Migrating a SaaS website with over 3,500 URLs to Webflow required a comprehensive approach to maintain performance and address existing technical SEO challenges. The process began with detailed site crawls to categorize URLs into performance-based buckets, identifying high-traffic pages that needed to be preserved, low-value URLs contributing to content bloat, and pages requiring redirects or deactivation.
This case study provides a detailed breakdown of the steps taken to successfully migrate our client’s WordPress website to Webflow. It highlights the technical SEO strategies, collaborative efforts, and results achieved throughout the process.
Before initiating the migration, we analyzed the existing website in detail to fully understand its structure and content. This step is akin to studying the “anatomy” of a website—examining every element that contributes to its functionality, much like how bones and muscles work together in the human body. Websites are the same way, every link, page, asset, and navigation item should serve a purpose. If one thing breaks, then you risk losing traffic, page discovery, and ultimately damage the user’s experience. To mitigate these risks, we conducted comprehensive website crawls to archive all existing URLs and assets. This provided a baseline inventory of the site's current state, ensuring nothing would be overlooked during the migration.
Once the crawl was complete, we needed to gauge two primary performance indicators in order to determine what should be migrated over to the new CMS (Webflow) and what should be excluded. These indicators are:
1. Quantitative Metrics: Sessions, page views, clicks, impressions,rankings, conversion events, and indexability status of every URL.
2. Content Relevancy: Noting the alignment of each page's content with user intent and the brand’s core offerings to see where we can optimize for User’s engagement with the website.
We connected our Google Analytics and Google Search Console APIs to collect all this data. Once the data was collected, it was time to get cooking.
For both User Experience and SEO purposes. You want to ensure that every piece of content on the website is relevant to your company’s core offerings and contributes value to the brand’s positioning and audience engagement. Content that is irrelevant or loosely related to the core offerings can dilute the user experience and ultimately hinder your bottom line.
The more your audience is not engaged the less likely they are to continue to click through your website and ultimately convert.
From an SEO perspective, this process is referred to as maintaining a lean index—prioritizing high-value pages over a bloated index of underperforming ones. This approach not only enhances crawl efficiency through strategic internal linking but also earns recognition from search engines, boosting your topical authority. By demonstrating topical relevance, Google perceives your site as an authority within your niche or market, rewarding you with increased visibility and better rankings.
Using data from our crawls, we categorized every URL into performance tiers based on its KPIs:
1. Dead URLs: 0 clicks, less than 2000 impressions
2. Weak URLs: 1 - 30 clicks, less than 2000 Impressions
3. Opportunity URLs: Greater than 2000 impressions and greater than 50 sessions.
4. Fair URLs: 50 - 99 clicks, greater than 2000 impressions, greater than 50 sessions.
5. Decent URLs: 100 - 500 clicks, greater than 2000 impressions, greater than 50 sessions.
6. Performance URLs: Greater than 500 clicks, greater than 2000 impressions, greater than 50 sessions.
For this client, 32% of their organic search traffic—and nearly 38% of their total website traffic—originated from their /blog/ URLs. However, this traffic was spread thinly across 1,739 blog posts. Upon closer analysis, only a small subset of these blogs significantly contributed to traffic, with the majority receiving little to no engagement.
This presented a challenge: preserving the client’s strong organic presence while pruning low-performing content to maintain a lean index. We focused on retaining top-performing blog posts and aligning them with the client’s new CMS structure, while consolidating or archiving underperforming posts.
This structured approach ensured a data-driven migration that balanced SEO integrity with user experience, setting the stage for continued success on Webflow.
As we prepared to migrate the existing content, it became crucial to identify and address high-priority technical issues affecting the current website. Failing to resolve these issues before migration could exacerbate the problems once the transition was made.
Here are all the high-priority problems we identified and how we fixed each one:
Reactivating Pages with Traffic to Avoid 404 Errors: The website had 156 URLs that were receiving fair to good traffic but were returning 404 errors. We instructed the development team to go into the CMS and reactivate these pages, ensuring they returned a 200 status code.
Deactivating Irrelevant URLs: Conversely, we identified and deactivated URLs that received minimal traffic and contributed significantly to both index and content bloat. This helped streamline the site and ensure better crawling efficiency.
