Buggy site, slow support

[jackwabbit (Jack Randall)]

I’ve built over 20 sites with Webflow at this point, and on my most recent site, I’ve encountered numerous bugs. Bugs that even stump community experts here on the forums. I’ve never experienced this type of behavior on any other Webflow site i’ve worked with.

I reached out to Webflow support earlier last week for help but still haven’t heard back. Is Webflow not profitable enough to hire enough support? I see you guys running ads like crazy… you’re trying to gain more customers but can’t support your current customers efficiently. What’s your response time on tickets? How long should I expect to wait before getting even a first response to my ticket, not to mention the inevitable back and forth I’ll have to go through with long response times between each contact.

@callmevlad

[mikeyevin]

I took a quick peek at your thread history and it looks like there are a couple of recent posts you made that haven’t been solved (Image Disappearing and Overflow Ignored), but these both appear to be from different projects. Would you mind linking the threads for the recent site with the issues?

I know that recently they’ve included notices that they’re operating at limited capacities due to remote working and an influx of support requests. This is probably due to a wave of new customers (as well as previous customers who are relying more heavily on the platform) now that in-person work is limited or unavailable with social distancing restrictions. I’m sure they’re doing all they can to keep up, but this situation kind of throws a wrench into conventional business operations.

Even in ideal situations they aren’t able to support every question—especially when it relates to visual or UI/UX issues as there are tons of variables here–so they lean pretty heavily on the community to help deal with these issues. They go into a bit more detail in their Customer Support Policy but thankfully there are lots of folks around here (like myself) that volunteer their time to try and assist as much as possible.

Since the Webflow platform compiles websites when they’re published, it’s possible that small development updates could cause issues that are outside of our (the user’s) control. I can’t speak to exactly what’s done to minimize these from becoming a problem, however sometimes unpublishing and republishing a project can fix weird quirks as you’d theoretically be using a newer Webflow build. Just as a disclaimer, I’m not sure exactly if this is the case, however I’d imagine that this is why strange issues can seemingly disappear between publishes without any change to the markup on a project.

Hopefully that helps clarify things a bit, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any issues (whether it’s tagging me on a specific question for the recent project or a DM) and I’d be happy to take a closer look

[jackwabbit (Jack Randall)]

Nice of you to try and help. Slow support due to the corona virus boasted from companies like Webflow seems completely bogus to me though. I’m confident their employees, especially their support department, works from a computer screen regardless of being in a physical office or not. Half of their team was already remote before this virus, so it’s not like this is something new to them.

If they can’t keep up, they shouldn’t be loading on more customers that they can’t handle.

I understand that Webflow is for the most part a “product as is” and they can’t help with all issues, especially when it comes to customization, but they should be able to support issues when it comes to bugs. A user or even community specialist isn’t able to debug for them. They should have higher priority for those tickets.

Regarding the two threads you linked from me, the only one I’m having issues with now is “Image Disappearing”. I’ve unpublished and republished along with many other attempts to fix it without luck unfortunately. It does definitely seem to be a bug.

Day 7 by the way without a response from Webflow – plenty of marketing emails from them in the meantime though.

[mikeyevin]

I can understand the frustration and I can relate to the longer than normal support times, but this is something that they’ve announced themselves as working towards improving. It sounds like the overwhelming majority of your experience with the platform has been free of issue, so thankfully this seems to be somewhat isolated.

Slow support due to the corona virus boasted from companies like Webflow seems completely bogus to me though. I’m confident their employees, especially their support department, works from a computer screen regardless of being in a physical office or not. Half of their team was already remote before this virus, so it’s not like this is something new to them.

The thing with the COVID issue is that there’s not only a change with some former in-house folks working remotely, but also a much larger number of customers (new and old) that are now able to work with the platform more than they used to. Let’s say you did freelance work in the evenings after your regular 9-5, but now you’re furloughed (or worse, laid off completely)—so now instead of a couple of hours in the evening, you’re freelancing full-time and working within the platform 6-8 hours a day. Spread this over all of their users and it can quickly become overwhelming even with all the right processes in place (I’d say this is Webflow’s weakest link at the moment).

If they can’t keep up, they shouldn’t be loading on more customers that they can’t handle.

I’d be surprised if any business is slowing down on their marketing efforts at a time when online businesses are thriving—it would be very counter productive to continued growth.

I understand that Webflow is for the most part a “product as is” and they can’t help with all issues, especially when it comes to customization, but they should be able to support issues when it comes to bugs. A user or even community specialist isn’t able to debug for them. They should have higher priority for those tickets.

Totally agree, and when issues are determined to be bugs I would hope they are prioritized accordingly.

Regarding the two threads you linked from me, the only one I’m having issues with now is “Image Disappearing”. I’ve unpublished and republished along with many other attempts to fix it without luck unfortunately. It does definitely seem to be a bug.

I took a quick peek at the disappearing image problem and will be replying in that thread with some steps you can try to hopefully address the issue. Definitely appears to be a bug though.

Day 7 by the way without a response from Webflow – plenty of marketing emails from them in the meantime though.

This relates to the idea of them continuing their marketing efforts, but the two teams almost certainly operate somewhat separately from one another. Technical support would be focused on retention (current customers) while marketing would focus on acquisition (new customers).