Yes it's true. Webflow has absolutely no way to import a list of redirects. You have to do them one by one, which can be ridiculously time consuming if you have hundreds of redirects.

But there are a couple smart ways to automate this. I will be showing you the easiest one. No coding knowledge needed and just a bit of Google Sheets or Excel.

Migrating to Webflow & Different URL Structure

If you've found this article, you're probably migrating to Webflow from another platform like Wordpress. And if so, your old website has a totally different folder structure and URL pattern.

Your old site might have URLs like example.com/blog/posts/post-name.

One option is to duplicate this exact structure on Webflow. This means you won't need as many redirects. But what if you want to improve on this structure? What if you want to organize your site in a way that is a bit cleaner?

You might want your new URL structure to be something like example.com/category/post-name

In this case you will need to get each of your old URLs and map them to the new URL.

Getting a list of old URLs

Usually I use a tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This is a great tool for running all kinds of technical SEO checks too. This gives me a list of URLs off the old website.

Alternatively you can use one of the many xml sitemap generators available online. Just google 'sitemap generator'. This will let you download a list of your URLs.

Dump all these URLs into one column in Excel or Google Sheets. And remove the start with "example.com". You just want the path, meaning the first slash and everything after it

Mapping to new URLs

Copy all your old URLs into a second column in Google Sheets.

Now the easiest way to change the structure of the new URL, will be to use the find and replace function inside Excel or Google Sheets.

Simply highlight the new column, and hit find and replace. This brings up a dialog box that asks what text you want to replace, and what you want to replace it with.

Here you can enter your old URL structure (/blog/posts/post-name) as the text to replace, and your new URL (/category/post-name) as the text to insert.

Make sure you only did this for that second column! The first column should contains all the old URLs - untouched!

At this stage I recommend watching my video on Youtube where I show you how to do the rest.

If you prefer reading, I've also written out the instructions below.

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Bulk Uploading Redirects Into Webflow

Ok so now you have your two columns - your old URLs and new URLs.

To upload them in Webflow in bulk, we're going to use a script or a little piece of code that someone kindly posted on the Webflow forums. The persons name is Janne Kanerva, and all credit for the script goes to them. They created it, and I'm just showing you how to use it.

You can grab the script off the Webflow forums or click here.

You basically just need to get your URL list into that piece of code, and then run it, inside the Chrome Console, on the Webflow admin page where you enter redirects.

Running Javascript in the Console

If you're unfamiliar with Chrome DevTools, prepare to have your mind blown.

Open DevTools by right clicking anywhere on a web page, and clicking "Inspect".

You will now be looking at the 'Elements' tab, which shows you the HTML structure of the page.

Switch to the Console tab at the top, right next to 'Elements'.

You can use the Console to run any code on this webpage. It only runs in your browser of course - but that's enough for us!

Now open Webflow and navigate to Settings and then the Hosting tab. This is where you would enter your redirects manually.

Open the console as described above, and paste in the script I included above if you want to test it out. This will add two new redirects to the page (just delete them afterwards):

old1 → new1

old2 → new2

How does this work?

The script is pretty simple, it doesn't talk to the back-end of Webflow or anything, its just an automation for what you would do manually. It enters the first value into the first field, the second value into the second field, and then hits the 'add redirect' button.

Getting Your URLs into the Script

Here's a part of that script which you need to replace with your URLs:

var redirects = [ {source: '/old1', target: '/new1'}, {source: '/old2', target: '/new2'}, ];

So for each redirect, we have a block inside curly braces {}, with the old (source) URL and new (target) URL, formatted with quote marks and commas in between.

Now let's go back to our spreadsheet with the two lists of URLs.

We're going to make a third column, and use an excel formula to replace '/old1' with the contents of the first column, and replace /'new1' with the contents of the second column.

Here is the excel formula that you can copy and paste into your cell for the first row.

="{source: '" & A2 & "', target: '" & B2 & "'},"

You should see that your URLs have been injected into this format, so it now reads something like  {source: '/blogs/posts/post-name', target: '/category/post-name'}.

You can copy and paste this across the rest of your third column. Each row should automatically get the data from the first and second column for that particular row.

Copy & paste the list back into the script.

You can now copy your entire third column and paste it back into the script.

It should go in between the two square brackets after var redirects = .

var redirects = [

Your redirects go here

]

Run it in the console

There's nothing else to it. Run the script inside the Chrome console as I described above. You should see your redirects start to appear on the page. It might take some time as Webflow saves each redirect and displays it to the page. If you have hundreds or thousands of redirects just wait a few minutes to be sure that its finished.

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Congratulations! You have saved yourself many frustrating hours of copy & paste.

I hope everything made sense. If you have any questions let me know in the comments section below or on Youtube.

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