Webflow vs WordPress. What is the best choice?

Author

Webflow vs WordPress: Pros and Cons

Let’s first go over general pros and cons of Webflow vs WordPress which will cover their primary benefits and drawbacks.

‍

Webflow

Pros:

Visual design — Webflow offers a user-friendly visual interface for creating custom website designs without extensive coding knowledge, which is advantageous for designers.
All-in-one — It combines design, development, and hosting in one platform, simplifying the website creation process.
Customization — Webflow allows for extensive design and interaction customization, ideal for tailored web experiences.
Responsive — Prioritizing responsive design ensures websites adapt seamlessly to various devices.
E-commerce — It supports e-commerce, making it suitable for online stores.
Clean code — Webflow generates clean HTML/CSS code for better SEO and site performance.

Cons:

Learning curve — Beginners may require time to master Webflow's features, making it less user-friendly for newcomers.
Cost — Advanced features can be costly, impacting affordability.
Limited community — The smaller community can make finding support and resources outside Webflow’s official resources more difficult compared to WordPress.
Complexity — Overkill for simple websites or blogs if you’re not familiar with basic design/dev principles.
Export limitations — Exporting a Webflow site may require extra work for compatibility.

‍

WordPress

Pros:

User-friendly — Known for its user-friendliness, WordPress is accessible to beginners and offers quick website setup.
Vast community — A large community provides extensive support, themes, plugins, and resources for users.
Themes and plugins — Offers a wide range of customization options without advanced coding.
SEO-friendly — WordPress supports SEO optimization for better search engine visibility.
Content management — Ideal for content-focused websites, including blogs and news outlets.
Scalability — Suits various website sizes and types.

Cons:

Security — WordPress sites may be vulnerable if not regularly updated and secured.
Customization — Some advanced customizations may require coding skills, as there are no working solutions via themes and plugins.
Maintenance — You will need regular updates and maintenance of the site, which is sometimes tiresome.
Performance — Complex sites may not perform as efficiently due to a big number of third-party plugins and messy code.
Design limitations — Design flexibility depends on the chosen theme.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Onboarding and user interface

Both platforms are very good once you get to know them, but how easy is it to find your way around when you’re using them for the first time, let’s see.

‍

Webflow

In Webflow, creating an account and starting out is super easy and very straight-forward. There is even a customized questionnaire that will tailor Webflow to your needs. But the difficult part starts when you start building a website.

Yes, you can use the template, Webflow has a lot of them at your disposal, but you still need to devote a lot of your time and effort in developing all of those pages.

On the other hand, the user interface of the Webflow Dashboard is very intuitive and if you start building your website it is not that hard, as long as it’s simple.

‍

WordPress

WordPress is not that intuitive with the onboarding, you need to find the website hosting, install WordPress CMS which is not that simple, and find the suitable theme. Only then you’re ready for development.

But besides that tricky start, launching a website in WordPress is in the matter of hours, thanks to the pre-designed themes with minimal customization, while more complex websites may take longer to complete.

As we said, you need to choose a theme to be able to build your website and the tricky part is that every theme has an interface of its own and you should take it all one step at the time before everything is up and running.

The user interface might seem confusing, especially because it looks empty with not a lot of options to work with, but that depends on the theme itself. To get you going, you need to install a lot of plugins and work around a bunch of settings to create your website successfully.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Features and capabilities

They both have a lot of features, and it’s difficult to describe them all in detail, but let’s take a look at the overview of all and try to break them down.

