Webflow vs. WordPress: Which ShouldYou Choose?

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WordPress is a large platform that everyone knows about, but that doesn't make it the best website platform for small businesses. Webflow is an alternative to WordPress that offers many unique advantages to small businesses hoping to make the most of their website. Is Webflow better than WordPress for your business? This post will take a look at Webflow vs. WordPress to help you answer that question.

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What are Webflow and WordPress?

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Just so everyone is on the same page, let's take a brief look at exactly what Webflow and WordPress are. You can't understand the benefits one has over the other without first understanding what they are designed to do for your business. Both tools are designed to make it easier for people to develop websites. They are platforms upon which you develop your website without the need to understand HTML, CSS,JavaScript, or other web technologies.

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A Look at WordPress

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WordPress was first released in 2003 and is used in nearly 40% of all websites. The software itself is free and open-source. This means anyone can download it and install it on their servers without having to pay anyone. However, you do need a web-hosting service in order to have someplace to install it. Many web-hosting providers, including WordPress.com, include the software as part of their hosting packages. Over the years, its basic functionality has been extended through the use of plugins.

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A Look at Webflow

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Webflow was launched in2013 with the goal of creating a website building platform that was easier to customize than the alternatives. It allows website owners to do more advanced design for their website before they have to rely on learning web technologies or searching for third-party plugins. Webflow is software-as-a-service, with a free plan offering. The price increases as your needs grow and require you to unlock more advanced features.

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Why is Webflow Better than WordPress?  

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With the basics aside,we can now begin to discuss Webflow vs WordPress. We've already mentioned how Webflow was designed to make designing your website even easier than prior platforms such as WordPress. Let's take a deeper look at some of the ways it does that, as well as introduce some of the other benefits that you'll get when you choose Webflow over WordPress. This will help you decide the best website platform for your small business.

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●      Ease-of-use —All website platforms are designed to provide a more visual way to create a website than relying on coding it with raw web technologies. Webflow takes that a step further with a highly visual and intuitive content management system(CMS). WordPress has similar interfaces available that work on top of its default CMS, but they require the use of third-party tools to match the functionality and intuitive design that comes out of the box in Webflow.

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●      Design freedom— The ease-of-use afforded by Webflow is augmented with the power to make a design that fits your creative vision without having to rely on even more third-party plugins or be restrained by existing templates. This allows you to step away from the cookie cutter feel of the competition and create a design that sets your brand apart. The aging design of WordPress makes this impossible without relying on even more third-party plugins.

●      Site speed — In today's fast-paced world, visitors love pages that load fast. Because of this,search engines also prefer pages that load quicker than others. Webflow does three things that WordPress doesn't to ensure your pages are served as quickly as possible. It will remove any extra white space from your site's code so its footprint is smaller and it downloads faster. It will enable caching, so CSS files that are used repeatedly only need to be downloaded once, and it will automatically serve your site's content from the server located closest to the visitor.

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●      SEO — As we've mentioned, search engines love fast pages. Webflow can help your SEO in more ways than that, however. It's also built on a modern, responsive, design philosophy: something else search engines love. Further, all the settings and fields that are necessary for great SEO are exposed and easily modified right from the Webflow interface.

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●      Security —Keeping the data of you and your customers safe is of utmost importance. Both services offer free SSL to help in that regard, but WordPress needs to be well maintained to keep on top of security threats. Because it's software-as-a-service, Webflow is always properly maintained and up to date with the latest patches without any responsibilities on your part.

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●      Customer support — Because WordPress is an open-source project, support for it comes mainly from the community. Sometimes, this is great. Lots of people willing to help can get you answers quickly. But if something is wrong in the code itself,or you need a guarantee that you'll get an answer promptly, community-based support is lacking. Webflow, on the other hand, has world-class customer support on staff and waiting to help you with your problems.

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●     Code quality — Even with all the power built into Webflow, there may come a time when your developers want to take a peek under the hood and make their own modifications. Its reliance on plugins makes WordPress code bloated and hard to follow, but Webflow generates clean, easy to understand code that developers will have no problem modifying to suit what ever very specific use cases your business needs.

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How to Make the Most of Webflow

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Most of the benefits we've mentioned come automatically from using Webflow. Right out the gate,you'll have a faster, more secure website with more design flexibility thanWordPress that's backed by world-class customer support. Many of the Webflow SEO features will also be there working for you from the start. But there arestill several things you can do to fully take advantage of the SEO features that Webflow has put into place for you. The company themselves have a lengthy blog post about maximizing your SEO with Webflow. We've included some of the key points here so you can see how Webflow can help to improve your search ranking.

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●      Create a responsive design — There was a time when all websites were viewed on desktop computers, and the common resolutions of those computers were fairly consistent. That is no longer the case. Monitors come in different aspect ratios, and mobile devices add even more configurations to support. Responsive design ensures that your site is easily viewed on any device. Search engines like this will rank responsive pages more highly. Webflow creates responsive design by default, but it's worth checking to ensure your site presents its best possible self on a wide range of devices.

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●      Use a well-structured page hierarchy — The closer a page is to your site's home page,the more important search engines think it is. This is also true of your users.Putting the most important information close to the homepage and expanding out as the information you are presenting becomes more specialized will help with your SEO and also make navigating your site much easier for customers.

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●      Make use of keywords — A search engine knowing that your page is important doesn't mean much if it doesn't also know when it is relevant to a user's search. Extensive keyword research will tell you the types of things that users are searching for. By putting relevant keywords into your higher level, important pages, you are telling search engines that those pages are both important and relevant.

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●      Follow good content marketing principles — Search engines can't search for pages that don't exist. The goal of content marketing is to create more pages for search engines to search, and more opportunities to drive people to your website. Search engines are smart though, if you are putting out fluff just to ensnare visitors, they'll know. Ensure that your content is authoritative and provides useful information about the keywords you choose.

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●     Optimize URLs, titles, and meta-data — Search engines rely heavily on URLs, the content of title tags, and meta-data to tell them what a given page is about. If you are not including relevant keywords in all of these places, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to take advantage of the previous three tips. Thankfully, Webflow makes it easy to edit those aspects of your page so your engaging content, keyword research, and well organized page structure are made full use of.

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Conclusion

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At LeadFlow, we believe that the Webflow vs WordPress debate is clear. Webflow allows us to ensure that our clients have a future-proof website that won't be relying on third-party plugins as the internet landscape changes. The Webflow SEO features give us the tools we need to drive maximum growth to the clients who hire us for marketing and lead generation.

Making the most of any web tool requires experience and knowledge. We've given you a good overview of how to maximize the tools Webflow offers, but nothing beats expert guidance.We'd love the opportunity to show you how LeadFlow and Webflow can combine togive you an edge over the competition and help you to generate, and convert,more leads for your small business. If you're ready to start making more money from your website, contact us today to book a discovery session.

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