Why Use Webflow

Introduction

As designers and developers, we've had our fair share of experiences with various website builders and content management systems (CMS). Creating custom sites usually provides the most flexibility, but in this revolving door of a digital landscape, finding the right tool can make or break your web design process.

Here I would like to share my thoughts on why Webflow has become our go-to platform for creating stunning, functional websites for most clients. I'll also touch on some alternatives and potential drawbacks to hopefully give you a well-rounded perspective.

What is Webflow?

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let's start with the basics. Webflow is a web design tool, CMS, and hosting platform all rolled into one. It’s an abstraction of CSS, HTML and JS. Crudely put, allows users to build a site by dragging and dropping elements and layouts in the screen.

To create truly wonderful designs I recommend you should at least know the basics of both CSS and HTML. Webflow allows designers to create responsive websites visually, without the need for coding (although you can dive into the code if you want to).

What sets Webflow apart is its ability to generate relatively clean, production-ready code while giving designers the freedom to create custom designs. The quality of said code can be debated and discussed, but you can easily access to the code and export it as well. It also allows you to create some truly stunning animations and interactions very easily.

The Advantages of Webflow

Visual Design Freedom

One of the main reasons we fell in love with Webflow is the level of design freedom it offers. Unlike many other website builders, Webflow doesn't constrain you to pre-made templates or limit your creativity. With its visual canvas, you can design exactly what you envision, pixel by pixel (or rem by rem as we would recommend) without compromising on functionality.

The Box Model, Flexbox, and Grid systems are all at your fingertips, allowing for complex layouts. I would like to add, to really understand all the options of said layouts and leverage their full capabilities a solid foundational understanding of CSS knowledge is recommended.

This visual approach via Webflow has dramatically sped up our workflow and allowed us to experiment with designs more freely.

Responsive Design Made Easy

A phone in everyone’s hand is the norm in this day and age, this also means your websites should ideally be designed with the mobile-first philosophy. Webflow shines in this area by providing an intuitive way to design for different screen sizes.

You can create breakpoints and adjust designs for various devices all within the same interface with ease. Breakpoints right from ultra-wide 4K displays to mobile (both landscape and portrait) can be targeted easily with Webflow.

What I particularly appreciate is how Webflow encourages you to tackle and see how your site looks on mobile and tablet from the very beginning. It's not an afterthought but an integral part of the development process. It also let’s you easily preview your design with different font sizes on the fly during preview, which helps in designing with accessibility in mind.

Clean Code Output

With it’s rather clean and production ready code-export, webflow really helps in backing up your site. We like to export the code of all our sites and also back them up on Github.

While you mostly design visually, Webflow generates semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript behind the scenes. This translates into faster load times and better performance for your websites.

Moreover, if you're like me and enjoy handling the code more directly, Webflow allows you to add custom CSS, HTML and js. This flexibility is a huge plus for projects that require custom functionality beyond what's available in the visual editor.

CMS

Webflow's built-in CMS has been a game-changer for many of our projects. It allows us to create dynamic websites with ease, defining custom content types and designing templates for blog posts, product pages, and more. The best part of this is that it allows our clients to easily update their content without fear of breaking the design and without having to pay someone else to regularly update it.

SEO-Friendly Features

Having a good and polished site doesn’t just end at good design and slick animations & interactions, but great SEO optimization is part of it as well. Webflow does great in this area by offering a range of features to help your website rank better in search engines.

It enables you to easily setup a custom robots.txt for your site or a global canonical tag URL as required.

You get options to customize all manners of meta tags along with open graph tags. You also get to set an open graph image and a webclip.

A sitemap is automatically generated and you get to choose if you would like to exclude any pages from this sitemap. You can also set your own custom sitemap, if you wish to.

Webflow provides all these tools necessary to create SEO-friendly websites out of the box.

Webflow vs. Alternatives

While Webflow is our preferred tool, it is after all just that, a tool. It should come down to your personal preference, project requirements and/or your client’s needs which tool you should use.

It is worth briefly comparing Webflow to some popular alternatives to give you a better perspective.

Webflow vs. Framer

Framer is immensely popular and capable. Designers coming from Figma will often have a much gentle learning curve with Framer as compared to Webflow.

• Design Approach: Both offer visual design interfaces, but Webflow feels more geared towards production-ready websites, while Framer excels in prototyping and interaction design.

• Learning Curve: Framer might feel more intuitive for designers used to Figma, while Webflow has a steeper learning curve but offers more hands-on approach to web development.

• Code Output: Webflow can export production-ready code while framer doesn’t export code at all.

• CMS: Webflow has more robust built-in CMS capabilities offering more complex fields such as reference and multi-reference.

• E-commerce: Webflow offers a couple of e-commerce plans and does offer robust tools to have smaller e-commerce sites. Framer however isn’t specifically tailored to build an e-commerce site. Although, I have to add, for any serious e-commerce project you should be looking into Shopify or a similar solution instead.

Webflow vs. Wix

Wix has a very gentle learning curve and is often seen as a more beginner-friendly alternative.

• Ease of Use: Wix is generally easier to pick up, while Webflow offers more power and flexibility at the cost of a much greater learning curve.

• Design Freedom: While Wix has has impressive design capabilities, Webflow still offers more fine-grained control and flexibility to really fine tune your design to exactly how you would want it to function.

