A practical guide to migrating from a website builder

Using a website builder like Wix or Webflow is the easiest way to get your business on the web. But for experienced and active marketing teams, website builders introduce limitations that are hard to overcome. Website builders also become expensive as your team and traffic grows, so it’s common to migrate away from your website builder eventually. This post will break down the key steps needed to make a migration happen.

The built-in CMS in a website builder is not compatible with the CMS you’ll use for a fully customizable website (these are usually so called headless CMS) that’s built in code. All your website content, including landing pages, offers, and blog articles, needs to be moved to the new CMS. Usually, this can be achieved by exporting to CSV files and then having your engineering team automate the insertion of the exported data to the new CMS. In more complex cases, you will need to create a custom data migration solution that interacts with the website builder API on one side, and your new CMS API on the other.

Many companies are adopting Contentful and Prismic as their CMS solutions, and we believe both are worth considering. Contentful offers more functions and flexibility but comes at a higher cost. In contrast, Prismic provides a good balance of functionality and simplicity at a competitive price.

Functionality like contact forms or product catalogs must be reimplemented outside of the website builder. This is usually straightforward to accomplish by engineering teams, especially because there are many useful software libraries you can rely on.

As we mentioned before, your new web platform’s CMS won’t be compatible with the one used by the website builder. There will be a learning curve for your marketing team to adapt to the new CMS, so they can continue to manage your website’s content. But with proper training and enough time, the marketing team will definitely get up to speed.

While custom websites are much more powerful and configurable than website builders, you team will be responsible for maintaining the site. After you’ve completed the migration, you should expect to spend some resources maintaining the new platform.

Maintenance encompasses all areas of the site, including, content, design, performance, and bug fixes. If you want to learn more about website maintenance, check out our post on Short and long-term maintenance of a web platform .

Migrating from a website builder to a custom website can be a daunting task, but it can pay off big time in the long term. To make the migration a reality, you’ll have to export your content, reimplement features, and get your team up to speed on the new CMS. The payoff will come in the form of much greater control over every aspect of the site, and lower operating costs as your business scales up.