My client uses their employee’s email for me to transfer the finished website and has already paid the CMS annual plan. However, they now want to use the company email instead.
I researched and found out that once you pay the site plan using an account, if you were to transfer to another account, you would have to downgrade the site plan, then transfer, and then buy the plan again. So if the company creates a new Webflow account and has the employee account transfer the site, they would have to pay for a new site plan. The employee account would still have the site plan paid available for a different site but the company is unlikely to make a second site. Basically, they would lose money if they went the transfer route
So instead, I suggest updating the email in the employee’s Webflow account to the company’s email. However, when I tested this using my own emails, I was faced with the issue “Invalid email and password combination” even though I successfully authenticated the email with Google Sign-in. (image 1) I have no idea what the problem seemed to be when I followed the steps successfully and still failed.
Unrelated, but this was also a problem when I tried to remove the secondary email. (image 2) I added the second email to see if that would help, like changing the secondary email to the primary but that was not an option.
Any help on how I can approach this problem would be greatly appreciated. I don’t want my client to lose money but I don’t know how I can change the site ownership without transferring and updating new email is not happening for some unknown reason.
It’s a billing question, so chat to Webflow support for the right approach.
If you’re saying that this account is already owned by the company and that they only want to change the login email, then I’d look at either;
Just changing the login email to the corporate one, or
Adding the corporate email as a second paid user, then making them workspace owner, then removing that first employee email and account, then downgrading to 1 seat
The site transfer idea is the most painful approach, because you cannot change the payment form on the site until the end of the first year. But, support might be able to help with a refund somehow after the new plan is established, or help with a card change.
Thank you for your help. However, as I showed in my previous post, I tried changing the login email to another one with my own emails as a test drive and it didn’t work. I followed all the steps and successfully authenticated Google Sign-in but it still showed the message “Invalid email and password combination." So with this test, I can’t be sure that it will work for my client or that the same issue will arise. I have contacted Webflow for support but they are not very fast with replies so I don’t know how to proceed.
It’s difficult to picture the process you took, but changing the email isn’t difficult. I’d avoid using Google logins during the transfer process, you don’t need them.
Suppose for example you are changing from diep@gmail.com to hoang@gmail.com, and both are Google logins. In Webflow you can;
Do “forgot password” with diep@gmail.com. Generate a password reset and set a regular password for that email.
Do a standard email+password login for diep@gmail.com avoiding the Google login
Change the login email to hoang@gmail.com
Login there to test everything, you now have an email+password login still
Then log out and log in using the convenient Google login with hoang@gmail.com.
Webflow doesn’t care which authentication you use, the email is the account key.
I’d use that approach because it sidesteps a lot of cookies and state-tracking weirdness around the Google login, which just complicates a simple task here.
Manually setting up the password, bypassing the Google Sign-in help! For something that’s supposed to fasten the sign-in process, it complicated and even obstructed the task. So weird.
Thank you so much for your help!
Indeed. Most sites work that way. They have their normal email+password sign-in and database and then Google SSO is bolted on top as an alternative option for that same email.
But Google’s mechanics have to be complex for security, so the whole process is heavy on cookies, tracking, etc that get messy when you’re trying to perform email changes like this.
Incidentally the way I discovered this- I changed my Google business emails from mwells@ to mike@ within Google, and basically the whole Internet broke. Even though it was the same Google account, 90% of the services I used didn’t recognize me, and most would create a new account when I tried to sign in which was even worse ( lots of cleanup… )
