At the end of 2020, we decided to make some improvements to our website. The main focus was to improve page load speed, SEO optimisation and a simpler CMS system for adding new projects, content and blog posts. In the last few years, our portfolio has been on the Wordpress platform, which due to its availability and many years of development experience, seemed like alogical choice. We were quite skeptical of other platforms and believed that there were no alternatives in this price range.

Like most founders, designers, developers and retailers, I have used the Covid crisis for my own progress, education and innovations implementation in our business. So, I heard about the Webflow platform, which has the ability to develop websites without knowing the code, and at the same time complete autonomy of the code if you know how to write it. We decided to invest our time, explore the platform and learn to use it.

The first project on which we tested Webflow and perfected our practical work was redrawing our existing website studio33.hr. We have saved the existing Wordpress database of blog posts and the necessary content, so that we can easily transfer it to the new archive via CMS. As a designer who has no knowledge in writing code, I manage to simply design an identical web like previous one in Wordpress, but of course I decided to correct all the imperfections of the old website and implement them in the Webflow.

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5 reasons why you could replace Wordpress with Webflow.

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1. Fewer dependencies on plugins

Plugins in some way make life easier and cheaper, because they allow free usage of existing solutions, or you can conveniently subscribe to their use, such as a plugin for contact form, plugin for subscription form or plugin for SEO optimization.

The hard truth is “more plugins, more problems”. Some plugins can make your website vulnerable,by adding extra bloated JavaScript code. You should definitely be aware of this.

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Plugins can expose security vulnerabilities

Plugins need to be updated regularly, which means you need to maintain your Wordpress page regularly. The more plugins you have, the more time you spend updating. If you do not maintain the site regularly, the site will probably be attacked by some spam. Webflow takes a plugin-less approach. If we need to work on SEO optimisation of a particular part of your web, we can do it directly in Webflow. If we want to design a custom landing page and know how to make it in one of the design tools, we can natively make it in Webflow as well. We need a subscription form, of course, Webflow forms is a thing.

Plugins slow down your website

Some plugins are designed to be"lightweight". By that I mean the code is optimized for fast loading on WordPress websites. Still, some plugins are made with a bunch of bloated JavaScript that increases the time it takes to load your web pages. Having multiple plugins like these will slow down your site even more.

The Webflow engineering team is constantly thinking about speed, so everything in Webflow is written with clean HTML, CSS and JavaScript - making sure every feature is lightweight.

Plugins can break things

Because Wordpress is open source, its updates are released regularly. Every time a new version of Wordpress came out, I hope that my site wouldn’t break after an update and won't take me a long time to fix the bugs.

When a plugin breaks your site, it can look bad to visitors and you can lose customer trust. With Webflow’s plugin-less approach, you no longer have to worry about updating your add-ons that cause problems.

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2. No need for 3rd-party hosting

If speed and security are important to you, you will probably spend a lot of time looking for the ideal hosting provider. Because there are so many hosting providers for WordPress sites, every 3rd-party hosting service wants its share of the pie. Some will sacrifice speed and reliability to give you a cheaper price. Some will claim to be extremely fast and charge more. And some will reduce the speed of your hosting based on the number of people who visit your website at a given time. None of this is ideal.

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Webflow Hosting is serverless‍

Webflow hosting is one of the main things that thrilled me when switching. Webflow hosting is designed to be serverless and is extremely fast. It has 99.99% uptime, and there is never a need to update anything on your website’s server. By using their server, you can forget about messing with the server control panel.

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3. Lowered production costs

Webflow helps reduce production costs in such a way that in most cases there is no need to hire a developer. Anyone who learns to work on the Webflow platform can create fully customized solutions for their clients, who do not need knowledge of traditional front-end development. If you have a team of developers working on product development, you can save time by removing them from most of the front-end web development work.

Webflow allows us to do whatever we want. After the website design phase, we no longer have to take time away from development team, designers can complete projects on their own.

Webflow lives on the core belief that if you can design it, you should be able to buildit.

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4. More autonomy

The biggest advantage of the Webflow is the smaller number of people needed to work on the project, which shortens the development time and the price.

More control

By using the Webflow, we can offer clients more affordable prices for the development of smaller websites, because we automatically reduce the number of people working on the project. In the same way, we ensure better maintenance in case of any updates and additional content.

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5. Experience the power of code — without writing it

Build for the modern web

The Webflow platform enables the reduction of development costs and makes the creation of web pages available to a larger number of small and medium-sized clients. By using Webflow, we enable smaller clients a faster online presence and positioning. As part of smaller branding projects with a not so big increase in budget, we can design and develop your website even faster.

This post has no intention of saying that your success depends on the platform we use to create a website. We can create and manage successful websites on WordPress, Webflow or custom CMS platforms, and each has its advantages and disadvantages.

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In the end, I can only say that we are extremely pleased with the transition to Webflow and the ease with which we manage our portfolio and other content.

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Author: Leo Vinkovic, Creative director

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