, and so there is usually a need to design a tailored approach that will work for your particular situation.
Can hurt SEO rankings, if done wrong. Any time you move things around on your website, it can confuse search algorithms for a while before they readjust. Expert care is needed to make sure that the transition is smooth and seamless, so that search rankings will be minimally impacted, if not improved.
Loss of performance or data. Your website may not be exactly the same after migration. But at the very least, you should expect to keep your existing design, all the content that you want, and to not impact technical performance factors like load times. Done wrong, though, a migration can lose information or make your site load slower.
Conclusion: Design Solutions for Digital Experiences
Moving from Wix to Webflow brings you a more modern, flexible, and powerful website hosting platform. It's a digital transformation that many businesses go through, and they find immense benefits as a result.
Website migration can be challenging, however, and it does take expert care to be done right. An improperly handled migration could lead to loss of data, a poor user experience, and negatively affected search rankings.
Composite is a web development agency in New York that centers on Webflow. One of our most common projects is helping businesses migrate to the platform from whatever system they are currently on, including WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace. We've helped dozens of businesses make the switch over the past few years.
Do you have a Wix site, and are looking for a better way to expand and maintain it? We'd love to talk!
