Webflow is a visual web development platform that allows you to design, build, and launch custom websites from one single place. It’s designed to provide you with ultimate flexibility. The Webflow Website Builder entire building model is about taking advantage of the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without having to do the coding yourself. It provides much more freedom for creativity and customization while, at the same time, being suitable for those without deep IT knowledge.

Overview Of Webflow

Webflow is unlike any other website builder. Webflow offers more advanced features and customization options to “break the mold” and build wholly original sites. If you have a specific idea about how you want your site to look, Webflow can help bring it to life. It’s much more than a website builder–it’s also a CMS, hosting service, and ecommerce platform. Webflow is so flexible and versatile that any type of website can be built with it. The website builder uses a drag-and-drop interface. In addition to a drag-and-drop site editor, Webflow offers comprehensive tools to control every aspect of your site design. You can control content breakpoints to create a responsive mobile site. You can also add CSS and Javascript using an integrated development environment to create dynamic website elements. Perhaps the best feature of Webflow is its CMS. This feature enables you to store your website data in a searchable database, including images, products, digital records, etc. The CMS also makes it simple to import and deploy content across your site.

Who Should Use Webflow?

Being a complex online toolkit, Webflow allows you to create, publish, and manage your site from one place. It’s designed to provide you with ultimate flexibility. Webflow’s entire building model is about taking advantage of the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without having to do the coding yourself. The Webflow platform is aimed at a wide range of users, including:

• Solopreneurs
• Small business owners
• Freelance web designers
• Web design agencies
• Large brands and tech companies

The Webflow Website Builder differs from the other systems you might have used. It’s much more complex and feature-rich. To share my first experience working with Webflow, I have to say that it has been pleasant. It does have a steep learning curve, but it provides excellent versatility once you get the hang of things. It can build almost anything from primary brochure sites to Awwward winning, highly interactive art pieces.

In this Webflow brand review, you can learn the basics of the Webflow website, and you will be able to decide if Webflow is the most suitable website builder for you.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Rating: Breakdown

We use specific parameters that provide the most accurate results to specify the best builders present. Below are the factors we used for the Webflow reviews. We ran a series of tests within each of these factors that gave us a total score for that factor when added together. Once all six areas had a score, they were added together, giving us an overall score for the website builder. This score is reflected through the website builder’s star rating.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use Webflow)?

Webflow is getting massively popular. It’s taking over the design/dev industry and is leading the no-code tools market and changing the lives of many designers and developers.

In the following few paragraphs, we will create a website from scratch to confirm this fact.

The first step is to set up an account and fill in your information. You need to go to webflow.com and click Get Started – it’s free on the homepage.

After signing up, you will be prompted to answer a quick survey to gather some insights about the website you will be creating.

After completing the survey, you are now ready to create your website.

The editor looks similar to Photoshop and includes a lot of functions. It’s, therefore, a bit more complicated to use than other website builders. Beginners (and even advanced users) may find it overwhelming at first. However, Webflow provides many support materials, like video tutorials, articles, and a forum, to help give their users the smoothest start possible.

There are three different ways to create a website with Webflow:

1. White canvas – Starting from scratch
2. Using a template – You can choose from over 1000 different templates. Some are free, but most need to be purchased
3. Using a preset – You start with a “skeleton” layout that you can customize.

Webflow provides an easy-to-navigate interface with numerous features to unleash your creative potential regardless of which option you choose. You can build any website, from a simple blog to a functional e-commerce platform.

Getting a website off the ground with Webflow is more time-consuming than other website builders. The platform has a steep learning curve. However, I was impressed with how straightforward Webflow Website Builder is to navigate once you get used to it.

Webflow Value for Money – Pricing & Plans

Webflow pricing plans come in two different types of plans, and they serve different functions: Site Plans and Workspace Plans. All their plans are charged as per the website, and they enable you to connect a custom domain to your website. The significant difference between these plans is of hosting and custom domain connection. With the help of an account plan, you will be able to create your website, whereas the site plan enables you to connect your website to a custom domain name.

The pricing plans for Site plans are of two types: Site Plans and eCommerce Plans.

The pricing plans for Site plans are shown in the table below.

