Migrating a Large Blog to Webflow – Tips & Hacks

Migrate a blog with more than 150 posts to Webflow

In this post, I'll show you how to effectively migrate an existing blog to Webflow. To do this, we create our own CSV file with all blog content, which we can then upload to Webflow.

If you find a plugin in your old CMS that exports your blog posts to a CSV file, be sure to use it! This saves you a lot of time and frustration! This guide is for anyone who can't find a plugin or extension.

By far the most complex way would be to transfer all contributions individually to the CMS. So that you don't have to do that, today I'm going to show you a few insights into my process, which hopefully does a lot of work for you.

I have summarized everything again in detail in the videos. The text content in this article should be understood more as bullet points.

Create a Webflow CSV file for blog import

If you don't have the option to export blog content to a CSV file using a plugin, you must create this CSV file yourself.

You can export a lot of information from your MySQL database (see video).

I also pulled some information such as the title, the release date or the teaser description from my blog's RSS feed.

Convert RSS feed to CSV file: scooterlabs.com/hacks/rss2csv.php (gives you the title, date, and summary of the post)

Unfortunately, the absolute links to the teaser images are not also exported. We'll take care of that in the next step.

Get the absolute path to all blog teaser images

In order to only get the paths to the images, I copied the entire RSS feed code and pasted it into a table (in my case numbers).

1. Copy and paste the complete RSS feed code into a spreadsheet
2. Filter table by <enclosure → copy everything
3. Auf https://www.convertcsv.com/url-extractor.htm Paste so that you can only copy the URLs

Importing SEO meta descriptions

Navigate to the blog area in your MySQL database and, if necessary, filter the table so that only your published posts or only posts in a specific category are displayed. Export CSV file from the mysql database.

As soon as I opened the file directly in Numbers, there was a coding error with umlauts. That's why I only have the CSV file on https://www.convertcsv.com/csv-viewer-editor.htm uploaded and then downloaded again with utf-8 encoding. Then opened in Numbers and sorted by publication date of the posts and copied the meta description column (everything is explained in more detail in the video).

Find and delete empty lines in Numbers

When copying from one table to another, it sometimes happens that an empty line or the text only starts in the second line. I don't know why, but you can simply search for\nin a table and replace everything with nothing (enter nothing).

Reverse the order of posts to import

If you want to reverse the rows in the CSV file so that the contributions are also created from old to new in Webflow, you must place another column with numbers (1,2,3,4...) in front of the table and sort the entire table accordingly (from big to small).

Create a blog CMS collection in Webflow

In this video, we create a CMS collection together for the new blog and then import all blog posts into Webflow via a CSV file.

We then retrieve the files on a blog overview page and I'll show you how you can simply copy individual blog content, including text formatting or images, into a Webflow rich text element.

Importing 301 redirects to Webflow

While you are creating a CSV file for import, it may happen that you also want to change the titles of some blog posts. This may also change the slug (alias) of the post. As a result, these posts will no longer be available under the old link and a 404 error page will also be displayed for search engines. It is therefore important that you create a 301 redirect in the Webflow project settings for these changed posts.

So that you don't have to create all 301 redirects individually, I'll show you in this video how you can import them into Webflow using a trick in the browser console.

Read out an existing structure with all sub-pages of a website

This can be helpful to see which 303 redirects you may also need to create in your Webflow project. You can use the following tools for this: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com

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