Migrating off Webflow and the worst way to use Claude Code — Sisyphus Bar and Grill

Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, La Mélancolie, 1785

Migrating off Webflow and the worst way to use Claude Code<br>July 16, 2026<br>Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, La Mélancolie, 1785

I could wax poetic about how bad Webflow is. Every small detail, from the way drafts in their CMS work to their support ticket flow, is so egregiously and offensively bad that there’s only one possible conclusion: they are doing this on purpose. No team could be this bad at their jobs. It’s simply not possible that this product is the unfortunate and accidental result of their genuine efforts to build something useful.

No, instead I like to imagine a group of evil basement dwellers with sharp teeth and blood red eyes, gathered around a screen and working themselves into an orgiastic frenzy. As they cackle and roar, they brainstorm increasingly clever and frustrating ways to antagonize their users. Make it a crapshoot as to if we save the user’s CMS edits…no wait, make ALL of the text switch to an H2, not just the highlighted text. Yes…now make the user type their support request TWICE after talking to our AI chatbot! AND FOR THE GRAND CRESCENDO, LET’S HAVE 72 HOUR OUTAGES!!!!!

They are cracked engineers to be sure; their knowledge of the game is so complete, so advanced, that they know exactly how to build things wrong. And they do so with delight, reveling in the small daily pains they’ll cause their millions of imprisoned users (thanks to the Webflow Agency Industrial Complex).

As John Milton said in Paradise Lost:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Anyway, after many years of complaining about how bad Webflow is, it finally felt like the time to migrate the Amplify website off of it and onto a custom setup.

The new stack and migration logistics

Here is my simple web stack for the internal apps I’ve been building for Amplify:

React and Next.js

Clean CSS, I hate Tailwind and hate that LLMs want me to use it

Deployed on Vercel

Sanity for the blog CMS

Claude Code in Warp

Nothing fancy, but then again, I’m just a salt of the earth guy.

I should have known that Webflow wasn’t going to make this easy. I should have known that it wouldn’t be as simple as just “exporting the code” (hah! haha!) and having a model refactor it for a new platform.

Of course, to export your code, you must have a paid plan on Webflow. Of course.

What’s that, you say? You have a paid plan? You’re already spending more than $1K/year on Webflow? Sorry broh, but we change our plans every 6 months and you’re on a great-great-great grandfathered SKU that doesn’t exist anymore and doesn’t count as “paid” in the code that one of our engineers spent 6 months writing for this.

Instead of rewarding your loyal multi-year subscription, we are unfortunately going to have to make your life as hard as we can. Hope that’s alright.

The important thing to know about hating Webflow is that you’re never alone. In my case a fine gentleman created just the piece of software to help me in my time of need: Exflow. So I was at least able to export some partial simulacrum of my site to aid my Claudes.

The work here was not very glamorous, it involved going route by route and having Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6, I’m frugal) patiently rebuild the page from first principles i.e. the existing published website.

Claude’s first pass at the page would look like, vaguely similar to the original but clearly involved several hallucinations, in particular around things like font sizes and weights and then border radii as well.

Most of my prompts looked something like this:

Download the HTML and CSS of this page and rebuild it on our local site. Match the styles, shapes, borders, and fonts exactly. Double check your work using the Playwright integration.

Speaking of which…the Claude Code Playwright integration didn’t work very well. Everyone kept telling me that we need loops, LOOPS!, and so I tried to give Claude a “loop” but:

Each Playwright use and screenshot took like 3+ minutes (?)

It would get stuck in the “loop” (after all how do you get out of a loop) often

…the end result wasn’t any better than me manually pointing out fixes

Ergo, I spent a few days going page by page writing prompts like:

Make the following fixes:

p tag font size should be 1.2rem

the border on the button is still black, your fix didn’t work

move the “About Amplify” CTA 50px lower down

etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

Over time, the model actually got a lot better: because it had a library of good components across the site to just copy and paste from. But even this didn’t yield anything close to perfect. I needed to continually say things like “make this button look exactly like the rest of the buttons” – in which I essentially discovered a design system from first principles.

Using LLMs for frontend is an antipattern and it sucks

I bore you with these details to get a point across, and that point is that this...