Can Webflow handle your next build? Lessons from one project

I evaluated a Webflow website through a real-world project: building a website that displays short video content retrieved from an external database, along with text transcriptions on the final pages. Beyond the site creation itself, I also had to set up a connection with the external system, which I implemented using the make.com automation platform. This tool allowed me to build timed, button-triggered, or webhook-based processes for managing the data flow. In this article, I summarize the key takeaways from that experience: the benefits Webflow development offers to developers, and the practical limitations you’ll need to navigate, and how Webflow performance can affect project outcomes.

Webflow is a platform that enables the development of responsive, modern websites without the need for traditional coding. It operates by translating actions taken in its visual editor directly into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript behind the scenes. The resulting code is delivered through a CDN, ensuring fast loading times and supporting high Webflow performance.

What makes Webflow stand out is its combination of visual design flexibility and developer-oriented logic. It allows for custom class management, supports animations and interactions, and includes a built-in Webflow CMS for handling dynamic content. Hosting, Webflow SEO configuration, and publishing tools are also part of the system, enabling the entire Webflow development workflow to take place within a single interface.

Although originally designed for visual designers, Webflow is increasingly being adopted by developers for rapid prototyping, small-scale projects, and marketing pages - making it a popular choice for teams working within a no-code development framework, where quick iteration and minimal engineering overhead are essential. In Webflow vs WordPress comparisons, this streamlined visual approach is often highlighted as a major advantage for lean, design-driven teams.

One of Webflow’s biggest strengths is its ability to deliver polished, fully functional prototypes in a very short amount of time. These are not just static mockups, they are responsive websites with real interactions. This proves especially useful in the early stages of a project, when stakeholders or internal teams need to evaluate an idea. Seeing a “nearly finished” version is far more intuitive and tangible than reviewing screenshots or Figma designs.

From a developer’s point of view, Webflow also offers significant time savings, particularly in the initial phases when frequent changes are expected. Thanks to the platform’s visual editor and intuitive structure, adjustments can be implemented quickly and efficiently.

One of Webflow’s core strengths is that it was designed from the ground up to support development optimized for multiple device sizes - including desktop, tablet, and mobile. Each viewport can be individually styled, allowing for precise control over how the layout adapts to different devices. The default view is desktop, which deviates from the commonly used mobile-first approach in many development environments.

Within the editor, switching between viewports is seamless, and changes can be previewed in real time to see how elements respond to each screen width. Beyond the standard breakpoints, Webflow also allows custom breakpoints to be added when specific design or user requirements call for it. This visual, real-time design approach significantly simplifies responsive, no-code development while ensuring that the final Webflow website remains both fully functional and visually consistent across all device types.

Webflow’s built-in audit system helps ensure that a site meets basic accessibility (a11y) standards and follows proper structural guidelines, such as including alt attributes and maintaining a logical heading hierarchy. Additionally, the Vision Preview feature allows developers to simulate how the site appears to users with colour blindness (e.g., red-green colour deficiency). This makes it easier to verify whether design choices and colour schemes are visible and understandable to all users. By conducting these checks, you can ensure your site remains accessible and usable for a broad audience.

Webflow allows you to create components that can be reused across different pages. Each component can have multiple variants, enabling you to manage various states or visual versions centrally in one place. Components can also accept external values (props), such as data from CMS fields or manually defined attributes - making them more flexible and easier to customise in different contexts. This approach results in a structure that aligns more closely with modular frontend development principles.

Webflow supports integration with external services like Make and Zapier, as well as the embedding of custom JavaScript code. This enables the implementation of simple business logic and automation within a no-code development environment. With Make or Zapier, you can import CMS items into Webflow from external sources or subscribe to Webflow webhooks, allowing for seamless management and integration of various processes and automated workflows.

Webflow’s built-in content management system (CMS) allows data to be stored in a predefined structure - such as blog posts, categories, or events - and used to automatically generate dynamic pages. With reference and multi-reference fields, you can also establish relationships between different content types (for example, linking categories or authors to a product). While this feature is useful, relationship handling remains limited, and the system's boundaries are quickly reached when dealing with more complex logic.

Webflow includes a real-time preview feature that allows you to test the full functionality of a site without having to publish it. Publishing itself is a one-click process. Depending on the size of the site, publishing may take a bit of time, but even for projects with multiple pages, it typically completes within a few minutes. When publishing, you can choose whether the changes should be pushed to the staging environment or directly to production. The interface clearly displays when the last update occurred for each environment, and it also flags any outstanding audit issues on the site.

