Website Publishing - swapping old for new

Community resources General
1

Hi,

I currently have a Webflow site live, and under the same account, I’ve purchased a website template that I’m redesigning to replace the existing site.

On the new site, some of the slugs have changed, but I’m unable to set any 302 redirects. It appears that enabling this feature requires an upgrade, even though my existing live site already supports it.

What is the best approach for swapping out the current live site with the new one, given this page redirect issues?

Additionally, I don’t use ecommerce, however, the new template included ecommerce section (which I don’t intend to use). Will this cause any issues when I publish the new site under my current subscription “Workspace plan”?

Thank you in advance.

D

2

In the pre-launch phase ( site B is ready, you’re preparing to launch ),

Get your old redirects;

  • Go to Site A ( the live one ), and export any existing Redirects as a CSV
  • Load that CSV into e.g. google sheets
  • This gives you existing redirects, which may still be relevant, plus the CSV column structure

Add your new redirects;

  • Analyze your sites and add any new items that you need for the redirect, A path to new B path
    • /contact-us → /contact

Polish;

  • Clean up your CSV
  • Remove any junk records that aren’t relevant anymore
  • Look out for any duplicates and resolve them ( which have the same “from” path )

Export as CSV.

Launch;

  • Backup your auto-generated sitemap.xml and redirects.csv from the current live site, just in case. These may be useful for reference later.
  • Do your seamless site plan transfer.
  • Import the CSV of redirects into your new site

Test, test, test

Remember, browsers cache redirects. If you adjust them, your browser will still hold on to the old one. In Chrome you can resolve this by opening devtools [F12], go to the network tab, and enable the “disable cache” checkbox. From then on any time devtools is open, it will avoid giving you cached redirects as you test.

3

None, just don’t create any Products or Categories, and you won’t be forced into an ECom plan to deploy it.

4

Thank you for taking the time to provide me with this info, really appreciate it.

D

5

Just following up on this: the live site (Site-A) is currently on the “CMS” plan, while the new site (Site-B) is on the “Starter” plan. How would I go about swapping the plans at go-live?