By Mehdi HassanWhy move from Weglot to Webflow Localization?
Teams replace Weglot with Webflow Localization to keep translations inside the Webflow project, serve every language from one domain in subfolders, and drop a second subscription. Weglot is a fast way to start translating, but once languages prove their value, native locales are usually simpler to run.
The trade is a one-time migration for lower ongoing friction. Editors stop switching between the Designer and the Weglot dashboard, design issues in long German strings show up as you translate, and per-locale SEO fields sit next to the content. Before you start, check that native localization actually fits your site; our comparison of Webflow Localization, Framer Localization and Weglot covers when Weglot is still the better tool. For the wider set of decisions, see the multilingual website migration playbook.
What changes when you go from Weglot to Webflow Localization?
Three things change: where translations live, what the URLs look like and who generates hreflang. The URL change is the one that trips teams up, because it touches every translated page at once.
Area | With Weglot | With Webflow Localization |
|---|---|---|
Translations stored in | Weglot's database | Your Webflow project, per locale |
Typical URL on Webflow | de.example.com/pricing | example.com/de/pricing or a translated slug |
Editing | Weglot dashboard or visual editor | Webflow Designer and CMS, locale switcher |
hreflang | Injected by Weglot | Generated by Webflow |
Bills | Webflow plan plus Weglot | Webflow plan plus localization add-on |
If your Weglot setup already uses subdirectories rather than subdomains, the URL work is much lighter: you may be able to keep identical paths. Check what your live translated URLs look like before you estimate anything.
How do you migrate from Weglot to Webflow Localization step by step?
Work in this order: export, rebuild, map, redirect, verify, then cancel. Skipping ahead, especially cancelling Weglot or changing DNS early, is how teams lose translations or rankings.
Crawl and count every translated URL
Crawl each language subdomain and export Search Console data per property. Note pages, CMS items, translated slugs and the top-traffic URLs in each language.
Export translations from Weglot
Use Weglot's export to download translations per language, including URL slug translations if you used them. Open each file and check that SEO titles, meta descriptions and alt text are included.
Add locales in Webflow
Create each language as a locale in Webflow Localization, set the subfolder and decide whether slugs are translated. Match Weglot's slugs where you can to reduce redirect complexity.
Import and review translations
Bring the text into static pages and CMS items per locale. Then review every template in every language, because Weglot translated rendered text while Webflow translates fields, so some strings will be missing or split differently.
Build the subdomain to subfolder redirect map
List every old URL like de.example.com/preise next to its new URL like example.com/de/preise. One row per page, per language. No row should point at a homepage unless the page itself was the homepage.
Set up edge redirects for the old subdomains
Point each language subdomain's DNS at a proxy or edge layer, such as Cloudflare, and apply the map as 301 redirects. Test a sample of URLs in each language before launch day.
Launch, verify and then cancel Weglot
Publish locales, confirm hreflang and translated metadata in the page source, submit the new sitemap and watch old subdomain properties in Search Console. Cancel Weglot only once redirects are confirmed working.
How do you redirect Weglot subdomains to Webflow subfolders?
Redirect each old subdomain URL with a 301 to its exact equivalent in the new subfolder, using a rule layer that sits in front of the subdomain. Because Webflow's own redirect settings work on paths within the connected domain, the subdomain itself needs another home for its redirects.
The cleanest options are a DNS provider with redirect rules, such as Cloudflare's bulk or dynamic redirects, or a tiny redirect service you control. A simple pattern rule that sends any path on de.example.com to the same path under example.com/de/ works only when slugs are unchanged. If you translated slugs differently in Webflow, you need the full page-level map for those URLs, with the pattern rule as a fallback.
For example, suppose half your German slugs changed
Hypothetical example: your German site has 40 pages on de.example.com. In Webflow you kept 22 slugs identical and translated 18 that Weglot had left in English.
The redirect setup then has two layers. First, 18 explicit rules such as de.example.com/pricing to example.com/de/preise. Second, one pattern rule that sends every other path on de.example.com to the same path under example.com/de/. Explicit rules must run before the pattern rule, or the 18 changed pages land on 404s.
Test all 18 explicit rules and a sample of the pattern rule, then check that each destination returns a 200 and not a second redirect.
Keep the subdomain's DNS record and redirect rules in place for at least a year. Backlinks, bookmarks and old campaign links keep arriving long after search engines have updated their index.
What should you check after launching Webflow locales?
Check that every old translated URL returns one 301 to the right page, that every new page carries a reciprocal hreflang set, and that translated metadata survived the move. Then watch the old and new properties in Search Console as indexing shifts over the following weeks.
- Run the redirect map through a crawler and confirm a single 301 hop to a 200 page for every row.
- View source on one page per template per locale and check hreflang, canonical, title and description.
- Confirm the language switcher links to the equivalent page, not the locale homepage.
- Check forms, cookie banners and thank-you pages in each language.
- Submit the sitemap and use URL inspection on the top five pages per language.
- Compare impressions by country in Search Console weekly for the first two months.
If traffic drops in one language, look for missing redirects or hreflang pointing at redirected URLs before anything else. Our guide to multilingual migration SEO covers diagnosis in more depth, and the Core Web Vitals fixes by platform help if translated pages load slower than English ones.
Should you use this move to switch platforms entirely?
Sometimes. If you're unhappy with Webflow as well as Weglot, you can combine the two changes, since the URL work is happening anyway. Framer handles locales natively too, and a Next.js site removes per-locale fees completely. The cost of combining is a larger project and harder diagnosis if something goes wrong.
If Webflow itself is fine, stay on it. Moving only the localization layer is a smaller, safer project. For alternatives, see how to migrate from Webflow to Framer or our walkthrough of moving off Webflow with Claude Code. Remember that translation quality matters as much as the platform, which is why localization beats plain translation for markets that buy.