‍

Webflow

Visual design interface — Webflow provides a drag-and-drop editor allowing users to design websites visually. This interface makes it easy to create custom layouts, typography, and interactions without extensive coding knowledge.
Web hosting — Webflow offers web hosting services, eliminating the need for users to find external hosting providers. This simplifies the website management process.
E-commerce capabilities — Webflow's e-commerce features enable users to create online stores, manage products, handle transactions, and design unique shopping experiences for customers.
Interactivity and animations — Webflow allows users to create intricate animations and interactions without writing code.
Clean code generation — Webflow automatically generates clean and semantic HTML/CSS code, which is essential for site performance, SEO optimization, and overall maintainability.
Responsive design — Webflow prioritizes responsive design, ensuring that websites adapt to various screen sizes and devices. Users can preview and fine-tune designs for desktop, tablet, and mobile views.
Content management — While Webflow is primarily a design and development platform, it offers basic content management capabilities for editing and organizing website content.
Custom code integration — Advanced users can integrate custom code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) into their Webflow projects, providing greater flexibility and customization options.
Collaboration — Webflow includes collaboration features that enable teams to work on projects together, making it suitable for collaborative design and development workflows.
Webflow University — Webflow offers extensive tutorials and educational resources through Webflow University to help users learn the platform and develop their skills.
Template marketplace — Users can access and purchase templates from the Webflow template marketplace, which can serve as a starting point for website projects.
Webflow apps — A range of internal and external apps are one of the latest additions to Webflow, further enriching the design, development, and maintenance of Webflow sites.
SEO tools — Webflow provides SEO optimization tools and features to improve search engine rankings, including meta tags, sitemaps, and clean code.
Custom domains — Users can connect custom domain names to their Webflow-hosted websites, allowing for a professional and branded web presence.
Localization — Webflow now supports localization options, making it suitable for websites targeting geo-specific audiences.

‍

WordPress

User-friendly interface — WordPress provides an intuitive, user-friendly dashboard that allows users to easily create, edit, and manage content without requiring advanced technical skills.
Content management — It excels at content management, with features for creating and organizing posts, pages, images, videos, and other multimedia content. Users can categorize content with tags and categories.
Themes — WordPress offers a vast library of free and premium themes that enable users to customize the design and layout of their websites.
Plugins — WordPress boasts an extensive ecosystem of plugins that extend its functionality. Users can add features such as e-commerce, SEO optimization, social media integration, contact forms, and more through plugins.
Blogging — WordPress started as a blogging platform and remains a powerful tool for bloggers. It includes features like post scheduling, commenting, and RSS feeds.
SEO plugins — Popular SEO plugins like Yoast SEO enhance SEO capabilities further.
Media management — Users can easily upload, manage, and embed multimedia content such as images and videos. WordPress supports various media formats.
User roles and permissions — WordPress allows for the creation of multiple user roles with varying levels of access and permissions. This is especially useful for collaborative websites or blogs.
Mobile responsiveness — Most WordPress themes are responsive, ensuring that websites adapt to various screen sizes and devices, providing a consistent user experience.
Security — While security depends on proper maintenance, WordPress has features and plugins that enhance website security, including user authentication, regular updates, and firewall protection.
Community and support — WordPress has a vast and active community of developers, designers, and users who contribute to its support network. Users can find extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials online.
Scalability — WordPress can be used for small personal blogs or large enterprise websites, making it highly scalable.
Customization — Users can customize their websites extensively through themes, plugins, and manual coding, giving them a high degree of creative control.
E-commerce — With e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce, WordPress supports the creation of online stores, including product listings, shopping carts, and payment processing.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Hosting options

They are quite different with hosting, Webflow only supports their own hosting with WordPress insists on looking elsewhere for that, but let’s take a deeper dive.

‍

Webflow

As said, Webflow’s hosting is an integral part of their platform and you can host websites built in Webflow only there, nowhere else.

But, hosting your website in Webflow is a great experience, because once your website is ready just buy a hosting plan and publish with a single click, no setup or anything, as simple as that.

They have cloud-based hosting and support all the infrastructure, server management, and updates, you don’t need to worry about any of that.

Their infrastructure is optimized for speed, security, and reliability. It includes features like global content delivery (CDN), SSL certificates, and regular backups to enhance overall performance and security for your website.

Scalability is one of the strongest points of Webflow's hosting because it scales automatically to accommodate traffic spikes and growing websites. This is especially important since it ensures a consistent user experience during a high traffic.

The only downside of Webflow hosting is its price. It costs at least $23 per month to be able to attach custom domains and have a CMS option.