Fixed All Redirect Links, Redirect Chains, and Broken Links: A total of 1,928 redirect links leading to 404 pages, mostly across the blog section, were deleted. This was a common issue for the client: many links were pointing to redirected or non-existent pages, creating a poor user experience and negatively impacting SEO. These were resolved to improve site performance and user navigation.
Creating and Optimizing a Robots.txt File: We created an optimized robots.txt file to provide Google with specific crawling directives for URL paths. This was essential for reducing index bloat, particularly related to query strings, tags, and pagination, ensuring that Google crawls only the most relevant pages.
Implement Self-Referencing Canonical Tags: We added self-referencing canonical tags to every URL to prevent duplicate content issues across the website. While this is a standard practice in WordPress, it needs to be manually programmed in Webflow to ensure content consistency.
Building and Submitting an Optimized Sitemap: An XML sitemap was generated and submitted to Google Search Console. Sitemaps are an essential SEO tool, as they provide Google with a comprehensive list of all URLs on the site, facilitating more efficient crawling.
Implementing Pagination for Optimal Crawlability: Pagination was set up to ensure that Google could crawl even the deepest and oldest content on the site. This structure allows search engines to index all pages efficiently, ensuring no content is overlooked.
With the current technical issues resolved and our KPIs established, the next step was to prepare Webflow to host all existing content within the new CMS while ensuring the redesigned website operates seamlessly. This process required careful planning, robust collaboration between SEO specialists, designers, developers, and internal stakeholders, and precise execution to maintain performance and user experience.
Below is a summarized breakdown of high-level tasks we executed during the migration preparation process.
1. Designated Page Templates for Consistent Subfolder Structures:
We created specialized page templates tailored to the unique needs of different subfolder categories. This ensured a cohesive structure while accommodating custom designs for key sections such as:
Product Pages: Highlighting individual items with dynamic content integration.
Fulfillment & Checkout: Streamlined for user experience and speed.
Resources & Blog: Optimized for rich, SEO-driven content presentation.
Miscellaneous Pages: Additional templates for any unique page types required in the CMS.
2. Mobile Optimization as a Priority:
All new page designs were tested for seamless functionality across devices. This included:
- Ensuring responsive design for all screen sizes, from smartphones to tablets.
- Optimizing page load speeds by compressing assets like images and videos.
- Implementing touch-friendly navigation elements and buttons to enhance mobile usability
3. Updating DNS Settings to Point the Domain to Webflow:
Migrating the domain to Webflow involved precise updates to the DNS settings. Here's how the Search Central development team successfully managed the process:
- Configured A and CNAME records to point to Webflow’s servers.
- Verified SSL certificates to maintain a secure connection (HTTPS).
- Tested DNS propagation to ensure the domain was correctly pointing to the new Webflow site across all regions.
This process minimized downtime and ensured a smooth transition for users accessing the domain.
4. Creating a Non-Indexable Backup of the old Wordpress Website:
While optional, we created a non-indexable backup of the existing WordPress site. This served multiple purposes:
Reference Point: Allowed us to compare elements of the old site with the new one during and after migration.
Content Preservation: Provided access to historical content, enabling the team to reuse, repurpose, or validate data during the transition.
Fallback Plan: Acted as a contingency in case of unexpected issues during migration.
To prevent duplicate content penalties, we ensured this backup was hosted in a non-public, no-index environment.
Within 9 months following the website migration, compared to the 9 months prior, our client achieved remarkable improvements across key metrics:
Pageviews: Increased by 34%, showcasing enhanced user engagement and content visibility.
Landing Page Sessions: Grew by 26%, indicating stronger entry-point performance and improved SEO.
Average Time on Page: Rose from 42 seconds to 83 seconds, reflecting more engaging content and better user experience.
Google Clicks: Jumped from 22k/month to 25.3k/month, a significant boost in organic traffic.
Conversion Events: Increased by 10.4%, demonstrating tangible improvements in lead generation and overall business impact.
These results highlight the success of the migration strategy in enhancing website performance and achieving business goals.
