Webflow does back your site up automatically, which is why most people never think about it until the afternoon they need it. That is also when they find out what a restore actually changes.
This guide covers how the backup system works, the specific things a restore breaks, what Webflow's backups do not protect you against, and the short routine that covers the gaps.
How Webflow's backups work
Webflow creates restore points as you work. A restore point is written automatically on every 50th auto-save, and another is written whenever you restore to a previous version.
There are no scheduled backups. Webflow does not take a nightly copy, so your backup history follows how much you edit rather than the calendar. A site nobody has touched for three months has no new restore points from those three months.
Only site managers can reach backups, and they live in Site settings under the Backups tab.
How much history you keep depends on your plan
Paid site plans, meaning Basic, CMS, Business and Enterprise, keep unlimited backups and can restore any of them at any time.
Sites on the free Starter plan can only restore from the two most recent backups, unless the workspace itself is on a paid plan. That is the detail that catches people out on client sites and side projects, because two restore points on a busy editing day can cover about an hour of work.
If you are running anything you would be upset to lose on a Starter site plan, that limit is the reason to upgrade, more than any feature on the pricing page.
How to create a backup point manually
Automatic restore points are tied to save counts, so before any risky change you want one you controlled.
- Check the save state first. Confirm the green "Changes saved" checkmark is showing in the top toolbar, otherwise your most recent canvas edits are not in the backup.
- Press Command + Shift + S on a Mac, or Control + Shift + S on Windows.
- Add a description your future self will understand, such as "before nav rebuild" rather than "backup 3".
- Click Save.
Do this before template changes, before deleting collections, and before any structural edit you would struggle to redo by hand.
How to restore, without making it worse
Open Site settings, go to the Backups tab, find the version you want, and preview it before you commit. Previewing is the step most people skip and it is the one that prevents restoring the wrong day.
Webflow saves the current state as its own restore point before it overwrites anything, so a restore is reversible if you picked wrong. Once the restore completes, publish the site, because restoring changes the project and not what visitors see.
Then check your integrations, because several of them will not have survived intact.
What a restore actually changes
This is the part missing from most guides, and it is all in Webflow's own documentation.
- Scheduled Collection items are set back to "Queue to publish", so anything you had scheduled will go out on your next publish unless you remove it from the queue.
- CMS and Ecommerce item IDs are preserved for backups made after 25 March 2024. Restoring anything older resets those IDs, which breaks every API call and third party connection that referenced them.
- The "Published on" date on Collection items updates to the moment of the restore. If your blog sorts or displays by that date, your archive reorders itself.
- reCAPTCHA keys are refreshed and have to be re-added in Site settings under Apps and Integrations, or your forms stop working.
- Bot blocking is turned off, and you need to switch Cloudflare Turnstile spam protection back on yourself.
- Ecommerce inventory levels reset unless you tick "include inventory levels" during the restore, and inventory tracking switches off with them.
- Comments are kept, but any comment attached to an element that no longer exists moves up to the parent or the body, so context is lost.
- Locales restore with publishing disabled if the backup had more locales than your current plan allows.
None of that is a reason to avoid restoring. It is a reason to have the list open while you do it, and to check forms and integrations immediately afterwards rather than a week later.
What Webflow backups do not protect you from
Every backup Webflow makes lives inside Webflow, tied to your account and your plan. That covers the common failure, which is you breaking something, and it does not cover the rarer ones.
It does not cover losing access to the account, a billing lapse that downgrades the site, a team member removing the project, or the day you decide to move to another platform. In all of those cases the restore history is on the wrong side of the problem.
It also does not give you a copy you can read. A restore point is not a file you can open, search or diff, so you cannot answer "what did that page say in March" without restoring the whole project to find out.
The routine that covers the gaps
None of this needs a paid tool. It needs about twenty minutes a quarter.
- Export your site code from the Webflow designer and keep the zip somewhere outside Webflow.
- Export each CMS collection to CSV, since that is where your actual content lives and it is the slowest thing to rebuild.
- Keep a copy of your assets, because images are usually the part nobody exported.
- Note your site settings that live outside the designer: redirects, custom code, form notification addresses and integration keys.
- Create a named manual restore point before every significant structural change.
If you publish frequently, do the CMS export monthly instead of quarterly. The point is having something that is readable and portable, not having a second copy of the same thing Webflow already keeps.
Common mistakes
Restoring without previewing, which usually means restoring past the change you were trying to undo. Preview costs ten seconds.
Assuming a restore fixes a live problem on its own. It does not, because the site your visitors see is the last published version, and the restore only changes the project.
Treating backups as a substitute for staging. If a change is big enough to worry about, duplicate the project and build it there instead of relying on being able to roll back.
Leaving a client site on the Starter site plan. Two restore points is not a backup policy, and it is a conversation you do not want to have after the fact.
Where this fits with the rest of your site
Backups are a hygiene job rather than a growth one. Get the routine in place, then stop thinking about it.
The related decision people usually reach around the same time is whether Webflow is the right platform at all, which our comparison of Squarespace, WordPress and Wix covers, and if the site is mostly campaign pages then our roundup of AI landing page builders is the closer match. If the question is where to publish writing rather than where to host the site, our Substack vs Medium comparison covers that choice.
If your Webflow site is stable and the problem is that nothing new gets published on it, Distribb writes and publishes content straight into Webflow, including the internal links, so the CMS keeps filling without a weekly writing session. The wider category is covered in our roundup of automated SEO software.
The honest limitation: we publish into Webflow, we do not back it up. Nothing in our product replaces the export routine above, and if you were looking for a backup tool, the routine is free and this is not it.
Sources and method
The plan limits, the 50th auto-save rule and the full list of what a restore changes come from Webflow's help documentation, checked in August 2026. Where Webflow's docs are silent we have said so rather than guessed, which is why there are no claims here about what is inside a backup file.
Frequently asked questions
How often does Webflow back up my site? On every 50th auto-save, and when you restore a previous version. There are no scheduled or nightly backups.
Can I download a Webflow backup? No. Restore points exist inside Webflow only, which is why exporting your code and CMS collections separately matters.
Will restoring break my forms? It refreshes reCAPTCHA keys and turns bot blocking off, so forms need checking straight after. Re-add the keys in Site settings under Apps and Integrations.
Can I restore a single page? Not through the backups tab, which restores the whole project. The usual workaround is to restore into a duplicated project, copy the page you need, and paste it back into the live one.
Does restoring publish the site? No. You restore the project and then publish it yourself, which is useful, because it gives you a chance to check things first.
Next step
Check which plan your site is on, create one named restore point today, and put a quarterly export in your calendar. That is the whole job.
Then get back to the part that grows the site. If publishing is the bottleneck, Distribb publishes into Webflow on a schedule and handles the keyword research and internal linking around it.