Webflow automatically creates a backup after every 50 autosaves, allowing you to restore previous states of your project at any time. Although it doesn’t offer a full changelog or diff view, it provides a reliable safety net for rollbacks or error recovery.

Webflow lets you build complex animations triggered by clicks, scrolls, or hover events, such as opening a menu, revealing elements on click, showing scroll position, or toggling a sticky header. These interactions can be fine-tuned with delays and triggers, all without writing a single line of code.

Webflow offers built-in Webflow SEO features that make it easy to define meta titles, descriptions, and Open Graph tags for each page. It automatically generates a sitemap.xml and robots.txt, supports slug editing, canonical tags, and alt attribute management - alerting you when alt text is missing. These tools simplify essential SEO optimization in Webflow steps without requiring developer involvement.

As a hosted solution, Webflow delivers content via a CDN, enabling fast load times, especially for smaller marketing or portfolio sites. However, it relies entirely on client-side rendering (CSR), meaning that content is not processed server-side.

Within the Webflow CMS, a single page can only include one nested CMS list, and even that list is limited to a maximum of five items. This constraint can quickly become a bottleneck, for example, if an article content type is associated with multiple categories and authors, only one of these linked content types can be displayed on a listing page without a workaround. Webflow’s developers introduced this limitation citing performance concerns. However, third-party solutions do exist to bypass it, such as the Finsweet CMS Nest tool or custom implementations using jQuery.

The visual editor in Webflow tends to generate an unnecessarily high number of wrapper elements used purely for layout structuring. This not only increases the overall DOM size but can also make the codebase harder to read and maintain over time.

Webflow’s built-in search functionality offers minimal customization options. For example, it does not allow displaying what the user searched for or how many results were found. As a result, only a basic, minimalist search experience is achievable using native Webflow tools. However, these limitations can be overcome through third-party integrations that provide more advanced search capabilities.

When a CMS Collection contains a large number of items, pagination is necessary to ensure optimal page performance and layout. However, Webflow only supports traditional page-by-page pagination. There is no built-in support for “Load More” buttons or infinite scroll functionality. Additionally, the number of displayed items is defined by a single global setting, which means it's not possible to set different values for mobile, tablet, or desktop views - users will see the same number of items regardless of device. Implementing “Load more” or “infinite scroll” requires workarounds, such as using the Finsweet CMS Load attribute.

Webflow does allow you to define styles for various states, such as hover or focus, but these styles can only be applied to the element itself, not to its children. If the intended visual effect requires styling child elements based on the state of a parent, this must be implemented using custom code.

When filtering CMS items, only AND logic is supported, OR-based filtering is not available. This makes it difficult to create more complex queries without writing custom code.

Webflow can be a highly effective choice for projects where visual impact and rapid implementation are key priorities. For smaller websites, campaign or marketing pages, event landing pages, product showcases, or prototypes, it performs well. Its visual editor allows designers to translate mockups into working pages with precision, and in many cases, a responsive, well-structured site can be built without developer involvement - making it a strong candidate for no-code development scenarios. In the context of Webflow vs Wordpress, this visual-first approach gives Webflow a considerable edge for teams that prioritise speed and design fidelity, especially when working with a professional Webflow agency.

One of its main advantages is the built-in Webflow CMS, which supports dynamic content, while integrations with third-party tools (such as Make, Zapier, or Airtable) enable basic process automation. This proves especially useful for projects that require regular content updates, data uploads, or basic external integrations, without the need for a complex backend or custom data logic.

However, in my own project, it quickly became evident that Webflow has limitations when it comes to more advanced business logic or complex data relationships. I had to rely on workarounds in several areas, such as pagination, nested CMS elements, and search customization. While these solutions worked in practice, they required compromises and highlighted the platform’s technical constraints.

That said, overall development time was still significantly shorter than it would have been with a fully custom implementation. If the goal is to launch a fast, visually polished, mobile-friendly site where responsive design and aesthetics are the main focus, Webflow is a solid option. But if your project demands a more complex data structure, specific business rules, or fully customized frontend components, it’s worth considering a developer-focused solution like a Vue, Nuxt, or React-based application.