Gemin
Get in touch

Base44 to Webflow

Migrate from Base44 to Webflow

Base44 can get an application and its website online quickly. The migration starts by separating the two. I rebuild the public marketing surface in Webflow, move the content that belongs there, and leave the application logic in the system that should actually own it.

Start a project

A migration like this usually takes 2–4 weeks

What the migration covers

What moves, and what we figure out first.

What moves

  • The public marketing pages, rebuilt in Webflow
  • Copy, posts and anything else written for visitors rather than for users
  • Images and downloads, rehosted and compressed
  • URLs, metadata, redirects and analytics
  • The handoff into the application, designed rather than inherited

What we figure out first

  • Whether the application is staying where it is. Almost always yes, and it should be said out loud before the quote rather than found in week two. If it is moving too, this is a different project and a different page.
  • Which paths the application keeps answering. Sign-in, the dashboard and everything behind them stay on an address that does not change. Settling that list is what stops the redirect map from sending a logged-in user to a marketing page.
  • Which system owns which hostname. Usually the marketing site takes the primary domain and the application something like app.example.com, but that follows an audit of the addresses in use rather than being assumed. It matters most where the application is still on a platform-hosted URL, because changing one of those does not leave a graceful path back from the old one.
  • Who publishes marketing content afterwards. The point of the split is that a copy change stops being a deploy. That only happens if somebody is set up in the Webflow Editor and the pages are built so publishing cannot break a layout.

Base44 can hand over the project code, and that is not the same as the application being ready to move. If it has accounts, data and people using it on a Tuesday, it stays where it is and Webflow rebuilds the public pages in front of it.

The reason to separate them is that the two halves have different lives. The application changes when the product changes, on the product’s schedule, with the product’s care. The marketing site should change on a Thursday afternoon because somebody rewrote the headline, without touching a system people are signed into.

Which makes the seam the thing worth deciding: which domain answers what, where the sign-in link points, what a logged-in visitor sees if they land on the marketing site, and which paths the application keeps. That is an hour of somebody’s attention before anything gets rebuilt, and it is the part a rebuild alone will not give you.

Why people move

What changes when you move from Base44 to Webflow.

What is being compared Base44 Webflow
What the project is holding Base44 An application and its marketing pages, as one thing Webflow Marketing pages, and a link to wherever the application lives This row is the whole page. Everything below it follows from whether those two things should ever have been one thing.
Publishing a marketing change Base44 A change to the application project, and a deployment of it Webflow An edit and a publish, isolated from the application entirely
Where the data lives Base44 In the platform, with the application built around it Webflow Not in Webflow, which is the right answer for user data Webflow losing this row is the point of the split. A marketing site should not be a candidate to hold accounts, and a page arguing otherwise would be selling you a problem.
Signed out and signed in Base44 The same project and the same deploy Webflow Two systems, meeting at a seam somebody designed
Content model Base44 Whatever the application's data happens to be Webflow Collections modeled for publishing, separate from the product's data
SEO control Base44 Present, and secondary to the application Webflow Per-page control, sitemaps, redirects
Who maintains it Base44 The platform, for both halves at once Webflow Webflow for the site, and you for the application, which was always true

What actually changes

Move the marketing site. Keep the application.

Now

One Base44 project

  • The homepage and the marketing pages
  • The application screens
  • The database behind them
  • Accounts and sign-in
  • Hosting, for all of it

After

Webflow

  • The marketing pages, rebuilt
  • Content in pages and collections
  • Hosting and the CDN for the public site

The application, exactly as it is Do not touch

  • Its screens and its logic
  • The database
  • Accounts and sign-in
  • The address your users have saved
The cutover succeeds when nobody signed in notices that anything happened.

Once you have decided

What actually migrates.

What you have What happens Why
Marketing pages and content Rebuild Made again in Webflow. The old version is a reference rather than something that can be imported. Base44 can hand over the application's code, and none of it is a Webflow site structure. So the existing implementation is source material for the rebuild rather than something to import: exportable and importable are different words.
The application and its backend Depends Not answerable in general. Which one it is turns on your plan, your export or a decision nobody has made yet. Usually it stays, and that is the honest answer rather than the convenient one. If it has accounts, data and people using it on a Tuesday, moving it is a second project with a second budget, and nothing about the marketing site requires it.
Images and files Move Comes across as it is. The content survives the move and the work is transporting it, not remaking it. Collected from the exported project or from the running application, then compressed and rehosted on the way into Webflow.
URLs and redirects Reconfigure The same thing, set up again. Nothing is recreated, but it has to be pointed at the new site by hand. Mapped from what is published today, with the paths the application still answers left out of the map rather than redirected. That exclusion list is a decision somebody makes path by path.
Integrations Depends Not answerable in general. Which one it is turns on your plan, your export or a decision nobody has made yet. Each one gets the same question: is it serving a visitor or a user? Analytics and chat come across. Anything the product itself calls stays with the product.

Before you budget it

Where this migration gets complicated.

  1. 01

    The export answers a different question than the migration asks

    The code does come out, as an archive or through a connected repository, and that is genuinely useful for reading how the current thing works. It is not a Webflow site and no amount of it becomes one, so an estimate built on the word exportable is an estimate built on the wrong word.

  2. 02

    There is a second audience who are already logged in

    Every other migration here can be verified by loading pages. This one has people sitting on an address they saved months ago, and no amount of redirect testing covers them.

The part quotes leave out

How I move it without losing the search footprint.

  1. The search footprint is inventoried before anything moves

    A crawl shows what the current Base44 site links to now. Analytics and Search Console show which addresses people and search engines are still reaching, including ones nothing on the site points at any more, so the list is the union of all three. The traffic, the top pages and the queries earning impressions get written down at the same time: without a baseline, a change in how you count and a change in what you get are the same graph.

  2. What can stay where it is, stays

    Addresses first, then the titles and descriptions attached to them, then the canonicals. Metadata is the easiest thing to lose in a rebuild, because the new site will happily generate something plausible for every page and nothing will report a problem.

  3. Everything that changes gets one rule, not a chain

    A redirect pointing at a redirect still arrives, so nothing looks broken. Each address gets an intentional destination rather than an inherited one: individual rules where the destinations differ, a pattern where a whole route family changes predictably. The new sitemap goes in at cutover carrying the canonical addresses and nothing else.

  4. Every old address is requested after launch and the response recorded

    The whole list, not a sample. Looking for anything returning 404 that should not, anything returning 200 that should have moved, and anything taking more than one hop. Then indexing and traffic by landing page for the week after cutover, which is the window included, and longer by arrangement where the site is large enough to warrant it.

None of this guarantees a ranking, and search results can move during a migration for reasons nobody controls. The goal is to change platforms without unnecessarily changing what search engines already understand about the site, and to notice quickly when something did change. Afterwards I watch indexing, what the old addresses return and traffic by landing page, so normal recrawling can be told apart from an implementation problem.

How it runs

Six stages, and what each one looks like.

Base44

Other migrations

Coming from somewhere else?

Reach out and see if we are a good fit.

Start a conversation

Currently booking two to four weeks out.