Why we require a strategy phase for all migrations

In the past you've had two approaches to developing your marketing website, and both had serious drawbacks:

1. Custom code your site to have design flexibility and technical control, but at the price of moving slower and being unduly dependent on developers to make updates. Having executed Webflow migrations from Contentful, Prismic, WordPress, Umbraco, etc, we've personally seen companies defect from this model.
2. ‍Pick a drag and drop tool for greater ease on marketers, but give up big time on brand and technical customization powers. Honestly, most serious brands have moved beyond a drag and drop tools like Squarespace and WordPress WISYWIG editors.
   

So as we enter 2026, companies are asking: "can we have the best of both worlds?"

The answer is yes! You can have the power of customization and marketer control.

At Candid Leap, our mission is to help you realize this vision. We accomplish this through using a combination of our own web migration strategy process plus Webflow's Enterprise website experience platform.

Please read this article to understand:

1. Why weeks strategic work at the start of our engagement is necessary for long term ROI on Webflow
2. What goes into these weeks of strategic work
3. Why our process at Candid Leap leads to greater speed to market and revenue growth than most Webflow development offerings

When is migrating away from WordPress or headless worth it?

Once your company has found some type of product market fit and your revenue justifies growing your marketing team to at least 5 people, the pain of a janky website becomes impossible to ignore.

A bad WordPress build or a headless headache frustrates your team, kills a culture and it blocks the creativity and ownership which creates revenue and earns you market share growth.

If this describes your company today, I am sorry you are going through this!

This is the stage where companies should start considering if the juice is worth the squeeze to replatform. 

Any experienced marketer knows that a replatform requires real time and energy - and if things are not in a great place - we suggest you don't hide from this truth but lean into it.

If you are going to free yourself from your current website challenges, you need a process that will make the migration as smooth as possible and a build that your team can actually adopt to hit your goals. A pretty looking website has nothing to do with how much power it gives your team to scale it.

Am I just replacing my old annoying developer workflow for a new annoying Webflow developer workflow?

A thoughtful person would ask this question and not just assume that because Webflow gives great marketing powers, that development expertise is not required.

It's true that to scale a custom site, some level of custom development and expertise is needed.  

You need to know with confidence:

• Do I need a developer to build new pages?
• Can I reuse sections across the site, but change the color and layouts without technical knowledge? 
• Will all pages on my site look the same?
• Will I be able to turn off and on advanced and custom features to my site without putting in a developer ticket?

When on Webflow, no matter what, your marketing team will be able to update content across the site without requiring a developer in the loop like you used to. But updating a headline or swapping a picture is not the same as website democratiation.

When it is time to build new pages to pursue new strategies, this is where your dependence on a Webflow developer will be small or large. This is entirely dependent on:

• who you hire to initially build your site,
• how they plan it,
• how they build it,
• and how they train you.

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This is where your agency's strategy phase, process and development framework will make ALL the difference. Here it from Ryan Smith, Demand Gen leader at the AI customer experience unicorn Decagon.ai.

What makes Candid Leap's strategy and process unique

The systems we have at Candid Leap enable your team to own your marketing site in an entirely new and exciting way.

Our philosophy at Candid Leap is rooted in feeling pride in making your team's lives easier and happier. This positive happens:

• During the multi-month migrations. We should all enjoy the process together while working towards ambitious goals.
• After launch day. Your team should be trained and equipped with a robust component library where all decisions are thoughtfully made.

When you are evaluating Candid Leap compared to other agencies, we suggest you ask one question:

"Can you show me exact examples of what my life should look like building new, on brand pages, post launch. What promises can you make now of what I can expect you to deliver? Can you show me component library systems you are proud of and that are easy to use and robust in features?"

To share another example, you can hear what life has looked like for Adam Feber, the head of marketing at the Series B FP&A company getaleph.com.

The industry leading work we do at Candid Leap is rooted in our strategy phase which we have run many times.

