If you’ve read our introduction comparison article, you’ll hear how I set my 11 year old the challenge of building a website for a made up business with various different tools. Here are his thoughts on WebFlow.

User review: building a website with WebFlow

I recently tried using WebFlow to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

I went to the WebFlow website and chose to make a free site. I entered my email address and got to work. Well, figuratively, because in reality I didn’t do much work. WebFlow asked me who I was making this website for: myself, my business or a client. I chose my business. It then gave me some questions like how big my business is (starter, small business, medium, enterprise) and how many people I employ (with options ranging from 1-5 people to over 10,000).

It then asked me what kind of site I wanted. I don’t know how much relevance this ended up having, but I was given options such as blog, portfolio, e-commerce and business. I actually wanted numerous of these, but it would only let me choose one, so I chose business. Next I was asked how I wanted to make my website: with AI, from a template or from scratch. I chose AI because in past website-builders I have had bad experiences with their AI’s so wanted to test out this one.

I then had a conversation with their AI. I was asked to describe my business in as much detail as possible (to this I gave it a few ChatGPT paragraphs) and what kind of theme I wanted. I chose one I liked. But was then given something I hadn’t seen before. I could choose the structure of my homescreen. But not in a normal way. This was before I was first shown my website. I was given the choice of what I wanted on my homepage and in which order (e.g. call to action, testimonials, contact us). After some more brief choices, I was given my website.

It looked very professional and was easily customizable. But the first thing I thought when I was given my website was “WHAT THE HECK IS HAPPENING HERE?” It was very daunting. There was my website in the middle, but there were these side-bars on each side of the screen that were VERY confusing at a first glance. It all looked much more technical than I had expected.

However, there was this checklist box next to the right side-bar which really helped me. It showed me how to create a page, change my site theme, preview my site, publish it and more. I started to figure out what was going on, bit by bit. I created an about page (using AI) filled it out with my own text and images. All was going well until… uh oh.  I can only make two pages! For some reason, in the free plan of WebFlow you can only add two pages to your website. Which really sucks compared to Wix, Canva and WordPress (.com).

I was going to see if I could add a blog, but they are so strict on the whole two-page thing that a free WebFlow blog just isn’t possible. On the other hand, the experience for the pages that I could make though was quite good. I could do everything that you would want relatively easily, and preview and edit in four different device size options (which I don’t see much in other website builders).

Publishing the website was easy, and it ended up with a domain name of https://magenta-interiors.webflow.io . I could put in images of any size and they would be automatically made the right size for my site. Some things were annoying, like at one point I imported an image but it was put at the bottom of my page and it took me ages to painstakingly drag it up to its correct spot.

For free you can get 50 CMS items (dynamic content, effectively database rows that can be blog posts or portfolio entries), which you could add to your site. You can only get two static pages, but up to fifty CMS pages in the editor. In order to put CMS pages on a live site, you need the CMS plan. You also only get limited bandwidth (1 GB/month) and limited form submissions (if using forms). This really limits your ability to create a proper blog on a WebFlow site without paying.

You could, though, use basic SEO for free, such as adding an SEO title and meta description for each page on your website. You could also add alt text to your images. I was emailed a list of youtube videos that explained how to do all of this, so look online for tutorials on how to add SEO. Basic SEO features are available on the free plan once your site is published. However, for advanced SEO (redirects, structured data and sitemaps) you need to pay.

I ran WebFlow through a tool called PageSpeedInsights and got these reports. (bearing in mind this is done with just the base website, no SEO tweaks or anything done to it).

How to set a title tag in WebFlow (as it’s important for SEO):

In WebFlow you can give individual pages names. This will affect what appears in your website’s tab in someone’s browser. This is how: in your editor go to pages in the left sidebar (the icon that looks like a piece of paper) and hover over a page. You can then click the settings button to the right of the page’s name and change it. Then click save, and publish your website again. This will update the title of that page.

On the whole, WebFlow is a capable, aesthetic yet initially daunting website builder. However, you do get used to it. Its only downside is the static page limit on the free plan.