Webflow can get pretty pricey, turning some people away from using it. Webflow touts itself through its marketing as a more sophisticated web builder than others out there and offers more control to users. The prices reflect that, but an average user may not know, need or even want to use things the plans offer.

Starter Plans are ideal for beginners who want to feel how Webflow works. The Basic Site Plan is for you if you are building your first website and don’t need CMS. The Basic plan doesn’t come with the CMS features, so you need to choose either the CMS plan or a higher one if you start a blog.  The Business Plan is a good fit If your website grows fast and needs more CMS items and more form submissions. As for the Enterprise Plan, if no other plan can suit your needs, you will want to upgrade to the Enterprise plan. It is a custom plan that the Webflow Website Builder team will create for you based on your requirements.

The pricing plans for Workspace plans are shown in the table below.

Site Plans

Workspace Plans

Templates (Design Flexibility)

Webflow offers more than 1000 templates for you to choose from. The templates are very high quality; they are modern and aesthetically pleasing.  Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can save time and trouble by simply leveraging an ideal website template that fits your specific design needs.

You can filter templates by industry, free/premium, or ecommerce. It makes it simple to find a template that suits your needs. You can even preview the designs before deciding and see which ones support dynamic content.

Even though there are free templates available, most of the templates that Webflow offers need to be purchased. The price range for the templates is between $24 and $149.

Let’s look at a few of the templates that Webflow offers.

One of the most popular templates is Reflex. It is a versatile one-page portfolio website template.

It can fit any creative looking for a distinctive way to be on the web. From freelancers to agencies and companies, Reflex is a great start to showcase the portfolio with a smooth, premium touch.  Easy and quick to customize, its design will unlock a broad horizon of new possibilities to enhance the style and make it your own.

The next template we will look at is Aurora. Aurora is a creative Webflow template designed & built for SaaS, software, startups, and mobile app. It is outfitted with all the features necessary to present you and your project as fun and unique. You can pick from our ever-growing features and sections and build your SaaS empire.

Webflow offers 25+ free templates to choose from and three wireframes. There are many templates, whether you want to build an e-commerce site, a blog, or a primary portfolio site. The overall rating is 9.6.

Features and Tools

Finding a website builder with the feature you are looking for is essential. Maybe you’re looking for a website builder that uses drag and drop or lets you edit the code itself. While many website builders may look the same, their features can set them apart. Taking time to discover and compare the features offered can make deciding much easier. Webflow offers many different features, so let’s look at some.

Hosting

Webflow can host your site for you. So, you don’t need to use your hosting provider. Webflow’s hosting is packed with features that make running your site easier.

• Backups and versioning – Preview and restore your site from constant, automatic backups — or create save points to mark progress and track changes.
• Password protection protects individual pages or your entire website to protect in-progress work or restrict access.
• Custom forms – Create custom forms to collect customer data and connect them with marketing automation platforms as needed.
• SEO management – Keep your SEO in check with 301 redirects and a customizable XML sitemap.
• Integrations – Easily integrate Google Analytics, Google Optimize, and other marketing tools by dropping custom code snippets in your site template.
• Site search – Create a custom search engine for your site with full control over the look and feel of your search results page.
• Zero maintenance – Publish your site and let Webflow take care of the rest.

However, Webflow is not a domain registrar, so you can’t transfer your domain to Webflow. On the other side, you can connect any domain you own to a Webflow site by pointing that domain to the Webflow servers using our DNS records.

Security

Webflow provides secure hosting services and encryption.

A good hosting service will be fast, reliable, and secure so your site never slows or crashes. A secure web host will also provide encryption, essentially turning the data communicated from your site into secret code that the intended recipient can only understand.

Webflow is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hosting. Their robust hosting ensures Webflow’s services, and thus your website, will run reliably and be protected from security threats, cyberattacks, and even simple traffic surges. Webflow offers secure and reliable hosting for your website in-house through this service. There is a range of site plans to suit different needs, from Basic and Business up to Enterprise level, but all meet the same professional standards.

Webflow offers SSL Encryption. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protects your non-public data from unauthorized access by encrypting it. All Webflow data is end-to-end encrypted between Webflow’s servers and your site. Webflow hosting automatically includes an SSL certificate for your website, meaning your site will be secure and visibly trustworthy for your users.

