Webflow to WordPress Conversion Tool

Publishing help General
1

While Webflow offers a great CMS some clients demand a WordPress website every now and then. You can still use Webflow to create your websites and just convert it to WordPress using: http://htmltowordpress.io.

Just upload your webflow project into the tool and after a few seconds you’ll get a fully functional WordPress theme activated and installed on a fresh WordPress installation for an easy preview. If you like what you see, you can download the theme. Simple, quick and effortless :slight_smile:

Because almost every respectable agency ships client sites with ACF (http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/) we decided to do this by default. ACF makes all text and images easily editable for non-technical users.

No custom code is required, but the site can be extended via CSS classes to add WordPress functionalities such as editable menus and blog posts. Learn more about this in our docs: Introduction · HTML to WordPress

Enjoy!

3 Likes
2

That looks pretty straightforward (:

Although I have a very good reason and occasion to use it right now—and the one time $27 fee is pretty attractive— I won’t. Because the reason I use Webflow for Webflow hosted sites, for self hosted sites and for self hosted CMS based on Webflow design—using custom attributes—is that I can continue designing in Webflow without losing any compatibility.

A CMS website is more than ever an ongoing project, something you create and continue working with. WF users and users’ clients will soon get the real benefit of it: easy to work with and easy to maintain, easy to work on a project again after a pause of a year or more. Using a converter, or using Pinegrow as I tried one, is letting you in a strange state: you have a working WP theme but it’s not as academic and full featured as if you had bought a $59 modern theme, and it lost every connection it had with Webflow. So to edit, debug etc, you need to dive into code, or start the conversion process again. In short: you’re not likely to fullfill your clients’ next wishes. And driving your client on a trip that you don’t control is among the most unprofessional things to do.

I wrote something very detailed about processing a WF site with Pinegrow to make a WP theme and my conclusion is this is something you’re going to regret at some point.

So even with a WP client, my workflow is still: prototyping with Webflow, then reproduce with a good builder theme upon client validation. I’m losing most of the interactions on the way, but get a chance to showcase Webflow and drag them into a super cool and easy CMS (:

2 Likes
4

Also Henry PLEASE don’t come to a forum, create an account and immediately go advertise your product in posts related to your activity. At best, it’s against the rules, but really it’s counter-productive.

5

You’re correct in saying that it would make further work quite hard. Leaves two options for further development work 1) develop new stuff using WF and convert again 2) develop in WordPress (if you posses the required skills).

6

I just noticed a lot of WordPress conversion related questions on the forums so I thought it would be quite relevant to post here :slight_smile: Admins can delete this if they feel this does not add value to the forums.

7

Thanks for taking it that way (: And I don’t hate you for that, I know you’re genuinely excited by your app and would like the world to know. I’ve done that by the past and got the backslash (:

8

Thanks for the precisions on that.

9

Hi @vincent - Although I completely agree with the case you make for the benefits of using the Webflow CMS, I’d love to hear more of your experience with converting Webflow to Wordpress as many of us are finding the Wordpress CMS as a requirement for some of our projects.

You referenced writing something very detailed about going from WF to WP. Care to share the link to that?

Thanks! JFly

10

Just FYI, this is what I’m getting in safari, iPhone 6.

750×1334 187 KB

1 Like
11

Yeah sorry - haven’t made our docs responsive yet. Will do that soon

12

@JFly, I wrote the following after you asked but I was too much in anger to post it. You can read it, then read what comes after, the “Edit” part. :slight_smile:

Hi, sorry, it’s outdated and I didn’t saved it I guess. In the end I don’t recommend Pinegrow at all. It’s like a fake visual designer, there’s barely a UI, it’s just dropdown lists over and over and over. And over. (Although it can be very usefull to make edits on an already existing site).

My experience in converting WF to WP is limited to tests. It’s not due to the process itself, it’s because of WP. I understand you’re obliged to work with WP sometimes and as we speak I am working on WP for a site I’ve been asked to take over and give a new look to. And I am in rage. in rage of clicking a thousands times, of switching interfaces from backend to theme admin to visual composer, tired of all of that. Also, I’m nowhere, I can’t understand this site, why there’s so many extensions etc.

WP was a blog platform and it evolved to do more. But it never changed, it’s still a blog platform. With plugins to compose pages and be stuck with something you have to be an explorer to find where your content is. And on top of that, you still have to add code, and shortcodes. And tons of plugins, and update all of that.

