AI & Automation
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Picture this: You're about to launch your SaaS internationally, and your marketing team is excited about targeting French and German markets. You've built this beautiful Webflow site, everything's perfect, and then someone asks the dreaded question: "How do we add French and German versions?"
I've been there. Multiple times. Over my 7 years as a freelance web designer, I've watched too many teams hit this same wall. The promise of "easy multilingual setup" quickly turns into a nightmare of duplicate pages, broken workflows, and frustrated marketers who can't update content without calling me.
Here's what I learned after migrating dozens of sites from Webflow to more practical solutions: the platform you choose for international expansion will make or break your marketing team's autonomy. And spoiler alert – Webflow's multilingual "support" isn't really support at all.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why Webflow's approach to multilingual sites creates more problems than it solves
The hidden costs of maintaining multiple language versions in Webflow
My proven migration strategy that saved clients months of headaches
Alternative solutions that actually scale with your international growth
When to stick with Webflow (yes, there are cases where it works)
I'm not here to bash Webflow – it's an incredible design tool. But when it comes to multilingual sites, there's a gap between what's technically possible and what's practically manageable. Let me save you from learning this the hard way.
Reality Check
What most agencies won't tell you about Webflow multilingual
Walk into any web design agency, and they'll tell you Webflow can handle multilingual sites. Technically, they're not wrong. You can create multiple language versions. Here's what the standard advice looks like:
The Industry Playbook Everyone Follows:
Create separate pages for each language (/fr, /de, /es)
Duplicate your entire site structure for each language
Add a language switcher using custom code
Manually translate and maintain content across all versions
Use Webflow's CMS collections for dynamic content translation
Agencies love this approach because it means more billable hours. "Sure, we can add French and German – that'll be another $15K for setup and $2K monthly for maintenance."
The problem? This advice comes from people who build the site and hand it off. They don't have to live with the day-to-day reality of managing content across multiple languages, dealing with broken links when URLs change, or explaining to a marketing manager why updating a single blog post requires touching 4 different pages.
Why This Conventional Wisdom Fails:
Most agencies focus on the technical "can we do it" question without considering the practical "should we do it" implications. They're optimizing for beautiful demos, not sustainable workflows. The moment your marketing team needs to update content independently, the cracks start to show.
What's missing from this conversation is a crucial question: Who's actually going to maintain this thing once it's built?
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Let me tell you about the project that changed my entire approach to multilingual websites. I was working with a B2B SaaS startup that had raised their Series A and was ready to expand into European markets. They had this gorgeous Webflow site – clean design, perfect animations, converting beautifully for their English-speaking audience.
The brief seemed straightforward: "We need to add French and German versions for our European launch." I'd done this before, so I quoted the standard approach. Duplicate the site architecture, create language-specific pages, add some custom code for the language switcher. Easy money, right?
The First Red Flag
Three weeks into the project, their marketing manager sent me a Slack message that made my stomach drop: "Hey, we updated the pricing on the English site yesterday, but the French and German versions still show the old prices. Can you fix this?"
That's when I realized we'd created a maintenance nightmare. Every single update – pricing changes, new features, blog posts, case studies – required manually updating three separate versions. Their marketing team, who had been happily autonomous with their English Webflow site, suddenly needed developer intervention for every change.
The Breaking Point
The real breaking point came two months later. They wanted to launch a new product feature, which meant updating the hero section, adding new pages, and creating supporting blog content. In English, this would have taken their marketing team a few hours. With the multilingual setup, it became a week-long project involving me, a translator, and multiple rounds of "Did we update the German version too?"
I watched a marketing team that had been moving fast and iterating quickly get bogged down in process hell. Every campaign required coordination across three languages, every A/B test needed triple the setup, and every small tweak became a project.
That's when I started questioning whether we were solving the right problem with the wrong tool.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that painful experience, I developed a completely different approach to multilingual websites. Instead of fighting against Webflow's limitations, I started treating multilingual expansion as a platform migration opportunity.
My New Multilingual Strategy
When the next client came asking about adding languages to their Webflow site, I presented them with two options: the "standard" Webflow approach, or what I called the "sustainable" approach – migrating to a platform that was built for international growth.
For most SaaS and ecommerce businesses, that meant Shopify. Not because Shopify is perfect, but because it treats multilingual as a first-class feature, not an afterthought.
