Webflow website builder is one of the most advanced website builders in the market. It has grown rapidly in the web development industries and has been compared with big website builders like WordPress, Wix, etc. Webflow eases the process of building and designing complex websites. It has a designed dashboard resembling the Photoshop editor and has various draggable web elements & blocks to offer the freedom of extensive customization.
Webflow platform’s learning curve is more so we recommend you to go through Webflow beginner tutorial and come back, so that you understand this review faster.
What makes Webflow Special?
The website builders in the markets like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, WordPress-Elementor etc. are easy to set up and launch websites but what all of them mostly lack, is the freedom of advanced customization and design. You will be limited in some areas of website development. Webflow is very famous among web developers who work for clients and develop websites for them, With good knowledge in HTML, CSS, and Script languages Webflow can be customized and designed to the next level and even create SAAS application. Check out some of the best-designed websites on Webflow for inspiration.
Pros & Cons:
Pros
Cons
Extensive customization & designing option
Not a beginner-friendly platform
Forever free plan available
Expensive eCommerce plans
Plenty of resources are available
No phone and livechat support
Over 200+ integrations/apps, highly professional prebuilt templates & lots of libraries/pre built blocks/layouts
Yes, It is one of the fastest-growing website builders. The platform offers greater flexibility and customization features to build the website the way you want. It has a style setting similar to a Photoshop editor to offer extensive design freedom.
Is Webflow better than WordPress?
Webflow and WordPress both are very good platforms for building websites, Webflow is an emerging website builder platform with greater customization, faster performance & design flexibility features but has a big learning curve and lacks plenty of features and integrations as compared to WordPress.
Is Webflow good for beginners?
Webflow is not a Beginner friendly platform, Its learning curve is more than WordPress. For a beginner, it can take more than 15 days to build a good website with this platform. Webflow has made it simple for beginners by providing excellent resources in the form of blogs, videos, and tutorials.
How difficult is it to learn Webflow?
Webflow editor is 10X more difficult than Wix and 3X more difficult than WordPress Elementor. You need 10 days to learn the proper usability of the Webflow editor, While you can learn the Wix editor in 1 day. Webflow editor consists of lots of editing and designing options. You can watch some of their videos from Webflow University, they have prepared step-by-step tutorials on using Webflow.
Can you code in Webflow?
Yes, you can code in Webflow. It can be customized extensively with custom CSS, HTML, JS etc. You can easily export/import. You can easily import any JS, CSS entire Templates to Webflow and then you can edit there. You can even add React component to your already existing website any page, any block or anywhere that you want to render it.
Is Webflow better than Squarespace?
Both Webflow and Squarespace are good, Webflow is good for extensive editing and designing but the editor is not easy to operate, Whereas Squarespace provides ready-made templates and draggable section templates with easy customization options. Webflow is better for advanced users & web developers and Squarespace is better for beginners & dummies.
Ease of Use
Webflow dashboard provides various options from website elements to Photoshop like design editor. There are plenty of design and web element options available. So It’s important to learn how to use them. For this reason, Webflow has provided various courses on its website Webflow University from beginner to advanced levels. Although the Webflow learning curve is big, it will become easier as you use the platform regularly.
As shown in the below gif, It has a basic dashboard that consists of editing and designing options. It has a plus icon to the left of the dashboard to add web elements. below that, it has the symbol options which turn elements into reusable blocks, The navigator tab is used for easy navigation through the websites, you can rearrange the sections & blocks in the navigator itself, and the pages tab has the collection of all pages used in the websites. Then it’s followed by CMS, Ecommerce, assets (Collection of images&videos), and then the setting tab.
plus icon ->symbol->navigator ->pages ->CMS->Ecommerce->assets ->
Webflow dashboard
Themes and Editor
Webflow themes have over 40+ free and plenty of paid themes. These themes can be sorted by various categories, layouts, styles, and many more. upon clicking one of the themes you can preview it in the browser and designer, and also can check various features the theme offers.
Webflow themes
Webflow editor offers plenty of options to edit the theme, the editor consists of various web elements and layouts that you can add to your page. These layouts and web elements can be simply added by the drag and drop feature as shown in the below gif. You can specify various dimensions and parameters of these sections.
Webflow Editor
Towards the right of the dashboard, there is a tab for designing called styles. It opens various options for designing. This section resembles the photoshop editor that contains options to edit the layout, spacing, Borders, position, Borders, typography, effects, colors, and more.
Besides to element setting tab, there is a style manager which is nothing but a directory of styles that has been implemented throughout the website. It will list out the header tags, colors, blocks, sections, and images used on the current page and various other pages on this website.
Webflow Style Manger
Besides the style manager tab, there is an Interactions tab that is useful in creating page triggers to add animations to elements and create effects on scrolling, loading effect, parallax effect, and more.
Webflow Parallax
One of the main strengths of Webflow is the flexibility of design, Normally in the other website builders, we can create a basic parallax effect while scrollings. In Webflow we can create various parallax effects with respect to the other image, parallax effects on scrolling, parallax effects on mouse hover, and more.
Plans and Pricing
Webflow has various plans and they have divided them into Site and workspace plans. Both site and workspace plans have a free plan in common. The site plan includes an eCommerce plan.