It’s a security best practice for an internet user to never log in or provide personal data to a site that doesn’t have secure encryption. You can tell if a site has an SSL certificate if the URL in your navigation bar starts with HTTPS:// or displays a closed lock icon in Chrome.

Webflow’s system follows stringent security standards and has measures to safeguard your account and the website you create with it. ‍It offers:

• Personal account protection
• Website password protection
• Automatic backups

Integration Library

Webflow, while easy to learn and use, also empowers subscribers with a wide range of integrations. Widgets, plugins, visual assets — you name it, Webflow’s got it.

Using these integrations, you can add powerful features to your website without a single line of code, including appointment scheduling, customer engagement tools, and even user management options.  We’ve gone through the hundreds of Webflow integrations available, and in this Webflow review, we will go over some of the most popular you should know about for your business.

• Zapier – By adding Zapier to your Webflow project, you can connect it to over 2000 services without any code.
  
  Note

  Note: Zapier is a tool that helps you automate repetitive tasks between two or more apps—no code necessary. When an event happens in one app, Zapier can tell another app to perform (or do) a particular action.
  With Zapier, you can:
  • Take form submissions from your Webflow website, automatically add them to MailChimp then add them to your CRM
  • Create proposal documents automatically in response to a customer inquiry
  • Keep Webflow pages updated from data sources across your company
• Shopify – Ecommerce solution that allows you to organize products, customize a storefront & accept payments. With Dynamic Embeds, you can add products from your Shopify account to your Webflow sites using an embedded Shopify widget. It lets you create a custom ecommerce store without relying on a pre-built Shopify template.
• Chatwoot – Chatwoot gives you all the tools to manage conversations, build relationships and delight your customers from one place. Chatwoot ships with many productivity features and enables your employees to be more productive and collaborate within the team without switching the apps.

Social Media Integration

Social media integration is the act of using social media accounts as an extension of your marketing strategy. Social media integration helps accomplish a few key goals, including increasing your brand reach and awareness. It also encourages engagement with your website and helps build a bigger audience on social media.

It is more important than ever that businesses and brands give their audiences more ways to interact with them. Social media integration is a huge opportunity for your audience to engage and interact with your brand. It’s becoming more likely that they will share your content and promote your products. With the help of some essential tools, you’ll be able to integrate social media with your email, website, and pages on various platforms. Webflow offers some built-in widgets for social media integration and instructions on adding some more integrations.

Business Features

Webflow’s versatility makes it the perfect choice for companies that want a platform to grow with them. It is not a surprise to see a great lineup of business features as small businesses are one of Webflow’s targets.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a key promotional channel for every modern business.

One of the best tools for email marketing on Webflow Website Builder is MailChimp. With the MailChimp Webflow integration, you can add email signup to your website in seconds. Then, MailChimp’s powerful marketing automation features send a series of emails to turn that warmish lead into a customer.

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform designed and developed for email businesses to reach out to their target markets.

It is an all-in-one tool where you can manage your mailing lists, create custom email templates, and nurture and automate your entire marketing campaigns. Enterprises looking to leverage email marketing need a tool like Mailchimp to run their campaigns like a well-oiled machine.

SEO Tools

Webflow gives you some SEO headroom. Unlike other website builders, Webflow Website Builder prioritizes clean code, meaning that search engine crawlers can easily scan Webflow websites to understand the content and rank indexed pages accordingly.

The following paragraphs will cover the essential SEO features Webflow offers to its users.

• Schema Markup – Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that you place on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. These markups allow search engines to see the meaning and relationships behind entities mentioned on your site. Schema markup helps your website rank better for all kinds of content types. There is data markup for a ton of different types of data, including:
  • Articles
  • Local businesses
  • Restaurants
  • TV episodes and ratings
  • Book reviews
  • Movies
  • Software applications
  • Events
  • Products
  • Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Adding these markups to your site allows a search engine to understand what your site is about. The search engine is then able to showcase this information via Rich Snippets.