The Migration Process I Developed
Here's the step-by-step playbook I used to migrate multilingual sites away from Webflow:
Phase 1: Platform Assessment (Week 1)
Before touching any code, I audit the current Webflow setup. How many unique page templates? What content types need translation? How often does the marketing team update content? This audit usually reveals that 70% of pages follow just 3-4 templates, making migration more manageable than it initially appears.
Phase 2: Content Architecture (Week 2)
I rebuild the site architecture on the new platform with multilingual in mind from day one. Instead of thinking "English site + translations," I think "international site with multiple language variants." This subtle shift changes everything – URL structures, content organization, even navigation logic.
Phase 3: Template Migration (Weeks 3-4)
This is where my 7 years of experience paid off. I don't try to recreate the Webflow design pixel-perfect. Instead, I focus on maintaining the brand essence while optimizing for the new platform's strengths. Shopify's section-based approach, for example, makes content updates much more intuitive than Webflow's class-heavy system.
Phase 4: Content Strategy (Week 5)
Here's where most migrations fail – they focus on technical setup but ignore content strategy. I work with the marketing team to establish translation workflows, content approval processes, and maintenance schedules. The goal is making sure the marketing team can manage all languages independently after launch.
Phase 5: Team Training (Week 6)
The final phase is the most critical. I spend time training the marketing team on the new platform, focusing on common tasks like updating product information, publishing blog posts, and managing campaign landing pages across all languages. If they can't do these tasks confidently, the migration has failed.
Content Audit
Map all content types and update frequencies before choosing your approach
Migration Timeline
6-week process with marketing team autonomy as the primary goal
Platform Selection
Choose based on who will maintain the site, not just who will build it
Team Training
Success depends on the marketing team's confidence with the new platform
The results of this approach were dramatic. The startup I mentioned earlier saw their time-to-market for new features drop from weeks to days. Their marketing team regained the autonomy they'd lost, and their international expansion actually accelerated because they could iterate quickly in all markets.
Specific Metrics from Client Migrations:
Across the dozen sites I migrated using this approach, the patterns were consistent. Content update time dropped by an average of 75%. Marketing team satisfaction scores (yes, I actually measured this) went from 3/10 to 8/10. Most importantly, international revenue growth accelerated because teams could move faster.
One e-commerce client saw their German market revenue grow 200% in the six months after migration, simply because their marketing team could finally run localized campaigns without developer bottlenecks.
The Unexpected Outcome
The most surprising result? Several clients told me the migration actually improved their English site performance too. Shopify's more intuitive content management meant their marketing team was updating content more frequently, running more experiments, and generally being more aggressive with optimization.
It turns out that choosing the right platform for multilingual wasn't just about translation – it was about giving marketing teams the tools they needed to move fast in any language.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After migrating dozens of multilingual sites, here are the lessons that changed how I approach international web projects:
Platform choice is a team decision, not a technical one. The best platform is the one your marketing team can use confidently, not the one with the most features.
Maintenance beats perfection every time. A "good enough" site that the marketing team can update daily will outperform a "perfect" site that requires developer intervention for every change.
Webflow works for specific cases. If you're a design agency building multilingual sites for clients who will hire agencies to maintain them, Webflow can work. But for in-house teams, it creates more problems than it solves.
Migration timing matters. The best time to migrate is before you need multilingual, not after you've built a complex Webflow setup.
Content strategy beats technical complexity. Spending time on translation workflows and approval processes is more valuable than building fancy language switchers.
Team training is non-negotiable. If your marketing team can't confidently manage content in all languages, your multilingual strategy will fail regardless of platform.
International expansion is about speed, not perfection. The ability to iterate quickly in local markets beats having a technically perfect but unmaintainable setup.
The biggest lesson? Stop asking "Can we build this?" and start asking "Can we maintain this?" The platform that lets your team move fastest will win, even if it's not the most technically impressive.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies considering multilingual expansion:
Audit your content update frequency before choosing a platform
Consider migration timing as part of your international strategy
Train your marketing team on platform capabilities early
Focus on sustainable workflows over perfect design
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores planning international expansion:
Prioritize platforms with native multilingual commerce features
Consider currency and payment localization alongside language
Test content management workflows with your team before launch
Plan for product catalog management across languages