Webflow has become annoying to use

Which tool do you think is the best for building sites? Which one do you like the most?

That’s a great question, and while I answer it, I want to clarify that the reason I am quite invested in this thread is because I wrote multiple articles on the subject of modern web development and their infrastructures, which cover tools like Shopify, Webflow, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace but also apps like Notion or Coda which can be used to make small apps.

So my answer to your question is that If the website does not involve ecom, then Webflow has been the choice until now, but simply because all other alternatives are worse.

However, if the website does include ecom, then the go-to is Shopify by far, and Shopify is actually the only “Website” builder app that has properly adopted the concept of “Block based architecture,” which has been a fundamental concept of modern software development for several years.

Block-based architecture starts by first properly defining core technical elements in your app as separate “services.”

For example Your define how styling works at its core through a recognizable API structure, you define how data is managed, how it is created (Your in’s) and how it is used (Your out’s), etc… Once each service is properly defined on its own, using a recognizable “API” pattern, you can start by linking them together as “Blocks” (Services).

Here is a 2021 article written by a Notion dev that I have been referencing for years, its pretty incredible: The data model behind Notion's flexibility

This adoption has now allowed Shopify to revamp their UI several times by making it much simpler every single time with no bugs and it has allowed for a much faster and much more dynamic way of creating websites as well. I mean, I can set up an ecom webiste with Shopify in 10 minutes from a template, while doing something similar in Webflow takes me 3 days at least.

And I can still go and edit the raw code files in Shopify, so if I do want to change the “Plain css” I can do this in plain code rather than finding the property value somewhere in the UI.

Webflow, on the other hand, has been stuck in this phase of having a product that continues to develop based on the originally implemented structure. Devs consistently use “quick fixes” to add new features, making it frustrating and illogical. I am pretty sure they have a hard time maintaining their roadmap or to consider scaling it.

This has been an interesting long read. @Max_Pauwels you bring up very valid and interesting points that should give pause to every Webflow user about how they are building their websites. However I also think that the learning process is one of the best things that Webflow offers. Using Webflow you can go from simply wanting to no-code a website to learning the basis of HTML CSS and then go on and learn Javascript, then other libraries and frameworks. Someone in the community once said that Webflow is the gateway drug to code. So I think that people on your position, that has been developing websites for a long time in a traditional way, but needs to use products like Webflow, should take a look at https://webstudio.is/. If I’m not mistaken, Webstudio was created by a former Webflow engineer, and uses Tailwind for the css. I’m going to stick with Webflow because like others suggested it is not about the tool but how you use it. So far I think Webflow is going in the right direction.

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@Pablo_Cortes here is another rant on an issue I’m facing: Webflow - Finitra - 5 February 2025 | Loom if anyone has a good explanation on why this is set up like this, I’d love to hear it.

This issue probably tops it all, though: Webflow - Finitra - 5 February 2025 | Loom. I am unsure if this is a technical bug, but the logic is truly incomprehensible.

:eyes: just able to watched the Loom very briefly, my apologies… First of all, I think Webflow’s native elements should stay as basic and unstyled as possible. That way, users have maximum flexibility without needing to remove or override default styles. Webflow is handling this the right way.

As for the little icons, there’s probably a historical reason, they were just born that way. But you can easily remove them and replace them with your own design. Btw, they scale like fonts.

CMS slider ← ya, that’s a shame :sweat_smile: (There are workarounds, but not so easy of coz)

Webflow doesn’t manage styles across breakpoints for you. Every element simply follows CSS behavior, so it’s on you to style them correctly.

That said, Webflow is super intuitive. There are no tokens, and the Designer doesn’t force everything into absolute positioning like Framer or Wix. Users don’t need to learn a whole new set of terminology.

Of course, it has its limitations—like not being optimized for stacking classes the way Tailwind is (don’t get why so many people overuse utility classes btw) But once you get familiar with the tool, understand its logic, and know its behaviors and limitations, you’ll get proficient with it.

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Webflow splits the styling at 1440px and Desktop, it cascades up from 1440px and down from Desktop.

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@Max_Pauwels, man I feel your pain and frustration, but it is all your fault. You jumped into Webflow to do something with it, without knowing how to use it. You were trying to build a slider with the pagination component, anybody that has been using webflow for a while knows that that is not possible. So, yeah the slider component is very limited, but why don’t you use Swiper instead, that is very easy to implement with Webflow, specially for someone with a code background. Even if you must use the Webflow slider, you can make it work for almost all cases, if you get familiar with Webflow. Also the way Webflow works with breakpoints is by cascading down from the base breakpoint to tablet, landscape mobile and portrait mobile, any custom breakpoint you add will be its own styling, just like if you add media queries for that custom breakpoint. So I can see how frustrating your experience with Webflow is but if you take some time to learn the basics, and with your coding background, you will love Webflow in no time.

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Hi All,

I really appreciate the responses. I’ll write a brief answer to all the messages above but will make this my last as it’s taking quite a bit of my time. I ended up finishing that website after 6 days.

Anthony:

Regarding styling: well, the thing is that Webflow provides the element styled already (These aren’t default HTML styles), so why don’t they take on the project’s Webflow directly? This would be the most logical way to approach this across all their “Elements.” It shouldn’t be thoroughly styled, but what’s the point in styling it using a completely different CSS than the project’s? I tried changing their sizes with font sizes and did not get to work, however.

