Transferring a live site to a team account

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1

Hey everyone,

Is anyone familiar with team plans? My web designer/developer is no longer working on websites. I’m the business owner and am familiar with webflow as i’ve done some work within the designer on simple projects. I’ve found a new developer that i’d like to bring on so i created a team account (I’m not going to give a stranger access to my log in and livelihood ).

I’m a little confused with how this is going to work. My site is currently live and published, what is the best way to have work performed? Do i need to duplicate the site, put the copy in the team account and once the work is completed copy the pages and publish them into the site that is in my personal account?

I’ve also seeing tutorials about canceling the hosting and transferring then resigning up. This to me is confusing as it’s a live site so won’t canceling the hosting remove the site? Also would it it effect any links, and SEO?

Any help would be appreciated, I’m a little confused with how this works.
Thanks!

2

Hey @DevinWeik Welcome to the forum!

The best process we recommend for copying a site to a team account is as follows:

  1. Duplicate the site
  2. Transfer the duplicate site to the team
  3. Purchase hosting on the site in the team
  4. Double check all of the site settings to ensure they match the original project. (Some things like collaborators don’t get copied over)
  5. Remove the custom domain from the original site
  6. Add the custom domain to the new project
  7. Publish the new site

If you remove and add the domain quick enough the downtime should be minimal to none.

This will have no impact on SEO or links.

Hope that helps! :grin:

3

Hey @Drew_Schafer, thank you, it definitely helped!

This next question is about billing. I just renewed my site plan on 3/29/21 for the next year. Will i get the majority refunded due to only being two weeks into the renewal or will it just get thrown away and i need to sign up and repay all over again?

4

Hey @DevinWeik.

Reach out to Webflow Support here: Webflow Customer Support | Webflow University

Someone from the team will be able to give you a hand. :slight_smile:

5

Hey @Drew_Schafer,

Thanks for all the help! Everything went smooth and i’ve reached out to support :+1:t2:

Thanks again

1 Like
6

I am facing this same transfer personal site to a team issue. I am using CMS collections heavily and records are kept in sync with a 3rd party system using the Webflow CMS collection items IDs (because that is the only way they can be queried using the Webflow API).

If I duplicate my site to do this “transfer”, if you can even call it that, will the IDs of my data remain the same?

7

Hey @benneic

If you duplicate the site it will create a new database, so all of the ids in the CMS will be different.

If you transfer the original, then everything will remain the same.

Hope that helps.

8

If you try to transfer a live site, you are told to downgrade the hosting plan to starter. This doesn’t make sense - is it essentially saying you can never transfer the original site unless you take the live site offline? Cheers

9

Hey @Jamie_Met_Ret

That is correct. You cannot transfer a site with an active hosting subscription.

So the site will need to be taken offline to transfer.

However if done quick enough, the downtime can be minimal since your DNS records are already set up.