• SEO Features: Both platforms offer good SEO tools, but Webflow's cleaner code output can provide an edge in some cases.

• Scalability: Webflow is a much more robust platform that handle larger, more complex sites better than Wix.

Webflow vs Squarespace

Squarespace is known for its sleek and design-forward templates. It is also widely popular because of their extensive YouTube driven marketing.

• Design Freedom: While Squarespace offers beautiful templates, customization is quite limited compared to Webflow. With Webflow, you have the freedom to design every aspect of a template or design your site from scratch entirely.

• Ease of Use: Much like Wix, Squarespace is generally easier to use for beginners, with a gentler learning curve. Webflow offers a lot more flexibility but will need more time to master.

• E-commerce: Both platforms offer e-commerce capabilities. Squarespace's e-commerce features are more straightforward to set up.

• Blogging: Squarespace has robust built-in blogging features. While Webflow's CMS can be used for blogging, it requires more setup to achieve the same functionality. Squarespace would be a clear winner for simple blogging as compared to Webflow.

• Code Export: Just like with Framer, Squarespace also does not have any code export features.

Webflow vs Wordpress

WordPress is the original CMS. It’s been around since the days of old Valyria when dragons roamed the skies. It is powering a significant portion of the web.

• Flexibility: WordPress offers unparalleled flexibility with its vast ecosystem of themes and plugins. However, this can be a double-edged sword, potentially leading to bloated, slower sites. Webflow, on the other hand, gives you the flexibility to design from scratch without relying on plugins.

• Learning Curve: WordPress can be easy to use for basic content management, but customizing themes or building from scratch requires significant coding knowledge. Webflow (even with it’s steeper initial learning curve) will end up offering more visual design control without coding.

• Design Control: Webflow is unmatched in this regard, offering a far greater design control. Achieving the same level of design with WordPress would require custom coding or premium themes.

• Performance: Webflow sites generally load faster out of the box, as they're not weighed down by a hoard of plugins. WordPress performance can vary greatly depending on your setup and optimization efforts.

• Hosting: Webflow has site plans which offer hosting, while with WordPress, you need to arrange your own hosting solution.

Webflow vs Shopify

Shopify is the go-to platform for many e-commerce businesses and for good reason.

• E-commerce Focus: Shopify is built from the ground up for e-commerce, offering more robust features for online stores. Webflow's e-commerce capabilities are nowhere near as comprehensive.

• Design Flexibility: Webflow offers more design freedom, allowing you to create unique shopping experiences. Shopify's design capabilities tend to be more template-based.

• Scalability: For large e-commerce operations, Shopify scales much better, handling hundreds or thousands of products with ease. Webflow is more suited to smaller or perhaps medium-sized stores.

• Apps and Integrations: Shopify has a vast ecosystem of apps for extending functionality. Webflow's app ecosystem is growing but not as extensive.

• Learning Curve: Shopify is very easy to setup for a basic online store, while Webflow will require quite a bit more effort.

Potential Drawbacks of Webflow

It’s not all rainbow and sunshine in the land of Webflow either, it's important to address some potential drawbacks of Webflow:

1. Learning Curve: Webflow's power comes from it’s complexity. As I have repeated many times in this post already, it is likely overwhelming for beginners or those used to simpler website builders. At least some web development understanding and capability is recommended.

2. Pricing: Depending on your needs, Webflow can be more expensive than some alternatives. Their add-ons for localization etc start adding up and pinching every month For larger projects or e-commerce sites we would straight up recommend Shopify instead.

3. Performance on Complex Sites: Very large or complex sites can sometimes face performance issues, and require careful optimization.

4. Dependency on Webflow: While you can export your code (on a paid plan only), moving a complex Webflow site to another platform can be challenging and isn’t simply just dragging and dropping the code.

Is Webflow Right for Your Project?

How do you decide if Webflow is the right choice for your project? It can be if what you seek are:

• Custom design-focused websites where visual impact is crucial

• Projects that require a good balance of design flexibility and content management

• Small e-commerce sites with unique design requirements

• Portfolios or showcase websites that need to stand out and really wow their audience.

• Projects where client content management is important, but design integrity needs to be maintained

When should you consider alternatives?

• You're building a very simple website and don't need advanced design capabilities, then Webflow might just be overkill for you.

• If you want to quickly prototype a design and validate it perhaps.

• If you or your client need an extremely simple content management interface, then Webflow is perhaps not the best choice.

• You need a full blown e-commerce store with 100s of products, then you should look towards Shopify instead.

Conclusion

For us as at Taktform, Webflow has proven to be an invaluable tool. Its blend of visual design capabilities, letting us access and manipulate the CSS etc of the site and it’s CMS made it a standout choice for creating stunning and responsive websites that add immense value to our clients.

While it's not perfect for every scenario, Webflow's strengths in design flexibility, SEO-friendliness, and the ability to letting our clients easily update content over time without deep coding knowledge make it our go-to platform for a vast majority of our projects.

Nonetheless, the best tool is the one that fits your specific needs and workflow. We talk to our clients and deep dive into their requirements and needs before recommending a solution, be it Webflow or something else.

If you would like to discuss what is a better fit for your project, feel free to hit us up at [email protected].