On the topic of pure vanilla HTML and CSS again, you’ve mentioned several times how Webflow’s editor follows pure CSS; while that is true to some extent in a very limited way, very few devs write vanilla CSS when developing websites anymore, and the same goes for HTML. We’ve long switched to more dynamic ways of writing this. For example, When you use React as a frontend framework, You could compare this to Webflow’s editor when it comes to “Logic thinking how to use code effectively”. This is what React does. It’s simply a tool that allows us to write much less code with much less boiler plate, but when the website goes live, all this React code is “Translated” into HTML and javascript in order to be displayed in the browser. And the same goes for Tailwind, NextJS, all other modern frameworks and technologies. So what is the point of being so stuck on “Vanilla css”? This directly goes against what everyone has been doing for years. And it does not offer more flexibility or make things more dynamic, it simply results in cluncky, illogcal dev flows that actually enforce devs to style in line.

SoCal Macel: I guess I should have done more research, as I thought that first “Icon” applied styles across all breakpoints. They could make this more obvious though, I mean, there is absolutely nothing that highlights that this first view applies styling to a specific breakpoint only.

Pablo:

I built my first Webflow project 6 years ago, back in 2019. I am not a Weblflow developer, nor a Webflow agency, but needed to use it for work.

Note that I have a vast technical background and am invovled in writing new technical libraries and apps, writing technical documentation and articles every single day. There are countless things in Webflow that I’ve developed with teams or at least written about countless times. (File mangement, General UI, Core Framework, Design systems, etc).

I’ve covered countless times how such systems should be designed and implemented in modern frameworks, and I am immediately surprised when I use a product that strongly emphasizes general dev and UX standards.

That being said: Webflow’s implementation and UX directly contradicts all modern standards and I can confidently say that many of the feature implementations are some of the worst I’ve seen.

As far as I am aware, Weblfow markets their product as a “Website designer and CMS” for developers to use and launch in “Minutes”, not as a product that can only be used by devs with years of vanilla css experience and an additional 100 hours of training on how to use the Webflow UI?

This is kind of what it boils down to:

  • Can you start using web flow as a “Business owner” or someone that needs a website with no “Code” background: No

  • Can you immediately start using Webflow as a “Frontend dev”? No

  • Can you start using webflow as more of a “Full stack dev” with general frontend knowledge? No

And if you do decide to go the web flow route as a frontend-focused developer, you’ll end up spending hours trying to learn an absurdly illogical UI for a framework that uses 0 modern web standards, claims to be a visual “CSS” tool, and is completely stuck in its own limited ecosystem.

I could write a book on how frustrating Webflow’s implementations are simply based on how they disregard entirely general standards, and it doesn’t always involve “Editor” specific rules. For example:

The file management system.

They should have implemented this system as being the root of file selection and organization, but instead, it’s different everywhere it’s used and incredibly buggy. When building that last website, I had to import and export the exact same files 3 times for countless stupid reasons like: Adding a file in a cms item does not involve the file system. Importing files through a CSV import does not work, so you’ll have to import all of them manually. There are several technical bugs related to file names; for ex: files can’t contain spaces or special characters. They don’t throw errors when this happens; you’re just stuck in the editor or experience a crash. (I have personally designed such file systems over 5 times with various teams, and literally every single one of these issues was addressed in the first version).

Data: There is absolutely no logic in how data works in web flow, which is ridiculous considering websites and apps today heavily rely on data and dynamic behavior based on it. This includes everything from illogical data types to data being “consumed” differently absolutely everywhere to not having a common way of simply “Looping” over data.

The entire UX during development: Want to add a new image on a page? The process goes like this: Click the little settings icon > Opens a menu on the right > Click on the update image button > Drop the new image or select it (Ensure you don’t have spaces or symbols in file names as it will otherwise crash) > Now reselect the image in the UI > Re click the little setting icon > Re-open the right menu > Re click the update button > Now select that newly imported file > DONE.

If you’re familiar with Shopify, this is all handled in a single flow. You want to update an image? Click on the element > Drop the file. > DONE. And this isn’t just “Great” UX, this is standard. Webflow’s way of handling these issues is plain bad.

I could keep writing about this, but these are all examples of things that could be addressed with logical infrastructure planning and thinking of their different features as their own “Services” especially since devs use these every few minutes.

By addressing these core things, I could have completed this website I just built in 2 hours instead of 6 days.

All right, that’s my last message in this thread though; if some of the things I mentioned sound foreign, here are a few amazing articles that cover these topics in a little bit more depth that I have been referencing for several years:

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Hey @Max_Pauwels, look I understand your frustration, but again, you are complaining about Webflow because you couldn’t adapt to the task at hand. I agree with you that Webflow is not perfect and that there are other solutions out there that work way better. However, for what it is, Webflow gets the job done. You might not like it, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work or that minimal ux/ui/technical flaws render it obsolete. Many frontend developers and full stack developers have started working with Webflow because of its demand. Entire agencies have been created by full stack developers that decided to adopt Webflow as a platform because of its potential and success. So all I’m saying is, Webflow is not for everyone and it is not perfect, but if you adapt to what it can offer, you can create remarkable products, specially if you have a development background.