Webflow pricing plan table with text and numbers on a white background

WordPress

The downside of this is that WordPress doesn’t actually provide any hosting services, you need to cover that externally on your own. There are a lot of options, some are better than others, so you’ll have to explore this topic on your own and find the best solution to fit your needs.

It’s not easy to connect it either, not a one click solution you’ll have to work more than that, but it might get you cheaper than Webflow one, we’re just not sure if you'll get enough value for that.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Pricing options

Webflow and WordPress are very different when it comes to pricing. Generally speaking, they are both free to use but WordPress is always free. You’ll need to buy a plan for Webflow at some point, but let’s break it down and see.

‍

Webflow

As we said, it’s free to use and experiment, you can even publish a website on their test subdomain webflow.io, but there are too many limitations with a free plan other than that.

Webflow pricing in general is not a simple topic and might require a post of its own since there is a pricing plan if you want to use Webflow as a freelancer, an in-house team, or a Webflow agency, there’s a difference in these workspace plans.

Webflow pricing table with bunch of text and numbers on a plain white background

Webflow pricing table for freelancers and agencies with a bunch of text and numbers on a plain white background

WordPress

WordPress is free to use, there is no pricing plan for that matter. You need to pay for your domain and website hosting, install WordPress and you’re free to use it as much as you want.

But, if you’d like to have a bigger and more complex website you’ll need to install more plugins and use premium themes, where all of these options are not free at all.

For example, a popular WordPress builder “Elementor” starts at $59 a year, but the price can go as high as $399 per year. Then you might need some SEO plugin, Yoast is one of the popular choices that is free to use but for better features it can cost around $99 per year.

Not to mention bigger websites, e-commerce, forms, and more might need more features and plugins that are premium to make it work as you need it to.

Overall, yes, WordPress is cheaper and more affordable then Webflow, but it really depends on what you’re going to use it for.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Templates

Both Webflow and WordPress have templates, WordPress probably much more since it’s longer in the game, but what platform is the right choice for you? Let’s find out!

‍

Webflow

Webflow has around 2,000 templates. The minority of these templates are free, but most of them are paid and some of them cost over $100+. The good news is that all of the templates are one-time payment from where you get lifetime ownership.

Once you buy a template, you can play around with it in Webflow Designer mode with higher customization options then WordPress has to offer.

We need to understand one thing, templates are not Webflow’s primary focus, they are just there to help you get started. Because all those customization options in Webflow are the things you want to use this platform, not the pre-made templates.

Most of the clients prefer not to use templates and lean towards custom solutions.

Webflow template images with text and numbers on a plain white background

WordPress

Templates or themes, how many people call them in WordPress are something why WordPress is famous for. Some of them, like Elementor or Divi, grew so much that they became website builders of their own, but are just using WordPress on top of that.

Many WordPress themes are free, there are paid versions too. It is assumed to be over 30,000 WordPress themes right now with the average price at $57.

Builders like Elementor or Divi, allow for a high level customization compared to a standard WordPress theme.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: SEO performance

This is everyone's concern when building a website, since that determines if your website will be easy to find or not. Let’s see the difference.

‍

Webflow

Webflow is well known for its SEO capabilities. You can optimize everything from title tag, meta description, image alt text, and more. It has a great interface for customizing SEO for each page and for the whole website in general that is super easy to find and work on.

It automatically generates a sitemap, which is essential for search engine indexing. While Webflow doesn’t have a lot of plugins for SEO like WordPress does, it still has a lot of options to optimize it and when they introduced Marketplace last year, we’re starting to see apps for SEO as well.

What pushes Webflow in front of WordPress for SEO is its hosting, because it provides fast page loading speed which is important for page ranking and enhances user experience. Its hosting provides an automatic SSL certificate which secures connection and CDN integration which helps distribute website’s content globally for faster loading times.

Another thing that is important for SEO is a clean code that Webflow has. This way search engine bots crawl and index your website more efficiently, because the website code is organized and has no errors.

All of these are tools to use at your disposal, but what makes the difference is to know how to use them. That’s why having a Webflow SEO expert is important to have to help you configure and optimize your website.

