Export CMS site as static site

Hello,

I’ve seen several posts related to this topic, but no straightforward reply with detailed operational steps.

How to export a CMS site as a static site?

Thanks!

Hi

I think you haven’t seen that because it’s quite technical and complicated. Anything connected to Collections will not be exported in regular export of the site. The Collection items can be exported as CSV file. And there is not a simple way as I know of to make that CSV into static HTML and CSS. There a some CSV to HTML converters out there but you need to add CSS to that.

My tips to you (depending of how many collection items you have and the complexity of CMS items) is to make the site static inside of Webflow and export it. My other tips is to use a tool from Udesly that can convert your Collection based Webflow site to a Wordpress Theme, not static though obviously.

Maybe someone with good developing skills will comment too help you out.

@WebflowUser

I would refer you back to this post, which you asked a similar question on. It does answer the question.

As @jorn mentions, how you go about it is complicated and depends on your skills and resources. If you wanted to export the data to another CMS, then that would depend on the CMS. If you wanted to create pages from CSV data, that would depend on either your database skills or knowledge of things like python.

I could give you a more specific recommendation if you could articulate why you would want to do this versus just using the webflow CMS with hosting.

Hi @webdev, thank you for your reply.

To be more precise, I just want to export the CMS website contents as HTML/CSS/JS so that I can host it on a low-cost basic hosting plan, as I don’t need to edit the site anymore.

I already looked at the similar question that you mention (you can see my comment on the thread), but the operational steps mentioned seem to be for mac users.

I know that some tools exist that can be used to download an offline “mirrored” version of a website (as HTTrack), but I don’t know which one is the best. Of course I’m aware that there will be some limitations, maybe for the controls that filter collection lists for example, but I can change the site in function of the limitations.

If anyone has tried a successful method to convert a CMS site to static, please share your experience!

Thanks in advance!

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Which one is best is a subjective question. I have used Wget, curl, and sitesucker before. Why don’t you try one to see if it works for you? They are all well documented.

Thanks @webdev! Well I prefer to ask if anyone has found some reliable method before trying all the possible solutions (that’s the purpose of the forum), but I understand from your replies that there is no straightforward solution for this question.
All the best and thanks for taking time to reply!

Hello @webdev, I installed Wget on Windows, but I’m having a problem. I followed the guide from @tkwebreform , but it is only extracting index.html and robots.txt.

Here it is what I did:

  1. I went to projects settings and disabled all the options (minify, cdn, etc).
  2. Opened cmd with admin rights and wrote the following lines:

wget siteurl --mirror -–page-requisites --convert-links --span-hosts --domains www.DOMAINXXX.org, daks2k3a4ib2z.cloudfront.net, uploads-ssl.webflow.com, uploads.webflow.com, www.DOMAINXXX.org

And after that I only got index and robots. My goal is to extract all the CMS pages, I’m probably missing something, any idea on what is it? Thanks, much appreciated :slight_smile:

PS: Wget works properly I tested with wget --help, it seems to be all good.

Edit: Never mind mates, I got it to work, I just had to link the pages to their current dynamic link, without it was not working :slight_smile:

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Hello again @webdev. One question though, I’m using the following line to scrape the posts (it worked fine, just wondering if I’m missing an important file or not):

wget siteurl --recursive --html-extension --convert-links

Should I add any extra command line or am I good with this? I only need the posts, nothing else, I do the rest inside of Webflow.

Hi,

I had had similar issues in the past, since 2018, and now facing again.

The problem is that Webflow happily exports the site internally in their Publish functionality, but does not give its customers the same functionality available for its customers for more advanced hosting setups. There are many legit reasons for full export or non-domain hosting, like using Webflow managed content as a part of larger enterprise site consisting of multiple backends.

Currently, the best approach I know is to leave the content on Webflow and then dynamically proxy rewrite it from there. Here is one article on how to accomplish it with Cloudflare:

I would love to see Webflow to gain a full export functionality that would write everything to customer hosted S3 bucket, or similar, as they are likely doing this internally already.

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Hi guys I found a way to export Webflow CMS site and host it on Netlify in a few minutes (with editable CMS data): Webflow to Jamstack | Udesly.com . I tried it, it works well. And you can host it for free with the free plan of Netlify.

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@Mikko_Ohtamaa
Thanks for sharing such an informative piece of information.
The solution you mentioned is to use Cloudflars.
I found it very helpful, but I haven’t tried it yet if it works or not.

One problem we had with Cloudflare was that Webflow starts 404’ing pages once it tries to renew the SSL certificate.

We tried Udesly after that, but it doesn’t keep your static site updated automatically when you change the Webflow site. You have to export after every change.

CryoLayer can convert to a static site and keep it in sync every change: https://cryolayer.com/

Hope that helps anyone who has this problem!

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Wow this is awesome, I will give it a try thanks!

Thanks! Looks like FlowGator on steroids — sweet!