Migrating from Webflow Enterprise to Headless CMS

Webflow is a phenomenal platform for any small business looking to get up and running with a functional website quickly. Their editor interface is easy to use, and the generated front-ends are relatively well-optimized. The platform provides 80% of what any Content Management System can do, for a very low cost.

However, for any mid-sized to enterprise company with more complex publishing requirements, they will feel the pain of the missing 20%. Adding to this, Webflow has been forcibly ‘upgrading’ larger customers (ostensibly based on traffic) to their Enterprise plans, without any additional features, workflows etc that would justify Enterprise pricing. 

Webflow Enterprise Deficiencies 

Based on our discussions with numerous Enterprise customers seeking alternatives to Webflow Enterprise, they cite the following issues:

1. Unusable Marketing Interface: The platform is challenging for non-technical marketing teams, despite some liking the platform. Sites cannot be constructed scalably or sustainably, as each element is built as an individual custom item rather than leveraging reusable component libraries or page templates.

2. Required Technical Knowledge: To create new content, non-technical users are forced to understand CSS. This is contrary to modern CMS’s, where the creation process simply involves dragging and dropping components and filling in forms.

3. Content Management Limitations: Different CMS collections are not relational or shared. This forces teams to create each blog post twice - once for its specific category and again for the combined list on the main blog page. Additionally, there’s no option of building publishing workflows, a common feature of all modern CMS’s.

4. Accessibility: Webflow front-ends suffer from accessibility issues, some of which are inherent to the platform and cannot be fixed. 

5. Performance and SEO/GEO Issues: Any company looking to improve SEO or AI-Search visibility, understands the need to improve page speeds and Core Web Vitals and fix existing technical SEO issues. However, there are limitations around basic optimizations, such as ensuring structured data schemas and correct canonical tags.

Why Consider Modern Headless CMS Alternatives

For businesses that require scalable architecture and developer flexibility required to meet aggressive business goals, there are significant advantages to modern headless CMS platforms:

• SEO/GEO Growth Targets: With lightweight, instant-loading and fully optimized front-ends, websites powered by headless CMSon the back-end and static front-ends can significantly increase SEO traffic post-cutover.

• Component-Based Architecture: All new CMS platforms leverage componentized architecture, where content pages are structured as a skeleton built out of reusable components. This paradigm ensures editor efficiency, allowing marketers to easily create and reuse content with zero technical skills.

• Versatility and Efficiency: Headless CMS platforms such as Storyblok and Prismic employ a "lowest common denominator" philosophy where a singular component can be built in a versatile manner to serve multiple purposes based on a few toggles, preventing the need to build multiple variations of the same component. For example a single header component can easily serve multiple purposes and adapt with size, copy alignment, background image (or video), calls-to-action, etc.

• Technical Performance: With a headless front-end, developers aren’t limited to the templating engine of any CMS. Therefore the website can be fully responsive, completely compliant to web accessibility standards and blazingly fast.

Simply put, migrating from Webflow to a modern headless CMS enables brands to decouple the content management from the presentation layer, allowing them to deliver the necessary technical improvements (speed, accessibility) while giving their marketing team the intuitive, self-service tools needed for efficient publishing workflows.

Naturally, when marketers think of “migrating”, it triggers painful memories of migration disasters (e.g. wholesale losses of organic rankings/traffic). However, Webflow provides adequate tooling for a seamless migration, and 9thCO has a defined process for handling both content extraction and front-end refactoring to Next.js.

9thCO's Content and Asset Migration Process

9thCO employs a specialized, semi-automated process for migrating content and assets, which they have refined over many years and through many migrations. This process involves:

1. Discovery and Architecture: First, during the Discovery phase, 9thCO will architect out all components to ensure a one-to-one match with the existing site structure. This includes cataloging all expected functionality and versatility.

2. Schema Mapping: We map all schemas required for the new blocks or components within the target CMS (e.g. Storyblok). This establishes a "layer of mapping" where we connect the data points from the old components to new.

3. Automated Migration Script: We run a proprietary migration tool designed to connect to the source (in this case Webflow) and fill out field and schema mappings. This script automatically imports all assets and content to map it one-to-one as closely as possible.

4. Safety Protocol: Our migration process involves a transformation step prior to the final migration to ensure safety, preventing scenarios such as accidentally deleting thousands of articles due to a single missed line.

This methodical approach ensures that large volumes of content (hundreds of thousands of pages and assets) can be migrated efficiently without manual editor effort.

Refactoring the Front-end into Next.js Components and Layouts

Since Webflow is generally not tied to any design system (e.g. in Figma), 9thCO has developed a method called "reverse engineered refactoring” to create a new Next.js front-end.

This front-end refactoring involves the following steps:

1. HTML Extraction: We extract the output of the actual HTML from a live Webflow site.

2. Component Translation: We translate the extracted HTML into React components, and then into JSX and Next.js.

3. Visual Documentation: The existing presentation layer is visually reverse-engineered by screenshotting all components and compiling into Figma.

4. Ticketing: These visual components are then converted into development tickets for the build process.

5. Philosophy: The end goal is the creation of a sustainable, component-based architecture where pages are constructed from global and page-specific reusable components.

This process ensures that the existing look and feel of a site migrating from Webflow are preserved ("lift and shift") while moving the front end to a modern, optimized Next.js application. 

By following this overall process and including a comprehensive pre-cutover SEO migration strategy, brands can benefit from the efficiencies of truly enterprise CMS systems, while also enjoying the UX, speed and security of a headless front-end.