If you’re one of the many businesses and individuals scouring the world wide web for reviews and comparisons of the best platforms to build your website on, chances are one of your first choices is WordPress. Granted, many web development companies, marketers, and business owners prefer WordPress as it is one of the most widely used content management systems (CMS) in the world. With more than 34% of websites in the world being built on WordPress, many people trust WordPress to cater to all their needs when it comes to web design.
However, there are alternatives out there that are similar or possibly even better than WordPress. If you’re looking for an alternative, let’s look at Webflow, one of the newer platforms getting some rave reviews from some developers and users.
What Is Webflow?
Webflow is also a CMS based within the cloud, with an intuitive website builder that allows users to create websites without writing lines of code. However, unlike other CMS platforms, the strength of Webflow really shines when it comes to the near limitless customization options it has.
Advantages of Using Webflow
While WordPress is easy to use for anyone due to its templates and themes, there are certain limits to it that you won’t be able to do unless you find a specific theme that has what you need or code it. Webflow offers full customization without relying necessarily on templates and themes. Here’s a list of Webflow’s advantages that you won’t find on WordPress.
1. Clean Code
When designing websites, designers and builders from web development companies use long strings of code to create elements on the web page. CMS platforms like WordPress try to minimize all that through their website builder. The problem is, those WordPress modules still generate excessive amounts of code behind the scenes. Using too much code can affect your website’s speed and load times, which can be quite frustrating for many customers or users who visit your site.
On the other hand, Webflow generates very simple lines of code to achieve pretty much the same outcome as those modules from WordPress. More often than not, if you look at the code of web pages designed using WordPress, they contain many unnecessary elements, unlike Webflow.
2. Site Speed
As mentioned above, having too much code can affect a website’s performance. Let’s say you want to build an eCommerce website and expect a lot of traffic once it’s up. Those long strings of code can make your customers’ user experience become a living hell. You end up losing more customers than gaining them. Many features that should be built-in on a website require additional plugins from WordPress, like caching and minifying, which then cause longer load times. You won’t find any of that in WordPress.
3. SEO
Webflow’s native SEO features are just plain amazing. Having the ability to change meta descriptions on the fly? Not possible with WordPress unless you have a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast. How about Google Analytics? Again it needs additional plugins if you want to monitor your website’s performance. The same goes for Google Search Console, which is another tool that’s crucial for marketers, web developers, and business owners.
All those features are available on Webflow and can be done natively without downloading or installing any plugin.
