TL:DR
Creative control and speed, security, server power. Production ease.

At the end of 2020 we migrated our entire practice to webflow recommending the platform for all our clients. Here, I'll briefly lay out its appeal and advantages – Creative Control, Cost, Speed, Security –that prompted the move.

Complete Design Control

Webflow is a visual code editor meaning you can control and dictate every aspect of what you’re building. This contrasts with more turnkey builders like squarespace or wix. Which, whilst quick, are mostly template based and prohibitive if you have a particular design in mind.

Prototypes are better than images

Webflow closes the gap between design and development significantly. The designer can visually build clean coded designs almost as easily as static mock-ups. Meaning they can share high fidelity prototypes that are ready to publish far quicker than ever before.

No more extras

With other platforms like Wordpress, so much build is depending on plugins and integrations - this can run up unexpected costs and weigh down the website load time. Not the case with webflow where, with the exception, of highly specific functionalities, 9 out of 10 are native.

Security

Verizon’s 2022 data breach report claims that 43% of cyberattacks are targeted toward new and small businesses because they tend to overlook web security. Webflow deploys and updates best securities practices to make sure sites built on the platform remain resistant to these sorts of attacks.

SSL

Webflow offers free SSL certification for all of its hosted websites, and it is renewed automatically unless a custom SSL certificate is in use. The certifications are provided by Let’s Encrypt, the world’s largest certificate provider with over 300 million users.

SOC 2

The company complies with SOC 2, an auditing system created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). It was developed to ensure service providers like Webflow follow and maintain strict procedures to secure their users’ data.

Webflow’s latest SOC 2 audit was performed by KirkpatrickPrice. They tested not only the company’s security practices, guidelines, and operations but also the physical and logical access.

Plug-in

The lowered dependence on plugins that comes with platforms like Wordpress isn;t just a cost benefit. It also reduces the opportunity for vulnerabilities with third part codebases.For example the artstechnica exploit in March 2023: Link

AWS

As Webflow is powered by AWS, it benefits from Amazon’s already strict security measures. AWS has tools like Amazon Inspector and Amazon Macie, which help to detect and secure threats, and protect cloud data.

Speed

Speaking of AWS, lets talk about speed.

Webflow Hosting is powered by a combination of AWS (which also powers Amazon & Twitter) and Fastly, making their servers one of the fastest in the world. Fastly has a claim to being the fastest and most reliable serverless compute platform - CDN - available, which reduced their average web command response times from 50 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds.

Apart from this, Webflow also supports HTTP/2 – the major upgraded version of HTTP. This allows sending and receiving multiple responses in a single connection, drastically saving time.

These factors, combined with the fact webflow automatically handles all maintenance of these systems makes it the ideal place to host websites, whatever their size.

In Summary

The functions and creative conventions of the internet are forever in a state of flux, but the systems build, maintenance community, service integrations of webflow make it a clear frontrunner for most web builds in terms of creativity and reliability for the forseeable future.

^‍