| Webflow standout features | |
| Hosting | Fast, scalable, and secure; built to handle millions of page views per day with <100ms response time. |
| Webflow editor | Classic visual editor for intuitive design in a familiar user interface. |
| Integration options | Built-in integrations for email, social media, and analytics. |
| Website builder templates | 100+ responsive free/premium templates optimized for performance and aesthetics. |
| Security | Advanced, state-of-the-art security mapped to industry standards. |
| Webflow University | Offers videos, courses, and boot camps to get your site up and running. |
| Support | Email with typical replies within 48 hours and helpful content available on Webflow University. |
What Are the Pros and Cons of Webflow?
Webflow stands out as a professional website builder with powerful features ideal for most users and website types, but I experienced some drawbacks with this website builder, notably pricing and lackluster tech support. Consider these benefits and drawbacks of choosing Webflow as your website-building platform.
Pros
- Popular in its niche: Webflow powers around 0.6% of all websites spanning major industries such as consumer electronics and technology, business and consumer services, finance, science, and education.
- Lots of integration options: Webflow integrates with multiple marketing, analytics, automation, scheduling, e-commerce, email hosting, social media, membership, payment processing, and localization tools.
- No need to code: You can create your site without coding knowledge, and Webflow will auto-generate HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Developers still have the option to edit code directly.
- Pre-made, optimized, and editable templates: Webflow’s site templates are professionally designed and optimized for performance and aesthetics. You can edit the templates to build a highly customized website without worrying about background code.
- Hassle-free WYSIWYG website editor: You can create and edit your site however you want without running into constant issues or wasting time switching between the editing screen and previews, ruining your design flow. It’s a virtual sandbox in which you can change nearly everything from texts to layouts and spacing.
Cons
- Comes with a learning curve: Webflow’s complex interface, coupled with its dizzying array of design options, can intimidate beginners. It’s a thorough platform but not the easiest to grasp.
- Expensive pricing plans: While Webflow includes hosting in its paid plans, the cost may not be accessible for some budgets.
- No live chat or phone support: Webflow’s tech support team is good, but only available via email on weekdays. It took 24 hours to get a response to queries.
- Limited plugin library: You can build a basic site in Webflow without adding plugins. While this makes the platform simpler to use, it’s also more limiting because you’d have to set up an integration with other platforms or embed your own or third-party code to extend your site’s functionality.
1. Intuitive visual editor
No matter the template you choose, Webflow’s visual editor will help you finish customizing your site.
The intuitive Editor offers control over your site and many options, which are great if you’ve built websites before. If you’re a beginner, the array of options can feel overwhelming, so you might first struggle with the learning curve. If so, take advantage of the large library of Webflow University video tutorials accessible right there in the designer workspace. I found these resources useful as a guide to navigating the interface
There are no complex dashboards or a messy, disconnected back-end CMS—just your site and the content you’re modifying on your page. I found the on-page editing pretty intuitive, and you can access various panels to manage dynamic content, forms, page settings, and your Editor account on the Editor toolbar.
The editor made it easy for me to optimize each page of my site for search with meta descriptions, Open Graph settings, URLs, and more. You won’t need a plugin to manage and update your site’s SEO settings. It’s nice having this capability native to the platform, considering the plugin limitations elsewhere.
You can invite other collaborators, like your teammates or clients, to edit your site and see what changes were made and by whom before publishing your site.
2. Powerful designer
With the Webflow Designer, you can build and design your site structure, look and feel, and add content, animations, interactions, and custom code. This way, you can create a fully functioning website, prototype, landing page, or presentation with clean, semantic, web-ready code.
The Designer is an online app/hosted program, so I found it easy to design in my browser and immediately see the results. Plus, it’s faster to push updates and improvements and collaborate with your teammates or clients when editing the site.
You can access the Designer via the Dashboard, from Project settings, or the Editor, and create your site using features such as:
- The left toolbar and panels to structure your web project.
