I wanted to do this for a long time, and finally got the time to do it. I designed the same site on Webflow, Wix’s EditorX, and a code editor, in this case the Superhi’s code editor. The design itself comes from one of Superhi’s free courses. If you haven’t heard about Superhi yet I highly recommend you try one of its courses or their intro book www.superhi.com. I completed the design trying to keep everything the same in all three editors when it was possible, and to the best of my capabilities with a time limit of 4 hours for each visual editor, after I was done I ran a Lighthouse report on each editor’s published sites. Here are the results.
Webflow was the easiest visual editor to use and the one with the best overall scores among the three editors.
I got to admit that I suck at EditorX, however it wasn’t hard to use and to design visually with it, in my opinion, it is very counter intuitive if you are looking for basic CSS elements. In some cases it took me five or six clicks to achieve something basic like padding or underline. It comes with a lot of options, but they are not very obvious for its users. Graphic designers would probably like it a lot.
Superhi’s code editor was really easy to use and it has great UX. I would recommend it to anyone that wants to code a site from scratch.
Anyway, I hope this was helpful. I recommend everyone to try taking a design from a pure code editor to Webflow, it gives you a lot of insights about the magic behind Webflow.
This is rad, thank you so much for throwing this together I’m pretty surprised how bad the performance rating is for EditorX but I’ve found that Wix in general scores pretty low in this category.
I’m glad you like it Keiran. I got the idea from my own experience with an old site I had on Squarespace, that once I moved it to Webflow it was like four times faster and way more responsive. I’ll try to do a new site comparing WordPress and Squarespace with Webflow.
Im glad you like it man. I was surprised too, I didn’t optimized the pictures, some of them are really heavy, like almost 3MB, so maybe EditorX could work better with smaller size pictures, but still, they have a long way to go to be even close to Webflow.
Really well done for testing and investing time in building the site 3 times on different platforms.
But…
What you are presenting here is a far from the truth.
A 20-second test shows that Editor X’s performance is great!
When I performed the tests for all the platforms I took a screen shot of the results and left the links so everyone can test them for themselves. I have no intention to favor one platform over another. I just posted the results as they were. I just did another lighthouse test and this is the result for Editor X.
Far from your 99 performance right? So I welcome everyone that doubts my results like you do to use the links and perform the tests on their own. My verdict is that Editor X is improving, but it still has some catching up to do with Webflow.
Let’s start with the fact that you’re right. I did not notice the date the post was published and it was probably relevant at the time.
Regarding the results: Lighthouse is known as inconsistent. Need to perform some tests and take the average.
I did 6 tests per site. Webfolw site: Average 81. Editor X site: Average 93. Superhi site: Average 74.
You may get different results in different places in the world (Although it does not seem to make sense to me).
@Matanya Lighthouse might me inconsistent so everyone should perform their own test and don’t rely on someone else’s results, right? So I welcome everyone looking for the best platform to use the links and test each platform on their own. Now, I also welcome everyone that currently uses Webflow to try Editor X, in my opinion, that will clarify all your doubts.
Lighthouse performance test is based on your own bandwidth. A more standardized test is https://web.dev/measure/ which will emulate a 3G network and some CPU slowdown and every sites are far from getting 100. Personally, I don’t see how you’d get 100 on this test unless you have no assets, just pure HTML.
It sucks google thinks we’re all on 3G networks especially with their Core web vitals update.
Thank you for doing this! This helped me save a lot of time doing further research. I know I made a good choice with Webflow… nice to see it in a comparison I can relate too! TY!!
Lighthouse. That is what is running at https://web.dev/measure. They bake the throttling in for the test. Something that you can opt out of when you run Lighthouse on your own or run it as a node app in the cloud. Also since they are running Lighthouse up in the cloud, latency would be reduced versus you testing from a normal endpoint (your home has more hops).
just to stir the pot a little here is a comparison from today (wix v webflow).
I’m pretty surprised how bad the performance rating is for EditorX but I’ve found that Wix in general scores pretty low in this category.
