How to Back Up a Webflow Site

Webflow is better at this than most website builders. It keeps restore points of your site, it can export your code, and it can export your CMS collections as CSV files. Three real tools, which is three more than Wix or Showit offer.

None of them is a copy of your live site sitting somewhere Webflow does not control. Here is what each one actually covers, and what is left over.

Backups: an undo button, inside Webflow

Webflow saves and restores backups of a site, so you can roll back to an earlier state after a bad edit or a redesign that went wrong.

This is genuinely useful and it has one property worth being clear about: it lives in your Webflow account. It is not a file you hold. If the account goes, through a lapsed subscription, a lost login, or a designer you can no longer reach, the restore points go with it. Every builder's version history works this way. It protects the site from you, not from losing the platform.

Code export: the design, not the site

Webflow can export your site code, which puts real HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in your hands. That is a genuine export, and it is rare.

Read the exclusions before you rely on it. According to Webflow's own documentation, the export does not include:

• CMS, User Accounts, and Ecommerce content. Collection lists come out showing their empty state, and Collection pages show nothing bound to a Collection field. If your site is a blog, a portfolio, or a store, the content is the site, and it is not in the export.
• Localized pages, elements, and content. Only the primary locale is exported.
• Working forms or site search. Forms, including file upload and reCAPTCHA, and site search do not function in exported code.
• Password protection. Password-protected pages are not protected once exported. Protection requires Webflow hosting.

So a code export of a marketing site with hand-built pages is close to complete. A code export of a CMS-driven site is a set of empty templates.

CSV export: the content, not the pages

Webflow can export CMS Collections, Ecommerce Collections, and User Accounts as CSV. That fills the biggest hole in the code export, in a different shape: rows of fields, not pages.

Between the two you have the templates and the data, and a job to put them back together. That is a real migration path, which is more than most platforms offer. It is not something you can hand to a client and call a backup.

What all three leave out

The obvious one: what the site looked like. Code and CSV rows do not tell you how the published page rendered on a given date. Fonts resolve differently, scripts do not run, Collection pages are empty. Open a code export in a browser six months later and you are looking at a skeleton, not the site.

And the practical one: remembering to do it. A code export is a thing you do by hand, on a day you think of it. The export sitting on a laptop from last March describes a site that has changed since.

What an offsite copy adds

Dead Simple Backups crawls your published site the way a visitor sees it. Every public page is saved as HTML, with a full-page screenshot of each page rendered in a real browser, plus the images, styles, and fonts it uses, so a page opens on your own machine and still looks like the page. Collection pages are included, because to a visitor they are just pages. It runs on the 1st of every month, keeps 12 months, and emails a private link. No Webflow login is involved, because it only reads what is already public.

It is a copy, not a restore. Nothing pushes it back into Webflow. What you get is the record: what every page said and looked like on a date, held outside the account.

Try it on one page: paste any page of your site into the free preview on our homepage. You get that page as HTML with a full-page screenshot in about a minute, no account needed.

A sensible setup for a Webflow site

1. Leave Webflow's backups on and use them for day-to-day undo.
2. Take a code export before any major restructure, and keep it with the date in the folder name.
3. Export your CMS collections as CSV on the same schedule.
4. Run a monthly offsite copy so a picture of the live site exists outside the account, whatever happens to it.

Steps 2 and 3 are the ones people skip, because they are manual. That is the argument for step 4.

Q: Does Webflow back up my site?

Yes, inside your account. Webflow saves restore points you can roll back to. They are tied to the account and cannot be downloaded as a copy you keep.

Q: Is Webflow's code export a full backup?

No. It gives you HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the design, but leaves out CMS, User Accounts, and Ecommerce content, localized content, working forms, site search, and password protection.

Q: How do I back up my Webflow CMS content?

Export the CMS Collections as CSV from Webflow. That covers the data. The pages built from it need a separate copy, either a code export for the templates or a crawl of the published pages.

Q: What happens to my Webflow site if the subscription ends?

The published site stops being served at its address. What you still hold is whatever you exported beforehand. That is the case for taking a copy while the site is up.