Webflow vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons)
Webflow vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons). Webflow and WordPress are platforms that are used to build and manage websites. Even the enthusiasts without prior knowledge of coding now tend to design websites/blogs. Therefore, it is essential to discuss the flexibilities and limitations of these two platforms.
What is WordPress?
WordPress has been used in the industry for more than a decade now. It is a popular web development tool among web designers, bloggers, and anyone related to web development, including newbies. More than 40 % of the websites on the internet are built on top of WordPress. Even the high technology companies are moving into WordPress nowadays. It is an open source tool that also supports web hosting. A domain name and a web hosting account are needed to develop and host a WordPress website. There are multiple WordPress hosting providers that offer easy setup and installation feasibility. You can find more details on how to install a WordPress server here.
Pros of WordPress
- Addons and plugins: WordPress has a massive collection of plugins with more than 50000 free plugins and many more premium plugins available in the marketplaces and third party providers. Google Analytics, Jetpack, SEO plugins, Elementor, SSO plugins and Akismet are some of these plugins that can be used to optimize the website, provide additional security, build attractive web pages and so on.
- Easy development: WordPress provides thousands of ready made templates and plugins which you can use to initiate the work rather than designing and developing everything from scratch.
- Convenient content management system: Adding and managing content to the site is much easier with the WordPress block editor, which acts as an initiative visual editor. You can choose from its layouts, components, and templates and use them without writing even a line of code.
- SEO Friendliness: WordPress is known for being SEO friendly. This tool ensures that you follow SEO best practices and your content is aligned with them when developing a website. Thus there is no added overhead to improve the site traffic. WordPress has many added features that help you optimize the website. Some of them are adding URLs, content categorizing feasibility, adding tags, images, image texts, alternative texts, and the ability to use built in settings to provide more visibility on the internet. In addition to this built-in support for SEO, there are many third party plugins for search engine optimization. They allow you to get more recommendations on the content you have been creating to publish. Apart from those plugins, some plugins can be used to change the appearance of the website on social media platforms, support analytic tools, etc.
- Community support: WordPress is an open source and community driven development tool that is nurtured daily. Therefore many supporting materials and help for WordPress are available in internet forums. They also have dedicated and official WordPress support forums, documentation and examples, sites such as WP Beginner, and community groups where people from similar tech stacks collaborate to offer help.
- If anyone finds the block editor boring and a bit complex, they can use drag and drop page builders. They allow users to select the required component block, drag and place it on the specific area and then edit its content. The page builders mentioned above are available as separate plugins and add ons. While most of these plugins are free, there are also paid plugins that provide more features.
- WordPress is free to use. You only have to pay for the domain name and website hosting facilities. WordPress allows you to develop websites cost effectively by offering many free plugins.
Cons of WordPress
- WordPress releases new updates frequently. Even though these updates are necessary for ensuring the security of the website, they can also cause performance and compatibility issues within the website. Thus, you might sometimes need to revert them to older versions.
- Some interesting features are offered as paid / premium plugins. So you will have to pay to add those features to your website.
- The cost of the site may increase as the site traffic increases.
- Websites built with WordPress tend to be subjected to hacking events as it is an open source platform.
- WordPress is unable to maintain the quality of code due to plugin usage. Thus, there can be more generic code, which can degrade the performance of the website.
In the next section of Webflow vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons) article we will discuss WebFlow website builder.
What is WebFlow?
Webflow vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? WebFlow has been there since 2013, and around 4-5% of the websites are built using WebFlow. It provides complete hosted websites much similar to websites developed with WordPress. WebFLow is a cloud based website development tool that is designed to be easily used by anyone without coding skills. It has become popular among web designers due to its high customization. You have to create a Webflow account and connect it to a specific domain name for developing a website with Webflow. Then you can download the site you developed and host it on a supported hosting platform.
Pros of WebFlow
- Visual interface: WebFlow comes with a visual interface that allows you to design your website. This tool is more like the photoshop editor. WebFlow also comes with thousands of features which may sometimes make the beginners struggle. You can simply click on the element you need to edit, change its properties and add new elements from the left panel.
- Designing effort: Webflow gets more plus points in terms of designing effort. It offers complete design freedom to customize the available templates, whereas WordPress provides the option of either using templates or coding them from scratch.
- Webflow provides Analytics snippets to implement certain features and integrate them with the website.
- Another benefit is the improved code quality of the website compared to WordPress.
- Webflow offers a free tier as well as a paid plan. There are two paid plans as site plan and account plan.
- As the name suggests, you just have to pay for the site with site plans. This price does not include the domain price. There are multiple site plans available with different levels of account limits and features.
- Account plans allow you to manage multiple sites within different projects. While this plan includes hosting with Webflow, you can exclude hosting if you need and host it in your location.
- Webflow offers some interesting built in features for search engine optimization, including the ability to edit the metadata of the site, such as the category tag, title tag, inclusive ULRs, open graph settings, and description using the page builder. It also offers the flexibility to customize the appearance of the website on social media. More advanced features will be available with paid plans.
- Webflow maintains a site named Webflow University, where you can find various tutorials and examples of the features available in WebFlow. They also have an email support service and AI-driven chatbot service to support their customers when needed.
Cons of WebFlow
- Webflow has limited content management capabilities compared to WordPress. It has fewer options to add categories to the content and does not natively support the comments feature. Therefore, WebFlow will be a bit hard if you are a content publisher.
- WebFlow seems to be less developer friendly, as feature integrations need to be done from scratch, involving an additional piece of work.
- A little high cost.
- CMS does have its limitations like reference fields and overall numbers.
- Having a steep learning curve for newbies.
- There is a limit of 100 for static / custom landing pages.
- Not recommended for e commerce sites.
- Advanced functionality can be a challenge for even experienced users.
Webflow vs WordPress – What’s the Difference? (Pros and Cons) Conclusion
Considering the facts discussed here, we can say that both WebFlow and WordPress are development platforms worth trying, especially if you are a newbie to the field. When comparing these two platforms, we can see that WordPress is more flexible and supports e commerce applications and content publishing at a lower cost. Anyway, it does not mean that WebFlow is a bad choice as it also has its own features and pros. Even though WebFlow is highly customizable and easy to proceed with, it is not recommended for e commerce sites as the e commerce related services are still in beta versions. Therefore, you have to choose the best platform for your application by carefully analyzing its requirements.
