From WordPress to Webflow: Migration Without Losing a Single Ranking

Overview

Mitunsaufreisen is a travel blog run by two digital nomads who document their trips across different countries and continents. The blog is their main source of income through affiliate links and sponsored content. When they came to me, their site was on WordPress with a purchased theme that worked fine until they wanted to change something about the layout or add a new section. At that point they either needed to hire a developer or leave it as it was, and for a two-person remote team that is not a sustainable way to run a website.

The Problem

Their PageSpeed score was around 30 to 35, which for a site that relies on organic search and Pinterest traffic is a real problem that costs readers every day. The WordPress theme was not built to be modified without technical knowledge, so any layout change required outside help. But the most sensitive issue was their SEO. They had years of published posts, each with its own URL that had been pinned on Pinterest, shared on social media and linked to from other sites. Any careless change to that URL structure would have broken a distribution network they had spent years building.

My role

Before touching anything in Webflow, I audited every existing URL and mapped the full content structure of the site. The only way to guarantee zero SEO loss was to understand exactly what was there before deciding how to rebuild it. The CMS architecture I designed reflects the actual structure of the blog: 90 posts, 20 country pages and 4 continent pages built as three interconnected collections that reference each other. A reader can arrive on a continent page, go to a country and find all related posts without any of that being manually managed. I also built 8 new static pages on top of the original 4 that were migrated.

Every blog post contained embedded widgets from booking and travel platforms including Booking.com, Trip.com and several others, all connected to their affiliate accounts. Reproducing those integrations inside Webflow's rich text was not straightforward, but I implemented each one through embed code within the CMS rich text fields and not a single affiliate integration was lost or broken in the process.

Every URL was reproduced exactly as it existed on WordPress, so zero redirects were needed for existing content. Every Pinterest pin, backlink and shared post continued to work on launch day exactly as it had the day before.

Moving the site from WordPress to Webflow eliminated the theme and plugin overhead entirely, which brought the desktop PageSpeed score from 30 to 35 up to 89. On mobile, where most of their audience reads, the site now passes Core Web Vitals with LCP 1.8s, FCP 1.4s, TTFB 0.7s and CLS 0.

The Bilingual Setup

After the initial launch the clients wanted to add an English version of the blog. Webflow's native Localisation feature would have solved this but it comes with an additional recurring cost they did not want to pay. So instead I built a parallel English CMS structure that mirrors the German one and added browser language detection through custom JavaScript. A reader whose browser is set to English lands on the English version automatically. Both versions are fully interlinked, switching works without issues, and the clients pay nothing extra to Webflow.

Before and After

Results

Core Web Vitals passed. LCP 1.8s, FCP 1.4s, TTFB 0.7s, CLS 0. PageSpeed score 89. SEO score reached 100 out of 100. Every URL from the original site was preserved without exception. Every affiliate integration survived the migration intact. The clients now manage all content independently without needing a developer. The site runs in two languages with automatic browser detection, and I continue to handle technical support as the site grows.