1. Site Plans
Site Plans (Personal blog, business site)
Ecommerce Plans (Online store)
Starter : Free
Basic :$15/m($12)
CMS :$20/m($16)
Business :$45/m($36)
Enterprise
Standard:$42/m($29)
Plus:$84/m($74)
Advanced:$235/m($212)
Note:The price mentioned in the brackets are Yearly plans
Webflow provides a Free plan, You can learn and master it before jumping to one of their paid plans, Squarespace provides 14-day free trials to get started with their platform. Check detailed Webflow features as per their pricing.
Domain and Hosting
Webflow doesn’t have a domain registrar, you need to purchase a domain from a third-party registrar. Webflow had made it easy to buy and connect domains from the Webflow dashboard. In the hosting section of Webflow, you can connect an existing domain to Webflow or purchase a new domain either from google domains or GoDaddy. Those purchased domains will be added to the hosting sections. If you already have a custom domain and want to connect to Webflow, You can follow the instructions provided by Webflow
Webflow domain
Webflow has a powerful speed server hosted on the AWS network and its HTTP/2 ready ensures that your site loads quickly. The hosting features get better and better as you upgrade to the highest plan, following are the features included in the Webflow hostings.
Webflow hosting features
Email hosting is not provided by Webflow, you have to get it hosted by third-party providers like google workspace and Zoho.
Ecommerce Features
Features
Webflow
Templates
Webflow has lots of Ecommerce templates but they are paid and their price ranges from $79-$129
Products
Webflow has a cap on items you can list in-store. You can add a maximum of 500 on the standard plan and 3000 Products on the advanced plan.
Plans and Pricing
Three eCommerce plans Standard – $29/mo Plus – $74/mo Advanced – $212/mo
2% on Standard Plan($29/mo), zero charges on other plans
Staff accounts
Unlimited
Automated tax calculation
Yes
Real-time shipping calculation
No (Shippo plugin required)
Checkout customization
Yes
POS
No
Ecommerce apps
20+
Webflow has separate Ecommerce plans whose annual price ranges from $29 to $212 which is quite high as per the features they provide. They have a Cap of $50K annual sales volume on the standard plan($29) and $200K annual sales volume on the Plus plan($74). They have very limited payment options, and also have limitations on items that can be listed in the store.
SEO
Webflow provides both basic and advanced SEO features, following are the SEO features.
Webflow allows adding and editing schema markups.
Migrate site URLs with 301 redirects.
Edit page Meta Title, Meta description, URL, Alt Text of an image.
Edit sitemaps and robots.txt of web file.
Set up a global canonical URL to avoid multiple page indexing.
Webflow doesn’t provide AMP pages.
CMS
Webflow has plenty of good features associated with CMS features.
Design web pages with real content.
Create CMS collections once and pull out the content from the collection to anywhere on the webpage.
Provide access to other teammates to Write and edit content.
Edit the heading once & it will update wherever the heading is on the webpage.
Webflow blogging provides flexibility, You can Design various blog pages and embeds these blogs, case studies, and testimonials anywhere on the site. It allows multiple authors and categorization of blogs but it lacks features like commenting, social integration, and dynamic content creation which requires coding to develop manually or requires a third party to access these features.
Webflow doesn’t have an inbuilt Newsletter feature, Instead, you have to get it from a third-party plugin like Mailchimp, Activecampaign, etc.
Apps and Integrations
Webflow has integration with 200+ third-party apps. These apps can be filtered by categories. The integrations are not automatic they need to be manually installed. Upon clicking on the apps you can click on the view lessons and it will display a set of instructions to install the apps. Most of the times apps installation needs the pasting of codes in Webflow.
Webflow apps
The Email Marketing and Social media integrations are available through plugins only. If you want to integrate Facebook and Instagram with your website. you have to follow the set of instructions for installing these platforms.
Webflow doesn’t have an analytics dashboard, it needs to be connected with google analytics to track the website data.
Support and Resources
Webflow’s mode of support is good. Its learning curve is more hence they have set up various resources in the forms of blogs, videos, articles, and webinars. They have beginner to advanced level courses, You can get access to all these resources in the Webflow university. If you want one-to-one support then choose email support which is available Monday to Friday. They usually respond in 24 -48 hours of intervals. You can also hire one of the experts to get assistance, Besides this, they have a forum with a big community where you can get answers, Webflow staff members are also available in the forums to provide assistance.
Webflow support
Conclusion: Webflow review
Webflow has seen tremendous growth in recent times, It’s been now compared to the top website builders. One of the reasons is that Webflow’s revolutionary editor adds tremendous design, styles, and interactions to the website without the need for coding. This allows to Brandify and designs the websites as per the requirements and Webflow is the best for web designers who work for a client to meet their design expectations.
There is a need for plenty of improvement in Webflow, they have way many plans and have higher prices. especially for eCommerce where they lack lots of features compared to another online store builder that offers better features and assists integration in very economical plans. As there is a lot of technical support needed they need to start offering live chat and phone support.
Declan Kingston mainly works around strong Data to create powerful visuals, complex graphs to make the right decision for companies. He has been working in this field for over 8 years, has a strong knowledge of eCommerce platforms and website builders. He has worked with Ethereum and Looker Data Sciences, Inc. (now part of Google Cloud).
