Webflow migration redirects: map, import and check them

Before you start: what Webflow needs

• A paid plan. Webflow's help centre says that to add 301 redirects, the site needs a paid Site plan, or must be in a Workspace with a paid Workspace plan.
• Where they live: Site settings > Publishing > 301 redirects. You can add redirects one at a time there, or import a CSV.
• Nothing works until you publish. Redirects you add or import take effect only after you publish the site.

1. Find every old URL that needs a redirect

Don't start from the new site's page list. Start from what the old site has that people and search engines actually use. Use several sources, because each one misses something:

• Search Console, Performance report, Pages tab. Set the date range to the last 16 months (the longest Search Console offers) so seasonal pages show up, and export the page list. These are the pages that get search clicks.
• Your analytics landing pages. The pages people arrive on from search, email, social and ads.
• Search Console, Links report. Pages that other sites link to. These matter even if they get few clicks today.
• The old site's sitemap and CMS. The old sitemap.xml and a CMS export list pages that exist, including ones that rarely get visits.
• Files and images. PDFs, downloads and images that are linked or found in search need new homes too. Google's site-move guide calls this out specifically.
• The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Useful if the old site is already gone and you have no sitemap or export.

Put all of them into one list and remove duplicates. Keep each URL exactly as it was, including any trailing slash or query string, because that is what visitors will request.

2. Map each old URL to its closest new page

For each old URL, write down the one new page that best replaces it. This is the redirect map, and it is where most of the judgement goes.

• One old page, one closest new page. A blog post goes to the same post at its new address. A service page goes to the new page for that service.
• Never send everything to the homepage. Google's site-move guide warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page, such as the home page, can confuse users and may be treated as a soft 404. If several old pages were merged into one new page, redirecting them all there is fine.
• Removed on purpose? Let it go. If content has no replacement, Google's guidance is to return a 404 or 410 for it. That is a correct outcome, not a failure.
• Keep slugs where you can. The fewer addresses that change, the fewer redirects you need and the less can go wrong.

Our free redirect map template has a column for each of these decisions, and a priority column so the pages that matter most get checked first.

3. Build the CSV Webflow imports

Webflow's CSV import expects two columns: the old path, then the "redirect to" path, one redirect per row. The file can be up to 16 MB.

/old-about-us,/about
/services/web-design-old,/services/web-design
/2023/05/launch-notes,/blog/launch-notes

• Use paths, not full URLs, in the old-path column. Webflow's redirects are relative to the site's root domain, so the old path is written as /old-about-us, not https://oldsite.com/old-about-us.
• Webflow's help doesn't document a required header row. The safest way to get the layout right is to export the site's current redirects first (see the next point) and put your rows into that file, keeping its first line as it is.
• If any row is invalid, the whole import fails. Webflow emails you a link to your original file with guidance on which redirects to correct, and shows the same in the Dashboard.

The trap: an import replaces every existing redirect

This is the step that catches people. Webflow's help centre says new imports overwrite all existing redirects: uploading a CSV removes any redirects already on the site.

A site that has been in Webflow for a while often has redirects you didn't add by hand. When you change a page's slug and tick "Permanently redirect the old URL to this new one", Webflow creates a 301 for you. Importing a fresh CSV wipes those too.

So, every time:

1. Go to Site settings > Publishing > 301 redirects and click Export. Webflow emails you a link to the CSV.
2. Add your new rows to that exported file.
3. Import the combined file.
4. Publish.

Pages that still exist at the old path

If a page on the new Webflow site still uses the old path, the redirect won't take over. Webflow says that to redirect an existing static page you need to delete it, save it as a draft or change its slug first. For a Collection item page, archive, delete or unpublish the item, save it as a draft, or change its slug.

Localised versions are separate rules

Webflow's redirects don't apply to localised slugs or subdirectories automatically. If both /old-url and /es/old-url should go to the new page, those are two rules.

4. Use wildcards for whole folders, and keep the list short

Webflow recommends a maximum of 1,000 redirects as best practice. It has no hard limit, but every rule goes into the site's manifest.json file, which visitors' browsers download, so a long list means more data for every visitor. Webflow's advice is to use wildcard redirects where you can.

