Webflow to React: Why and How I Switched
After 9 years on Webflow, I've moved all my sites off the platform and stopped recommending it. My hosting costs dropped to $0 and my productivity is up. The switch does have costs, but all in all I feel it's a step in the right direction.
I created my Webflow account in May 2017. For 9 years it was the core of my freelance work, including mission critical launches with large enterprise clients.
As of this year, I've stopped recommending it and moved all of my own sites off the platform.
What my clients have always wanted is a site they can easily manage and that is performant. In my humble opinion, the easiest solution for that today is a React site, hosted on Netlify, Cloudflare, etc. and managed with Cursor or Claude.
My client's fixed costs drop to $0 and they can go bananas 🍌 making changes to their site with their agent and model of their choice.
To test this workflow I moved my own sites out of Webflow, converted them to React and continued editing them with Cursor.
These 4 sites were once Webflow projects and are now all React sites hosted on Netlify:
Will I ever go back to building sites on Webflow? It comes down to productivity. There are things I already miss about it but for me at least and my client it's a step in the right direction.
My 3 reasons to switch from Webflow to React
1. Webflow's productivity penalty
My sites are all on React now, and I manage them with Cursor.
A site change that previously took me 10 minutes on Webflow now gets done in a single prompt. And if that weren't enough, on Webflow my changes were manual, meaning one change at a time. On Cursor, I can have 10 agents working on 10 complex tasks simultaneously.
The productivity delta is immense.
Webflow does have an MCP, but it's slow and its tool coverage is limited. It often times out, and I need to keep the MCP Bridge app open for most changes. The experience, at least today, is awful.
2. The free alternative is better
As of May 2026, a CMS site on Webflow costs $276/year, and a Basic site costs $168/year. For my 4 sites, that added up to $780/year.
My new fixed costs after the conversion: $0/year.
For hosting, I'm using Netlify, which has a generous free plan, but you could also use Vercel or Cloudflare.
This blog you're currently reading was previously on Webflow CMS, and it now runs on Sanity.io. Sanity's free plan has more than I need, and since it's fully agentic, I can manage my entire CMS from Cursor directly.
3. No learning curve for my clients
As a Webflow freelancer, once I was done with a project my clients could easily make text and CMS changes to the site, but they always needed me for anything more complex. For me, that meant monthly retainers. For my clients, it meant a fixed cost on top of what they were already paying Webflow.
Today, my clients can continue to edit the page themselves using their agent of choice. My recommendation is Cursor, but they can prompt the changes on Claude, Codex, or whatever else they prefer.
While I used to be the "Webflow guy" doing all the changes for my client, now their entire team can prompt changes to the site directly.
The creativity that unlocks is something else.
My new stack for marketing sites
Webflow's elegance lies in having everything on one platform. The tradeoff of leaving is that a handful of tools have to work together to replace it.
My new stack:
- Cursor: Managing my site and making changes.
- Netlify: Hosting and CDN.
- TanStack Start: React framework powered by TanStack Router and Vite.
- GitHub: Version control and triggering new site changes.
- Sanity: Headless CMS that replaces Webflow's CMS.
The only tool I pay for is Cursor, and it's a variable cost.
The reason I went with TanStack Start instead of Next.js is the ability to easily switch to another hosting provider at any time. Next.js is amazing, but switching it out of Vercel isn't trivial.
I'm enjoying Netlify, but I can easily move my React site to Cloudflare or Vercel whenever I want.
As to CMS, Sanity is a refreshing change after years of using Webflow CMS. It's extremely flexible and fully agentic. Can't recommend it enough.
Webflow-to-React: a free skill
To make the conversion, I created a free React skill. Using it is very simple:
- Export your site from Webflow. Go to Webflow and export your site. You'll get a
.zipfile. - Install the skill on Cursor, Claude, etc. Run
npx skills@latest add dmenchaca/webflow-to-react -y. To install it for all projects on this machine, add-g. Reload your editor or agent after install. - Upload the exported
.zipto your agent and prompt:Convert this Webflow export to TanStack Start (React, SSR) with pixel parity. Use the webflow-to-react skill and follow SKILL.md from step one.
What I miss from Webflow
Easily editing text
Editing copy with Claude or Cursor is today not as simple as clicking somewhere on a page and making a text change. This some I immediately miss from Webflow, both for static pages and CMS.
Faster deploy
My new deploy workflow entails pushing code from Cursor to Github and waiting for Netlify to create a new build. It's an automated process and takes less than a minute but Webflow's publish button is something I really miss.
Team collaboration
Webflow has a multiplayer experience which is solid. Multiple team members could be making changes to a same page elegantly. With a React site this gets tricky. I now use Git which is the industry standard for version control and it's solid but the teams I work with need to learn to use it. Not the end of the world but it takes a bit more of training and hand holding.
Closing thoughts
Webflow gave me a career, and I'll always be grateful for that. For 9 years it was the right tool, and for many people and projects it still is. This post isn't a takedown, it's a snapshot of where I've landed in May 2026.
What changed isn't really Webflow, it's the rest of the toolbox around it. AI agents have made it possible for a non-technical designer to ship and maintain production sites at a speed that no visual builder can match right now. The lock-in disappeared, the costs collapsed, and my clients gained autonomy instead of depending on me for every change.
If you're a freelancer or a small team still on Webflow and curious about what life looks like on the other side, give the webflow-to-react skill a try. Export one site, run the prompt, and see how close to pixel parity you land. Worst case, you go back to Webflow with a clearer view of what you actually value about it. Best case, you join me on the other side.
Either way, the creativity you'll unlock is worth the experiment.