Leave Webflow without the export leaving half my site behind
Webflow is the one platform on this list that does give you an export button. That sounds like the easy case, and it's the reason people get caught out.
What the export actually leaves behind
Webflow is upfront about this in its own documentation, which is to its credit, but the detail is easy to skim past. Exported code leaves out your CMS content, your user accounts and your shop entirely, and forms and site search stop working once the code is off Webflow.
In plain terms, if your site is:
- A few fixed pages. The export is a fair copy, and a sensible backup.
- A blog, a portfolio, a directory, anything built on Collections. The export gives you the page designs with the contents stripped out. Every post and every project lives in the CMS, and the CMS doesn't come.
- A shop. Products and checkout don't come across at all.
- Anything with a contact form. The form arrives as a shape on the page that no longer sends anything to anyone.
There's also a quieter one worth knowing: password-protected pages lose their protection in exported code. If you used that for client work or pages that weren't ready, an exported copy is not private.
So don't lead with the export
Bernard doesn't work from an export. It reads your live published pages, the way a visitor's browser does, which is the one view where a CMS-driven blog post is simply a page with words on it. What's on the screen is what comes across.
That inverts the usual advice. Paste your address, look at the free show-home, and treat the Webflow export as a private backup you keep for your own records rather than the mechanism of the move.
The two subscriptions people confuse
Webflow bills in two separate places, and this is where money quietly carries on leaving your account.
- A Site plan covers hosting one particular site on its own web address.
- A Workspace plan covers your account and everything inside it.
They are billed separately, and you can hold one without the other. So cancelling the Site plan for the site you have just moved does not necessarily stop your Workspace bill, and plenty of people go on paying for a Workspace containing nothing they use.
When you do stop the Site plan, be clear about what happens: cancelling removes your custom address and unpublishes the site at the end of the billing period, from both your own address and the Webflow staging address. And Webflow generally does not refund the unused part, so there's no saving in cancelling early. Let it run to the end of the period you have already paid for.
Your domain and your email
Webflow doesn't do email, so your business email is already somewhere else and the move doesn't go near it. That makes this the least risky of the platform moves, provided you follow the usual rules while adding the website records:
- Only add the records you are shown.
- Don't delete MX records or email-related TXT records.
- Don't change your nameservers as part of this ordinary connection. Moving the whole DNS service is a separate job that needs a complete record inventory.
The full walkthrough is in Connect my own web address (domain) to my site.
The safe order
- Paste your address into bernard and look at the show-home. Nothing has changed at Webflow.
- Export the code anyway, as a private backup. It's incomplete, but it costs nothing and it's yours. Keep it somewhere private, given the password point above.
- Check the new site, paying particular attention to anything that came from a Collection, since that's the part an export would have lost. Worth knowing what happened to unpublished pages too (What happens to my unpublished or draft pages when I move?).
- Connect your domain and let the switch happen.
- Test everything: both versions of your address, your contact form, sending and receiving email, and any shop pages (Move my Shopify shop across).
- Cancel the Site plan, then check the Workspace plan separately.
So the order is: show-home first, export only as a backup, connect, test, then cancel both subscriptions rather than one.
And the rule that saves the most money: check what else Webflow is billing you for after the site itself has gone.
The prompt
“I'm moving my website off Webflow to bernard. My address is [yourbusiness.com] and my site [does / doesn't] use the Webflow CMS for things like a blog or a portfolio. Tell me whether I should bother exporting the code, what would be missing if I did, and the order to move and cancel in.”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Webflow lets me export my code. Shouldn't I just do that?
- You can, but the export is emptier than it looks. Webflow's own documentation is clear that exported code leaves out CMS content, user accounts and anything to do with the shop, and that forms and site search stop working once exported. If your site is a handful of fixed pages, the export is a reasonable backup. If it uses the CMS for a blog or a portfolio, the export gives you a shell with the contents missing.
- So how does my site get across?
- Bernard reads your live published pages, the way a visitor's browser does, rather than working from an export. That means CMS-driven pages come across as the pages people actually see, because that's what's on the screen. You paste your address, look at the show-home it builds, and nothing changes anywhere until you approve it.
- Why am I paying Webflow twice?
- Because there are two different subscriptions and they catch people out. A Site plan covers hosting one particular site on its own address. A Workspace plan covers your account and everything in it. They are billed separately, and you can have one without the other, so cancelling a Site plan and assuming the rest has stopped is a common way to keep paying for something you no longer use.
- Does anything happen to my password-protected pages?
- Only if you export. Webflow warns that pages protected by a password lose that protection in exported code, which matters if you used it for anything private like client work or draft pages. It's another reason to treat the export as a backup you keep to yourself rather than something you publish anywhere.
- Will my email break?
- Webflow doesn't provide email at all, so your business email is already with somebody else. The ordinary connection route leaves its records alone. Do not change nameservers as part of those steps; a deliberate move of the whole DNS service must copy and check the email records first.