Comparison Of WordPress And Webflow

In the Webflow vs WordPress debate, there is a lot of back and forth that goes on and some businesses may benefit from one over the other. However, because it is still a fairly new and less well-known platform. Webflow often takes a back seat due solely to the familiarity everyone has with WordPress.

Payton Smith
published
August 16, 2022

Comparison Of WordPress And Webflow

In the Webflow vs WordPress debate, there is a lot of back and forth that goes on and some businesses may benefit from one over the other. However, because it is still a fairly new and less well-known platform. Web-flow often takes a back seat due solely to the familiarity everyone has with WordPress. So today, we are going to do a Comparison Of WordPress And Webflow and see why many professionals, and hobbyists, webpage designers, and managers are falling in love with this platform. Here are some of the ways Webflow is taking the lead in the race to the future of webpage creation and management and why it is the leading contender for those looking for WordPress Alternatives for Business webpages.

Clean Code

One of the most obvious and also most impactful of the differences between these two platforms is that Webflow generates clean code. This means that the code used to build every part of the webpage is simple, logical, compact, and easy to understand. It is designed to take up as little space as possible in terms of how long the lines of code are for each part of your webpage. This also means that your website will be faster to load for your visitors. This is important for two main reasons:

  • User Experience-time is money and in a world of 5G super-fast connections, no one is going to sit for long waiting for a website to load
  • Ranking on Searches- Google has announced they will begin to penalize websites that take longer than normal to load so the speed is a must. 

Connections and Boosts

Webflow makes it easier to do certain backdoor and back-end work on your webpage that your customers may never see but that can have a huge impact on the success of your website.

Caching

Caching is a common thing that happens with most user computers and mobile devices. It is the process where your browser downloads a file and doesn’t need to download the same file again. For example, you often visit the same website that has a background image and three smaller images on the home page. With that website set to cache, those images will be downloaded to your browser and your device. This makes it faster and easier to load that page every time you visit it. Webflow allows this to occur as a standard-setting on every page that is made with the platform. WordPress on the other hand, doesn’t offer this without needing to download and use an additional plug-in.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A CDN will basically work as a host server for your website files and will make it possible for them to be sent to your visitor’s device from a server that is closest to them. If you only serve local customers then this is not as important but most businesses today work on a national or even global level and for these businesses, this is absolutely vital to the success of their websites. Having a CDN will significantly improve your website experience with visitors outside your local area. Web-flow has natively integrated Amazon Cloudfront CDN. It is almost never down or having long term connection issues like many of WordPress based servers and hosts. To get something like this with WordPress it is another plug-in, another cost, another thing to worry about. And who has the time for that?
 

SEO Features

One thing WordPress has done very well is develop its focus on SEO for the websites that are built using the platform. Most websites do not suffer ranking penalties from using WordPress. But like everything in life, there is room for enhancements to be made and Webflow has made many of those improvements!

Meta Description

This is a vital and often overlooked part of the SEO building process for any webpage.

A meta description is a description that is shown in the search results right under the title of the page or web link. It is a small sentence summary of the page and its contents and is a prime place for keywords to be used to enhance search result ranking. This currently cannot be done with WordPress without a plugin to be able to edit, track, and manage your meta content. With Webflow, this is all built into the platform right from the start.

Permalink Structure

WordPress’s pages are set up to uses web URLs that have day and name in them. This may not seem like a big deal until you realize that content is king and timeliness is one of the key things that customers search for. Your posts should be updated regularly to reflect the latest trends or standards. At times you hear the term evergreen used. Content that is months or years old often is no longer relevant, so why include dates that would push your results farther down the search result listing?  Webflow uses a permalink structure that is based on the blog's title and doesn’t include the date and time markers in the linking structure.

Ease of web design

We can’t talk about how Webflow is often times surpassing its predecessor without talking about easy it is to use the platform and build professional looking webpages.

Classes

Classes refer to the way Webflow sets up elements on the page and how it groups similar-looking elements together. When we make changes to one item, the properties of the other item follow suit. For example, you have four head shots designed for your staff on the About Us page. If you change the size or look of one, all the others on that page will automatically update to match! They will match not only on the same page but they will look identical across pages. This creates consistency, helps build a more professional look, and makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site. WordPress requires manual adjustment to each individual element which is very time consuming and not always accurate.

Autosave

Such a simple and basic feature, but anyone who has lost work due to a glitch and a missed ‘save’ button press, will rejoice over the autosave feature on Webflow. Not having to worry about constantly pressing the save draft button and living in a panic until a page is finished and made life is a huge relief to many designers. Everything that is created in Webflow is automatically saved, much like Google Docs!

Webflow vs WordPress - Which One is Better?

With a comparison between WordPress and Webflow now completed, it may be easier for you to see how Web-flow can help you improve your website. In terms of what you can create and the end results you can get, any website that you can build with Webflow can also be achieved with WordPress- you will just need a lot of custom code and a lot of additional work. However, it is important to note that you can’t do the opposite. Web-flow is making changes to the way we build, design, host, and manage websites today. The speed of designing, the convenience of integrations, and easy staging makes this platform one that is incredibly hard to beat. This is especially true today where digital content is the way of the future and the competition has never been fiercer in most industries and business niches. WordPress is by no means gone but in the eyes of many web designers and managers, it is on the way out and many are making a move to the newer, more streamlined, and more applicable Webflow!