Wordpress Vs Webflow Showdown 2024
TLDR
Why Webflow is the clear winner in our opinion:
- Amazing performance features, and lightning-fast hosting with hassle-free set up.
- Total design freedom for all aspects of a site.
- Rapid proto-typing, template sections shared between projects.
- Built-in animations and interactions, including Lottie animations.
- Highly customisable CMS structure - does way more than just blogs.
- Zero dependence on plug-ins (although some integrations are available).
- Worry-free development with built-in staging environment on a subdomain.
- Easily access all client projects from a single dashboard.
Design:
While the designer interface in Webflow can seem daunting at first, it’s the sheer amount of customization that can be achieved that sets it apart. Webflow allows for the creation of completely bespoke sections in a visual drag-and-drop fashion with total access and control to all styling of each element. Once you’re familiar with the designer in Webflow, it allows you to prototype new sections faster and more intuitively than any other website builder we’ve worked with.
Wordpress offers some customization options out of the box, but these are limited to fairly simple sections included with Wordpress and typically look very basic. While some creative use of CSS can transform these sites, it’s almost always more practical to use a third-party website builder to create more interesting layouts. Commonly used builders such as Elementor and Divi allow for essentially total freedom of design, but require paid licenses to get all the features.
While not an specifically Wordpress issue, you will usually notice more ‘popping’ or layout shift as the page loads on a Wordpress website as styling in many third-party builders is often deferred or added inline with the section, which can cause the appearance of elements to move around as this styling is loaded and applied by the browser. This is not an issue with Webflow as all styling is added to the <head> of each page, meaning that as the page loads, the browser already knows how every element appears. For this reason, we think that Webflow websites generally feel higher quality and more stable (although Wordpress websites made well, can achieve the same result).
Performance:
Wordpress is a common option for clients trying to keep hosting costs down, and is the go-to website for many site owners who want to keep the running cost of the website low. This is usually achieved with shared hosting plans. The drawback is that shared hosting, while cheap, can be quite slow, as there may be several other websites on the same servers which all share compute resources - some that may have significant traffic.
Wordpress websites also rely heavily on third-party plug-ins to boost performance with features such as caching, responsive image sizing, global CDN, and minification. Which are all features built-in to Webflow.
Webflow websites are hosted on a custom AWS cloud infrastructure, ensuring that your website always has guaranteed compute resources. This is all handled with a very simple process through the Webflow dashboard, you simply create a new site from the dashboard, and it’s all ready to go.
Webflow provides many performance features natively such as global CDN, ensuring that your website is loaded from a server close to where a site visitor is located - ensuring fast load speeds wherever your visitors are located. Automatically serves responsively sized images as needed to save on load time, and minifies CSS with the tick of a box.
Wordpress websites, again, absolutely can perform as well as a Webflow site with proper optimization and server set up, but Webflow makes this level of performance much easier to achieve. The cost of Webflow hosting, although higher than entry-level Wordpress shared hosting, is great value when compared to similarly high-performance or cloud-based hosting solutions.
CMS
Wordpress has been the default platform for any site that needs a blog (which is all websites if SEO is a concern for your business), and has been built and maintained over years specifically for this purpose. Many developers and writers are familiar with the relatively simple process of adding and managing content on Wordpress websites. It’s simple, but it gets the job done. However, without the use of plug-ins like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), Wordpress is only built for blog articles, and doesn’t have any other form of custom fields to display different types of content - eg. Recipes, real estate information, author bios, etc.
Webflow allows for the creation of completely custom data ‘collections’. Rather than title and content as you see in Wordpress, you create a collection in Webflow eg ‘Blog’, and add as many data points as needed, such as ‘Title’, ‘Content’, ‘Author’, ‘Images’, ‘Related Articles’. Meaning you can create data collections for any use-case much more easily.
SEO
Webflow creates a .xml sitemap by default out of the box, and also creates simple metafield page data, however advanced SEO data such as more detailed website schema need to be added manually. Although this requires some SEO know-how, this means that each page can have highly detailed and specific SEO data for search engines to read.
Wordpress has the same features out of the box, and several plug-ins available that make the creation of advanced schema slightly more convenient for those not familiar with SEO Schema.
