A WordPress to Webflow migration starts with the plugin audit

Open your WordPress admin and click Plugins. That screen, more than your page count or your design, holds the first question of a WordPress to Webflow migration, which is what happens to the job each active plugin does when the plugin itself cannot come along.

This post walks through that audit. It does not cover how to migrate, which is a project of its own, but what the move has to include, which is a sorting exercise. Run it before anyone touches design, because the plugins that land in the last pile are the ones that set the scope and the price of the build.

Plugins are code, not content

WordPress hands over your content without complaint. The built-in export tool produces an XML file, and the official documentation lists exactly what it holds.

your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, and users.

Plugins never appear on that list. WordPress’s own Backups handbook explains why. Plugins and themes are files that live outside the database, and the handbook draws the line itself.

the database contains your posts and a lot of data generated on your site, but it does not include the above elements.

Read those two pages together and the shape of the export is clear. It carries what the database holds, meaning your words and their organization, and none of the code that gives the site its features. Only the data leaves.

One question the documentation leaves open is plugin settings, everything you configured in each plugin’s panels. The export’s content list does not name them, and no page we found says either way. Plan as if every plugin’s configuration starts from zero.

Plugin counts on both platforms

WordPress advertises more than 70,000 free plugins in its directory. Webflow’s Apps Marketplace publishes no total at all, only a rounded install count on each app card, such as “5k+” or “1k+”.

Neither number helps with the audit. What you need to know is whether each plugin on your list has a replacement in Webflow, and a directory total says nothing about any one plugin.

Webflow’s own sales page against WordPress claims it has “built the most popular WordPress plugins straight into our platform as native features.” That covers the popular plugins, not all 70,000 of them, and not necessarily the ones your site runs.

The next three sections test that claim against the most-installed plugin in three common categories on WordPress.org. There is a fair chance your site runs at least one of them.

Yoast SEO against Webflow’s native settings

Yoast SEO shows 10+ million active installations, and its core job is the search setup a marketing site needs: a title and description for every page, canonical tags, and a sitemap for Google to crawl.

Webflow covers each of those natively. Every page carries its own title tag and meta description in its settings, and a canonical tag, the signal that tells Google which copy of a page counts, can be set site-wide or per page.

The sitemap generates itself and updates every time you publish. For the audit, that reads as mostly covered, since the fields Yoast manages all exist. Extras like its content scoring have no equivalent in Webflow’s SEO settings, so a team that leans on them should note that.

Forms are covered, with a plan condition

Contact Form 7 also shows 10+ million active installations, and it exists because WordPress core has no form builder. It renders your forms and passes submissions along, with no platform cap on how many come in.

Webflow’s forms are native, with one condition tied to one plan. On the free Starter plan a site collects 50 form submissions in its lifetime, and that limit never resets. Every paid Site plan removes that cap, so you don’t have to worry about submission limits.

File uploads through forms have their own limit. Storage is 10GB free, then $0.50 per GB per month, with a hard stop at 100GB where new submissions stop being collected.

Those figures come from Webflow’s help pages as of August 2026, and Webflow adjusts them from time to time, so check Webflow’s pricing page before you budget around a plan.

So forms are covered on any paid plan. The reason this line item is still worth writing down is that a business coming off Contact Form 7 has never met a submission cap, and the audit exists to catch questions like that before launch.

Caching is built into the hosting

LiteSpeed Cache shows 7+ million active installations and does the speed work. It keeps finished copies of your pages ready, so visitors are not kept waiting while WordPress rebuilds each one. Self-hosted WordPress leaves that whole job to plugins.

On Webflow there is nothing to install, because the hosting does the job itself. Webflow’s hosting page claims sites “reach 95% of the world in less than 50 milliseconds,” and image optimization is included on every plan. Those are Webflow’s own numbers about Webflow, so treat them as a claim, but the setup behind them is real.