Now I will run through the key parts of the Candid Leap strategy phase that will enable your team to be an industry leader in marketing operations and speed to market.

1. Define Sitewide Components

We identify and consolidate reusable sitewide components that enable post-launch scalability. This ensures your site remains efficient and future-proof for ongoing marketing site updates.

2. Establish the Design System

A comprehensive design system in Figma flows from our BrandOS system framework built for Webflow.
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Our system organizes typography, spacing, colors, and UI patterns for consistent design and development. We believe this is why we were nominated for Webflow Agency of the Year 2025.

3. Consolidate and Design Responsive Components

Dynamic, responsive sitewide components are designed and tied directly to your BrandOS system. Every piece is crafted for flexibility and long-term brand alignment.

When other agencies start rebuilding your entire site without organizing your responsible variables and unifying components - your component library will be hard to piece together and filled with noisy extra components you'll hardly use.

4. Execute the Component Property Strategy

Component properties are what let you turn a grid from 2 columns to 4, or a section from light mode to dark mode. We propose a component property strategy across section components and module components (think Russian stacking dolls) to give your team control over layout, design variations and brand consistency.

You review, collaborate, and provide input here. If we do it purely alone, we'll have to then clean it up again later.

Note: You should expect to continue refining components during your three-month post-launch retainer. We don’t consider a site “done” until your team confidently builds and edits pages without our involvement.

5. Finalize Sitemap & URL Structure

We define the final sitemap, optimizing page paths and URL structures for both user clarity and search performance.

6. Develop a Robust CMS Strategy

The CMS strategy is the most detailed part of the process, with eight key substeps:

1. Template Consolidation – Redesign and document CMS template features and fields.
2. Edge Case Audit – Ensure unique situations are accounted for before development.
3. Technical SEO Audit – Add breadcrumbs, internal links, categories/tags, and decide on folder structures or proxy optimizations.
4. Category & Tag Realignment – Re-evaluate and reorganize perspectives, tags, and categories for better content logic.
5. CMS & Static Page Design – Redesign directories and templates to improve internal linking and conversion performance.
6. Remove Unnecessary CMS Pages – Clean up and declutter content for long-term maintainability.
7. Import & Categorize CMS Content – Use Airtable to manage, categorize, and prepare content for migration.
8. Automation & Migration Planning – Determine what can be automated versus done manually based on your brand’s standards for aesthetics and content quality.

7. Document Page-Specific Notes

Candid Leap adds developer notes and questions next to each page to surface technical considerations early.
Your team reviews and responds so every open question becomes a clear decision, preventing unnecessary communication loops and post-launch fixes.

8. Define Technical Requirements

We gather and document all technical needs — including forms, pop-ups, animations, and complex interactions — so the development phase runs smoothly and predictably.

hire Candid Leap to give their marketing team power over the marketing site without sacrificing on brand or flexibility. 

How to separate the good, better, and best Webflow design system strategic processes

Our opinion  is that a majority of Webflow developers and agencies do great work, but are not yet deploying all the new design system features that Webflow has released in the last two years. Without these, you can't really live up to the promise Webflow has to offer. 

Of the agencies that have developers who use Webflow's design system features, many have not built internal priorities to standardize using design system features to build scalable component libraries and a true BrandOS on Webflow. We say this as friends of many leading agencies in the industry.

We are seeing an increase of agencies using the only Webflow framework built around design system features called Lumos. But the issue is that the framework is slanted towards technical developer power over marketer usability. Granted, the framework is moving more and more towards being manageable by non-developers.

 https://webflow.com/made-in-webflow/website/lumos-v2-beta

At Candid Leap, we have our own framework that takes the by far most popular framework called Client-First, but built into it all the best development features of Lumos. On top of this, we have our own standards of how we group, name, and deploy component properties and groups which is where marketers are able to make their impact. 

A large part of our strategy phase is about giving your team and our team clarity and confidence that the right decisions are made before development to streamline development and end up with a truly scalable and marketer-friendly site.

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