How a Website Migration Works: The Process, Step by Step
The short answer: a website migration has seven steps: inventory, target stack, content model, rebuild, redirects, parity checks, and launch with monitoring. For a B2B marketing site, it usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. Rankings survive when every URL is kept or redirected, and every title, meta description, canonical and schema block carries over.
We moved our own site, allsite.pro, from Framer to custom code (Astro on Cloudflare) in November 2026 and kept all 225 URLs, titles, meta descriptions and structured data. This is the process we used, and the one we run for clients moving to custom code, Webflow or Framer.
When a migration makes sense
Companies migrate for four reasons:
- Cost grows with every feature. Languages, CMS collections, A/B tests and editor seats each add to the bill on hosted builders.
- The platform blocks the team. Publishing waits for a developer, plugins break on updates, or the CMS can’t hold the content model.
- Performance and SEO hit a ceiling. Page speed, schema, hreflang or llms.txt can’t be controlled the way the team needs.
- A rebrand or merger. Two sites become one, or a new brand needs a new build anyway.
If none of these apply, fix the current site first. A migration moves your content and URLs, not your problems.
Step 1: Inventory everything
Crawl the live site before you choose anything. List every URL, template, CMS collection and item, file, form, script, integration and redirect that already exists. Export Search Console data for 12 months (pages and queries) and the external links report.
The inventory answers three questions: which pages earn traffic or links, which pages can be merged or removed, and how many templates the new site needs. It is also the baseline every later check runs against.
Step 2: Choose the target stack
Choose the platform by who will run the site after launch:
- Custom code (Astro or Next.js with a headless CMS): several markets and languages, many CMS collections, deep integrations, top performance, full control of SEO and AEO. With AI coding tools, a marketing team can request changes in plain language without a developer.
- Webflow: a team that already knows it and wants visual control with a mature CMS.
- Framer: a design-led team that builds and edits pages visually every week on a smaller site.
Compare the yearly cost, not just the build cost. Our platform comparison and cost calculator help.
Step 3: Design the content model
Map every content type from the inventory into the new CMS: insights, case studies, jobs, FAQs, legal pages. Define the fields once, with references instead of copies. This is the moment to fix duplicated collections and pages that were hard-coded when they should have been CMS items.
Step 4: Rebuild templates and move content by script
Build each template once, as components, then move content with a script rather than by hand. Export from the old platform (CSV, XML or API), clean the HTML, download and self-host images, and import into the new CMS. Hand-copying hundreds of items is where typos, broken links and lost alt texts come from.
Step 5: Map redirects
Keep every URL you can. For each URL that changes or disappears, add a 301 redirect to its closest match, not to the homepage. Check the redirect map against the inventory: every old URL should end in a 200 page in one hop.
Also decide the canonical host and trailing-slash rule once (for example, www and no trailing slash) and redirect every variant to it.
Step 6: Run parity checks
Compare the new site with the old one, URL by URL: status code, title, meta description, canonical, H1, structured data, hreflang, robots and sitemap entries. On allsite.pro we ran this as an automated test that had to pass before launch. Fix every difference or mark it as intended.
Then test every form, CRM connection, analytics event and consent banner on the new site.
Step 7: Launch and monitor
Switch DNS, submit the new sitemap in Search Console and request indexing for key pages. For the next two weeks, check daily: new 404s (add redirects), indexing errors, traffic per page and conversions. Expect a few days of ranking movement while Google recrawls. A lasting drop points to a missing redirect or lost content.
Typical timeline
| Week | What happens |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Inventory, target stack, content model, new setup |
| Weeks 2–3 | Templates, content moved by script, redirects, parity checks |
| Week 4 | Launch, Search Console checks, monitoring begins |
A like-for-like move can be faster. A migration with a redesign, a new brand or several languages takes longer.
Guides by platform
- How to migrate from Framer to custom code
- How to migrate from Webflow to custom code
- How to migrate from WordPress to custom code
- How to migrate a website to Framer
- How to migrate a company website without losing SEO
How Allsite runs migrations
Allsite is a design and development studio for marketing websites. We migrate sites to custom code, Webflow or Framer at a fixed price, typically in 2 to 4 weeks, with a full inventory first, redirects for every changed URL, automated parity checks and two weeks of monitoring after launch. See website migration or request a project.