Caching on Webflow is a built-in part of the hosting, not a plugin. There is no cache plugin to install, no settings panel to configure, and no update that can conflict with your theme. Webflow describes the delivery network only as “our global CDN provider” without naming it, and that is fine, because you never deal with the provider directly. It is one less piece of the platform for you to administer.

Webflow’s documentation for standard Site plans describes no cache rules for a site owner to set, because there is nothing to tune. Webflow handles caching for every site the same way, and the time a WordPress admin spends adjusting LiteSpeed settings goes away with the plugin. For the audit, mark caching as covered by the platform.

The three piles, and which one decides

Run every plugin through the same questions and each lands in one of three piles:

• Replaced by a native Webflow feature
• Replaced by a Marketplace app or an outside integration
• Replaced by nothing

The first two piles are migration work that can be planned and quoted in hours. The third pile takes more thought, and it is the reason to run the audit before design starts rather than after.

A plugin in the third pile does a job Webflow does not cover out of the box, and that job still has to happen on the new site.

Webflow accepts custom code on any paid plan, connects to outside services through integrations, and for full application features it runs an Astro app inside the marketing site on Webflow Cloud. We cover more details about running Astro in Webflow in our Astro and Webflow guide. Which of those fits depends on what the plugin actually does, and that is a scoping question for whoever builds the site.

What the audit gives you is that answer before the project is priced. A third-pile plugin found now becomes a line item in the plan, with a build behind it. Found after launch, it becomes a feature your site is missing until someone builds it, on a schedule nobody chose.

What comes after the audit

Once every plugin has a pile, the migration itself has three more parts, and each one has its own guide on this blog.

First, map every URL on your current site to its new address, so the Google rankings you have earned move with you. Redirect rules, launch order, and the mistakes that cost traffic are covered step by step in migrating from Squarespace to Webflow, and every step applies the same way to a WordPress site.

Second, take an inventory of your content. WordPress exports your posts and pages as an XML file, but the theme, the page layouts, and every plugin’s settings get rebuilt by hand. Migrating from Wix to Webflow shows how to sort a site into what exports, what gets rebuilt, and what nobody documents, and the same sort works for a WordPress inventory.

Third, put the whole move on a schedule. Planning your WordPress migration lays out the full project, from the URL inventory through DNS cutover to the month of monitoring after launch.

How to run the audit yourself

None of this needs a consultant. Copy the plugin list out of your admin, one row per plugin, and write the business job next to each one. The job might be rankings, leads, speed, bookings, or payments.

Then sort each row into its pile using the vendors’ own documentation, the way this post just did for three of them. For most Houston marketing sites the third pile comes up empty and the move becomes a scheduling decision.

When it does not come up empty, the audit has done its most useful work by naming the plugins that need a custom build, so they get scoped and priced with the rest of the project instead of discovered later.

Our website migration service starts with this exact sort. We move businesses off WordPress and onto Webflow, and every project is scoped from the sorted list, not from a page count.

If you would rather have us run the sort, get in touch with your plugin list and we will tell you which pile each one lands in.

Frequently asked questions

Does a WordPress export include my plugins?

No. The export carries posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, taxonomies, and users. WordPress’s Backups handbook states the database does not include plugins or themes, so plugin functionality gets rebuilt, not moved.

Do plugin settings transfer when migrating from WordPress to Webflow?

The documentation does not cover it. WordPress lists what its export file contains, and plugin settings are not on that list, but no page addresses them either way. Plan the migration as if every plugin’s configuration gets rebuilt by hand.

Does Webflow have an equivalent for every WordPress plugin?

No. Webflow’s own comparison page says it built “the most popular WordPress plugins” into its platform as native features, a claim about the popular ones, not the full 70,000-plus WordPress advertises. The audit answers the question for your list, one plugin at a time.

What happens to a WordPress plugin that has no Webflow equivalent?

The job the plugin does still gets built into the new site. Webflow accepts custom code on any paid plan, connects to outside services through integrations, and can run an Astro app beside the marketing site for full application features. The audit finds those plugins before the project is priced, so each one becomes a scoped line item instead of a surprise after launch.