- The Canvas, where you can select and move elements around and edit the content on the page in real time.
- The top bar offers a host of settings and tools to save, publish, or export your site.
3. Beautiful, responsive, and customizable templates
Webflow offers over 100 free or premium templates, which you can customize without coding. Responsive templates are ideal for personal or business use, ranging from one-page to complex multi-page sites to help you jumpstart your website process.
Beyond the free templates, I found a huge, ever-growing selection of paid templates. There is some great design work for the Webflow platform and the template offerings available for purchase span a wide range of categories, design aesthetics, color palettes, and functionality. Certainly worth exploring these options if the design isn’t your strength and your budget allows it.
Once you choose a template, it will be added to your dashboard and all its pages as a brand-new project. From there, you can customize the template to your liking.
The major downside is that Webflow templates come as-is. So if you’re changing an existing site or project, the template won’t automatically replace its design and layout. I recommend previewing a template in the Designer before purchasing it so you can ensure it fits your design needs.
If you’re a freelancer or designer, or just enjoy creating templates, you can sell your templates in the Webflow Template marketplace.
4. Fast, scalable, and secure hosting
Besides offering an intuitive, no-code website builder, Webflow provides fast, scalable, and secure hosting via its Tier 1 Content Delivery Network, Fastly, and Amazon CloudFront. I experienced blazing-fast load times in testing for this review.
Along with fast load times, Webflow’s hosting service offers features, such as:
- Custom 301 redirects, which make it easy to change a page’s URL and redirect and preserve the old URL’s SEO juice.
- Daily website backups/versioning to automatically save site backups and restore with a click.
- Staging site and production databases so you can publish with confidence.
- Instant software and site upgrades.
- Per-page password protection.
- A custom domain name.
5. Security
Webflow maps its security program to ISO 27001, CIS Critical Security Controls, and other industry standards to improve its website builder’s security. The company also complies with CCPA and GDPR regulations, works with certified payment processors like Stripe, and has additional built-in security features, including:
- Backups and versioning
- Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- Single Sign-On
- A free SSL certificate
- Role-based permissions
Encryption is used throughout Webflow to protect communication between Webflow users, databases and their backups, and PII and non-public data from unauthorized success.
Customer data such as names, usernames, email addresses, payment history, invoices, and more are stored in the Webflow cloud. You can request all your data or have it deleted, provided it’s not subject to an investigation or legal hold.
Webflow also uses third-party payments, analytics, email, and hosting service providers, which undergo thorough due diligence checks and tests to ensure your data is secure. These providers can only access the minimum data required to perform their processing duties.
As part of its focus on providing top-notch security, Webflow updated its TLS hosting configuration in August 2022 to support TLS 1.3—the most secure modern browser encryption protocol.
What Are Some Good Alternatives to Webflow?
This Webflow website builder review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some suitable alternatives to the platform.
Here’s an overview of how Webflow compares to alternative website builders our Digital team recommends:
Frequently Asked Questions About Webflow
What is Webflow used for?
Is Webflow Really Free?
What are the Benefits of Webflow Hosting?:
Is Webflow Good for SEO?:
Does Webflow Have Email Hosting?:
How I Rated Webflow
For this Webflow website builder review, I considered its features, design templates, ease of use, and pricing. I tested the free Site plan, which has most—if not all—the useful features to set up and build a simple site.
It’s difficult not to recommend Webflow because of the many things it gets right—templates for everyone, no code necessary, insights and advice, and add-on apps to enhance and get more out of your site. In short, the platform can be an absolute powerhouse in the right hands.
However, the platform isn’t for everyone. Its overwhelming array of design options is too much of a tax for beginners, and its price points may not be accessible for all budgets.
Experienced designers may find a good home with Webflow because it’s packed full of features and customization options, a robust editor, hosting, e-commerce website builder option, and a free plan to test run the platform before committing to paid plans.
That said, if you just need a simpler website builder for beginners, you’ll want to go with Wix, Zyro, or Squarespace instead.
