Process Question: Redesigning Existing Pages

Design help CMS
1

We’ve been building on Webflow for a while now. Some of the same process issues keep coming back to bite us and I’m curious how others are handling this. It’s a common situation:

Redesigning an existing page on a published site

Do you:

  1. Just go to town on the existing page and hope nobody publishes the site while it’s in-progress?
  2. Create a new page that can be reviewed/approved with no worries if someone publishes the site. When the page is done and approved, archive the old one and move the new one to the old URL?
  3. There has to be a third option, right?

We’ve been opting for door #2 but when we move the old page to an archive folder, any site links pointing to it get updated to the new location. There are no link checker tools in Webflow so now we have to manually track down every link to update.

We could just not use Page links and set all links up as External URLs. AFAIK this will work fine with the exception of breaking links in preview mode. And, if we want to change a page slug, redirects will catch anything we miss when manually updating links.

Another possible solution is a good link checker tool. I’m open to recommendations here.

But if someone out there has a magic bullet, I’d love to know how you’re solving this issue.

2

You may wish to consider duplicating the project, and when done revising it, swap the hosting from the old to the new.

3

Jeff, we do that with larger redesigns but that’s not a great solution for day-to-day work. It would avoid someone else publishing the site on accident but we’d constantly run into erasing collection content published by editors on the original site. These are live sites that are just constantly growing and evolving. We definitely need a workflow that allows editors to publish content (ex: blog posts) and allows designers to redesign pages without the two groups stepping on each others’ work.

4

I use other CMS’s where this is a requirement since Webflow has this limitation. There should be some Webflow announcements next week regarding this area at the NoCode conf. Maybe they have a solution coming?

5

I’d love it if Webflow announced a solution as there are several potential fixes here from better link tools when moving pages around to link checker tools to a draft mode for changes on already published pages. That said, I’m not expecting a solution from Webflow and I’m not going to migrate clients over this one issue.

I’m just looking for knowledge sharing from other folk’s who are solving for the same issue.