‍

WordPress

WordPress is well known for SEO tools. It provides a wide range of SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, and more. These tools offer options like title tags, meta description, and image alt text.

But since WordPress is very long in web development it has a large community and extensive documentation, making SEO-related resources and advice easy to find. With these tools you have full control over your website’s SEO, allowing you to do all customization and advanced SEO techniques.

But despite all of these things, you can find a lot of problems when it comes to SEO and here is a list for some of them:

Performance issues — WordPress websites can sometimes suffer from performance issues, especially if not optimized properly. This can lead to slow page loading times, which can negatively impact SEO, as site speed is a ranking factor.
Security concerns — WordPress is a frequent target for hackers due to its popularity. If you don't keep your WordPress installation, themes, and plugins up-to-date, your site could be vulnerable to security breaches.
Hosting choice — Unlike Webflow, which offers its own hosting solution, you’ll have to find one for your WordPress site. Choosing a poor hosting provider can have adverse effects on your ranking.
Plugin overload — While plugins can enhance the functionality of your WordPress site, installing too many can lead to conflicts, code bloat, and performance issues. Additionally, poorly coded or outdated plugins can introduce vulnerabilities.
Theme and plugin compatibility — Not all WordPress themes and plugins are SEO-friendly or compatible with each other.

‍

Webflow vs WordPress: Support, Community, and Learning Material

It’s no secret that WordPress has a very large community and lots of resources due to their longevity in web development, but Webflow has to offer a lot of free high-quality lessons created directly by Webflow which makes the learning curve way more efficient. But let’s take a look in detail.

‍

Webflow

Customer support — Webflow offers customer support through email and a help center, and it provides priority support to users on higher-priced plans. However, some users have reported mixed experiences with the responsiveness and effectiveness of Webflow's support.
Community — While Webflow has a growing and active community, it may not be as extensive or mature as WordPress's community. It can still be a valuable resource for getting advice and sharing experiences, but it may not have the same level of depth and diversity as WordPress's community.
Learning materials — Webflow provides a library of tutorials, webinars, and courses on its platform. Things like Webflow Blog, Webflow Forum, and the very popular Made in Webflow page helps quite a lot. These resources are helpful for users looking to learn how to use Webflow effectively. However, the availability of learning materials may not be as vast as what's available for WordPress.

‍

WordPress

Customer support — WordPress is an open-source platform, so it doesn't provide direct customer support. However, because of its widespread use, many web hosting companies and theme/plugin developers offer customer support for WordPress users. The quality of support can vary depending on your hosting provider and the specific themes or plugins you use.
Community — WordPress boasts one of the largest and most active communities in the web development world. There are countless forums, blogs, and social media groups dedicated to WordPress. This vibrant community makes it easy to find solutions to common problems, get advice, and stay up-to-date with the latest developments.
Learning materials — There is a wealth of learning materials available for WordPress users, including official documentation, video tutorials, eBooks, and online courses. The availability of learning resources makes it accessible to users of all skill levels.

‍

Conclusion

As we can see, there is no one solution that fits all, you’ll need to decide on which platforms work for you and your needs.

Webflow is a great choice if you are focused on a visual, design-centric approach for your website. Their intuitive interface makes things easy and inspires designers to build anything. It provides clean and efficient code, and has great options to boost SEO performance. Integrated hosting solutions simplify management of your website’s infrastructure.

WordPress, on the other hand, provides a great ecosystem that helps you in finding your answers without a problem. It’s a great choice for many website types, from simple templates and blogs, to complex e-commerce websites and web applications. Their vast variety of themes, plugins, and broad community provides limitless possibilities for customization and growing. With the right optimizations and plugins, WordPress can make a great website no doubt.

Since we’re a Webflow Agency and one of the experts in this field, we understand how powerful this tool is and we’ll have to side with Webflow on this. It is not perfect for everyone, that’s understandable, but do your research, see which tool is the best for you and then pick the right option for your project.

Don't want to miss anything?

Get weekly updates on the newest design stories, case studies and tips right in your mailbox.