WordPress vs Webflow – A Tale of Two Platforms
It’s been an interesting year in website land.
WordPress had a bit of a wobble not long ago — a big online boxing match between its founder and members of the WordPress community, all on show and open source for the world to see. It seems to have settled down now.
Then this week, Webflow went through a major DDOS attack. Sites were down, leads were lost, sales missed. For a platform that’s been growing fast and winning hearts with its sleek front-end tools and “no-code” promise, it was a stark reminder that no system is bulletproof.
Webflow is a great system. It’s clean, fast, and for a lot of projects it can be a great fit (the CMS is pretty terrible). But there’s a downside: you’re locked in. You can’t just pick up your site and move it somewhere else. If Webflow goes down, your site goes down. If they change their pricing, or their features, or what you can and can’t do — you’re stuck playing by their rules.
WordPress, on the other hand, isn’t perfect. It’s a bit clunky, a bit old-school, and it’s had its fair share of security issues over the years. But there’s comfort in how familiar it is. Most marketing teams already know how to use it. The rise of no-code builders like Elementor, Bricks, Breakdance and Oxygen has made it easier than ever to create, manage and update content without needing to write a line of code. These builder tools can also be locked down by User roles which a lot of people (mostly Webflow and other purists) don't seem to understand. No one wants the client to be able to change the font to purple Comic Sans.
Where WordPress really shines is in its flexibility. I’m currently working on a custom integration with a payment provider (eWay, for those playing along at home), and the level of control and access I get with WordPress makes that possible. Webflow, for all its strengths, just doesn’t offer that level of freedom when it comes to advanced integrations.
There's a lot to be said about being comfortable with a program, Microsoft Word is a terrible program (apart from the paperclip guy) but people know where the buttons are. There’s value in that comfort, in that wide adoption and long-term stability.
Clippy the Paperclip guy
More importantly, with WordPress, if something goes wrong and you’re backing up your site daily offsite to an Amazon S3 bucket (and you should be), it’s not a disaster. You can move your site, spin it up somewhere else, and carry on. You’re not trapped in someone else’s ecosystem with no exit plan.
WordPress powers some very big sites, including Standard Chartered, NASA, Rolling Stone, Whitehouse.gov, SBS, Skyscanner, The Harvard Gazette and TechCrunch. You can find more details about a few of these projects over at the very amazing WordPress Guru's Human Made website.
So while I’ll keep building in both platforms depending on what’s best for the client, it’s a good time to remind ourselves — platforms are tools. And the best tool is the one that gives you control when you need it most.