Webflow's wildcards are capture groups: (.*) in the old path matches anything at that point, and %1 in the new path puts it back.

Three rules from Webflow's help that decide whether a wildcard works:

• Order matters. Webflow runs redirects in the order they were added: older first, then newer. Add specific redirects before broad wildcard ones, or the wildcard catches the URL first. You can check the order by filtering the 301 redirects list by Date created.
• Escape special characters in the old path. Webflow lists these characters to escape with % in front: % - & * ( ) = _ + ?. Only the old path is escaped; the redirect-to path is written normally. For example, to redirect mysite.com?category=food, the old path is %?category%=food. (Webflow's own one-to-one examples, such as /old-url, are shown unescaped, so test anything with a hyphen or underscore after you publish rather than assuming.)
• No slash before a query string. Webflow strips a trailing slash that sits directly before a query string before it matches. To redirect /slug/?param=value, write the old path as /slug%?param%=value. With the slash in, the redirect silently doesn't fire.

5. Moving to a new domain as well?

If the domain is changing too, Webflow's method is to connect both the old and new domains to the site, set the new one as the default, and publish. Then, in Google Search Console, submit a Change of Address for the old domain. Google says that tool is only for moves from one domain or subdomain to another, not for path changes on the same domain.

6. Publish, then check every old URL

Clicking an old URL in a browser and seeing the right page is a start, but it hides the problems that matter. For each old URL in your map, check that:

1. The first response is a permanent redirect (301 or 308), not a 302 and not a 404.
2. It takes one hop. Google can follow chains, but its site-move guide advises redirecting straight to the final page.
3. It lands on a page that returns 200. Not a 404, and not a general page standing in for a specific one.
4. That page can be indexed. No leftover noindex from staging (noindex left on), not blocked by robots.txt, and a canonical that points to itself, not to the webflow.io address (canonical points to staging).
5. The new page is in the new sitemap, and the redirected old URLs aren't (no sitemap).

You can check a whole list at once from a terminal. Put one full old URL per line in old-urls.txt and run:

while IFS= read -r url; do
  [ -z "$url" ] && continue
  first=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code} %{redirect_url}' "$url")
  final=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -L --max-redirs 10 -w '%{http_code} %{num_redirects} %{url_effective}' "$url")
  echo "$url | first: $first | final: $final"
done < old-urls.txt

A good line reads first: 301 https://newsite.com/about | final: 200 1 https://newsite.com/about: a permanent redirect, one hop, a live page. A 404 in the first column means a missing redirect. A number above 1 in the middle of the final column means a chain. Then run the free Skewcheck page check on your most important new pages for noindex, canonical and robots.txt problems.

7. Check again 7 days later, and keep the redirects

Redirects get broken after launch too: someone renames a page, deletes a CMS item, or re-imports a CSV and wipes the list. Run the same check a week after launch.

Then leave the redirects in place. Google recommends keeping them for as long as possible, generally at least a year, so it can move all signals to the new URLs, and says that for a small to medium-sized site it can take a few weeks for most pages to move in search. Ranking changes during that time are normal; Google says visibility may fluctuate while it recrawls.

Mistakes we see most often

• Importing a new CSV without exporting first, and losing every existing redirect.
• Sending every old URL to the homepage.
• Full URLs in the old-path column instead of paths.
• A broad wildcard added before the specific rules it was meant to sit behind.
• Forgetting the localised versions (/es/…, /fr/…).
• Testing only in a browser, which hides 302s, chains and noindex.
• Checking on launch day and never again.

Want it done for you?

Migration Repair is our done-for-you service for sites moving to Webflow or Framer. We find the old URLs that get search traffic, map each one to its new page with you, give you the CSV ready for Webflow's import (or put the redirects in ourselves if you add us as an editor), and check every one live at launch and again 7 days later. You get a record of every old URL, where it now goes, and the status we saw.

• Free first: a redirect map for your top 10 traffic pages within 48 hours.
• Then: Migration Repair at $500 per site (₹40,000 + GST in India), agreed before we start. We don't promise rankings or traffic.

Email hello@swynq.com for your free top-10 map · How Migration Repair works

Also useful: Launching a Webflow site: the checklist · Framer migration redirects · Traffic dropped after a migration?

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