To me WP is a nightmare that should never be a solution to a design process. Unless your client wants a blog. In my experience, telling a client they will be able to manage their modern looking responsive website with WP is not a lie but close. And it’s more and more the case. Visual composers didn’t bring any better comprehension of how to do things in WP, it’s just another level of complexity.

Edit: I called the client one hour after writing the above. I couldn’t do anything with their WP. I said this is rare but I failed the mission, I would not invoice and I was so sorry to let them down. They told me they don’t like Wordpress and they don’t know why certain things don’t work either. So… I asked them if they could consider around a $200/year hosting for a solution I though was good—you see where I go right?—they said yes. From there, it took me 6 hours to redo their site With Webflow CMS, including content import (thanks @cyberdave and Keyboard Maestro!). Now they are very, very happy with their site and tomorrow we will link the domain and publish it. It’s like a Webflow christmas story :wink: oh and they decided to pay me the extra time passed, because they thought I’ve been honest and my work deserves to be paid.

9 Likes
13

Would love a pro-tip post on how you guys managed this! I’d imagine a lot of users are looking for fast and simple ways of importing content.

6 Likes
14

Thanks, @vincent for the rant. Dontcha just love a story with a happy ending?!? Honesty IS the best policy and I’m always glad when people actually gte rewarded for it in real life.

Your emotion was felt and invaluable for convincing some of us who are thinking WPress is a better solution to think before we leap. Unfortunately, some of us still have a cliff in front of us from which we must leap… Wish I could just do what you did with your client. Unfortunately, with Webflow CMS still in its infancy, the limitations are still keeping some of us at bay.

Anyone on the Webflow team care to hint at what the next update might bring? Capacity for more than two Editors perhaps? Scheduling publication of posts? Site Comments?

Anyone else have priority changes before they can consider the WF CMS?

1 Like
15

I would say the api to grab the content data that Webflow stores for us. Which is on it’s way!

Another plus is the ability to communicate with the database we have with webflow hosting so we could extend the cms limits.

Cheers,

Diana

2 Likes
16

Yes! Please share! :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
17

You’re talking about the “dirty import” with Keyboard Maestro? That’s a fun thing to do :smiley: @cyberdave may be better at it than me, I have troubles to loop some complex aspects of my processes, but I reduced series of 10 click to one, so it’s not that bad at all! It’s quite demanding in data preparation though… I hope we’ll get a proper csv import soon :smile:

As for the whole process of making the site, I thought about timelapsing it, I’ll do it next time. people who are doing Drupal, Wordpress and PrestaShop work saw me building the first templates with dynamic lists and they’ve been totally wow-ed. Seeing the content take shape before their eyes, how I switched for a node to another during the process to manage to see different records in action… that was somehting they’ve never see yet. Until then they kinda considers Webflow was like Squarespace. Not the case anymore :slight_smile:

2 Likes
18

And I still didn’t pass the cliff entirely. One development at a time, it will take time. Some of the CMS solution we have created for clients the last past 10 years, we have to support them, becuse we sold them as being sustainable. I do’nt sell CMSs as being that much sustainable anymore. With experience I know that web development needs maintennce, is subjects to trends. However we have some sites now that are at the middle of several technology. www.kds.com is designed with Webflow and totally compatible with the webflow project even if self hosted and dynamic. We’re using custom attributes to populate the templates and the WF site is calling a JS API made with Angular… but all the content, the database, the backend to organize and add content, is still a… Drupal, the one we built 7 years ago. The site has 5 languages all done in Webflow. The live site has a different structure, and Drupal acts like Apache, catching the errors and serving the proper page for the desired language… This system works for 18 months now.

19

@HenrikHarju Thanks for posting this, it looks like a great tool and I look forward to trying it out soon. I have been wanting a good solution to easily convert Webflow to WordPress so I’m glad you posted.

@vincent I understand your point about ongoing development but there is definitely a good use case for this tool. Sometimes I want to build an MVP where the design is important (so I would rather use Webflow than WYSIWYG plugins for WP), but I also need the power of WordPress as a CMS. So the solution here would be to build with Webflow, convert to a theme, test the site for 6 to 12 months, and then either redesign with Webflow and convert again using this tool, or do custom WP development to build a fully fledged solution.

20

+@vincent this is key! the ability to import a .CSV will be a big milestone on the mission to convert wordpressers…

1 Like
21

i only use pinegrow to convert to wordpress with all the recent updates to pinegrow i find it a really useful tool
and very easy to use i would recommend it once you get the hang of it it is very quick to convert any website to wordpress