• Meta titles and meta descriptions – Meta titles and meta descriptions are bits of HTML code in the header of a web page. They help search engines understand the content on a page. A page’s meta title and meta description are usually shown whenever that page appears in search engine results. Well-written and compelling meta tags can attract more users to your website from the search engine results.

• The meta title is the title element of a web page that summarises the content found on a page. It will appear in three key places: browsers, search engine results pages, and external sites such as Facebook or Twitter. There’s one important thing to keep in mind. Search engines expect a meta title to include relevant keywords and phrases that describe what that page is about. So if the title you create is not relevant for the page, Google can choose to show a different title instead.

• The description tag is intended to summarize the content found on the web page. While the meta title is very limited, a meta description gives you a bit more space to tell users what you’re offering, and it’s an opportunity to give them a compelling reason to click through to your page.

• Indexing and Sitemap controls – A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important. There are four main types of sitemaps:
  • Normal XML Sitemap: This is the most common type of Sitemap. It’s usually in the form of an XML sitemap that links to different pages on your website.
  • Video Sitemap: Used specifically to help Google understand video content on your page.
  • News Sitemap: Helps Google find content on sites approved for Google News.
  • Image Sitemap: Helps Google find all of the images hosted on your site.

If your site’s pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of your site. Proper linking means that all pages that you deem important can be reached through some form of navigation, be that your site’s menu or links that you placed on pages. A sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites or specialized files.

• 301 directs – 301 is an HTTP status code sent by a web server to a browser. A 301 signals a permanent redirect from one URL to another, meaning all users that request an old URL will be automatically sent to a new URL. A 301 redirect passes all ranking power from the old URL to the new URL and is most commonly used when a page has been permanently moved or removed from a website. Having valid status codes that correctly signal where content has moved allows search engines like Google and Bing to keep their index up-to-date.

• Image alt tags – Alt text, also known as an alt attribute, alt description, or alt tag, is a snippet of detailed information describing what an image shows. The origin of setting alt text was developed to help the blind and visually impaired understand what an image portrays when the screen reader relays the text snippet back to them, thus improving their internet browsing experience. However, aside from that vital function, alt text is crucial in enabling your website images to be accurately appreciated and acknowledged by search engines when they analyze your content in response to a search.  Setting alt text for images is very important for SEO and is a key contributing search engine ranking factor. Alt tags provide context to what an image is displaying, informing search engine crawlers and allowing them to index an image correctly. However, not only do alt tags help search engine crawlers but not setting alt tags for your images can have a detrimental effect on the ranking of your web pages.
• Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is available for free to anyone with a Google account. Google Analytics is used to track website performance and collect visitor insights. It can help organizations determine top sources of user traffic, gauge the success of their marketing activities and campaigns, track goal completions (such as purchases and adding products to carts), discover patterns and trends in user engagement, and obtain other visitor information such as demographics.

Performance

Performance is important for accessibility and other website metrics that serve the goals of an organization or business. Good or bad website performance correlates powerfully to user experience and the overall effectiveness of most sites. When thinking about website performance, the most immediately visible factor for your site is speed. The speed page is the key metric to measure and improve your website efficiency, as it has a great impact on whether the visitor will browse a web page or not.

While website builders may not be known for their excellent speed, Webflow is no ordinary website builder. So to prove this, I checked out the platform’s speed with GTMetrix, which measures site speed and platform optimization.

Speed Page

The results were excellent: A score and “98%” on performance. The website takes 1.7 seconds to load fully, which is great, and it takes only 699ms seconds to be fully interactive and load the most visible elements. I visited the page a few times and was pleased with the page speed. We can conclude that Webflow has a great page loading speed time.

Webflow has excellent performance.

Uptime and Response Time

As there are many reasons for a website to go down, monitoring uptime and response time will minimize the potential costly downtime. To test Webflow’s uptime, I ran an automated check on a website every five minutes for seven days to ensure it was still up. It performed well. At no point was the website unavailable. Webflow is super-fast and has very good uptime. It ensures a 99.99% uptime guarantee as we pay for the premium features. Webflow websites deliver excellent performance with a good response time.

Based on the tests and the results, the overall ranking for performance is 9.8.

Help and Customer Support

Webflow offers one of the most robust self-help sections from a website builder. Webflow offers a great variety of video tutorials, detailed step-by-step guides, and courses/lessons via Webflow University. You can download eBooks on relevant topics for free. Webflow University is an online resource where you can find guides on everything from using the platform to how specific integrations work. It’s well presented, easy to search, and should generally be the first place you look if you get stuck.

There’s also a forum where questions seem to be answered pretty frequently. If you need help with something, it’s fairly safe to say someone else will have encountered the same problem. However, unless you’re on an ‘Enterprise’ plan, Webflow only provides one customer support channel — email. Webflow’s response team is on-hand 6 am – 6 pm PT, Monday – Friday, and you can expect a personal reply within 24-48 hours. You can leave a message and attach files to show exactly the problem. It isn’t favorable to customers who want their issues resolved quickly.

While Webflow doesn’t offer consulting services, it maintains a list of Webflow Experts that can help you get up and running. You can search for freelancers or agencies based on multiple criteria, including location, type of assistance provided, project type, team size, etc.

Webflow Example Sites

With Webflow’s drag-and-drop interface, it’s possible to create any type of website. You don’t need to touch a single line of code to create a stunning, custom website. The best way to see what the builder is capable of, apart from trying it out yourself, is to look at some of the many live Webflow websites that have been built.

Conversation Guide (Online Conversation Booking)

Conservation Guide is a platform where you can search for quality opportunities to engage in conservation. The website has a full-width video background and a search bar that directs you to relevant opportunities. The website is content-heavy, with maps, programs, and a blog, and handles it all beautifully.

Nomad Emporium (Online Course)

Nomad Emporium is a 12-week online course that two digital nomads created. The Webflow website is beautifully designed and engaging, featuring video, various impressive scroll effects, large text, and subtle animations. The agenda section resembles a timeline where you can hover over the numbers to explore the different modules in the course.

Lustgarten (Website for a Design Studio)

Lustgarten is an experience design studio. It has a stunning, full-width image and oversized typography. As you scroll down the homepage, you’re presented with various projects that appear to float on the page. The layout is clean and simple, and the effect relies heavily on the brand’s beautiful images and creative typography combinations.

Webflow Review: Summary

Webflow is a full-featured website builder that offers an abundance of templates that you can fully customize. For a designer with a solid understanding of HTML and CSS, the Webflow Designer may feel very intuitive. However, if you’ve never coded before, it’ll likely take some time to familiarize yourself with technical concepts like the box model to get the idea of using Webflow.

For some designers, the steep learning curve with the Webflow Designer is a turnoff. However, Webflow could be a total game-changer for your design business once you get it. The product itself is like a fusion of a website builder with a CMS. You have complete control to design and build fully-responsive websites while also being able to customize the mobile versions (unlike with most website builders). You can make sitewide changes directly within the visual editor without installing plugins.

I have to mention that Webflow is not the best choice for eCommerce websites. The eCommerce system is still rather new compared to other available solutions. Payment gateways are a bit limited with Webflow. It also does not support POS (point of sale). Webflow is also a bit limited in its dropshipping abilities. So, unless you are interested in a full e-commerce builder, Webflow is certainly a solid choice for those wanting a powerful yet accessible site builder.

Wix User Reviews

Being one of the most popular website builders on the market, Webflow has been reviewed by many users. As concluded, Webflow is generally easy to use and probably among the best choices for creating a simple website. It’s safe to say that most users have said that WebFlow University has been super helpful. Many functionalities like the drag and drop text blocks, strips, gallery templates, videos, forms, and more can be added and manipulated quickly. Webflow has many functions for creating websites for different purposes: landing pages, online stores, and others. It is easy to design websites/pages to a high level. Also really easy to scale stuff with the collections feature.

One of the cons is the lack of features for e-commerce. As powerful as it is, it’s still lacking features that competitors have. This weakness can cause you to lose a client and be unable to accept a client’s project. The second con is the interface and speed of customer support. Submitting a support ticket is a bit awkward and adds time to the submission process. Then once a ticket is submitted, you don’t get consistent response times. However, most issues will be addressed satisfactorily, so the support results are not an issue.