I’ve been a WordPress designer for over a decade. I’ve watched Webflow grow from a curiosity into one of the dominant tools in modern web design. Half my designer friends have moved across to it. Some of the work being produced in Webflow is the best small-studio work in the industry right now.
I haven’t moved across. I’m still building everything in WordPress.
I want to write about why honestly, because most “WordPress vs Webflow” pieces are written by people with a financial stake in convincing you of one or the other. I have a stake in WordPress. I’m trying to set that aside and tell you what I genuinely think.
The case against me
Let me make the case against my own position first, because it’s the strongest argument and I want to be honest about it.
Webflow produces faster sites than off-the-shelf WordPress. The build experience for designers is genuinely better — it’s closer to designing in Figma and lets you produce more polished work in less time. The hosting is integrated, which removes a category of problem that WordPress designers spend disproportionate time on. The community of Webflow agencies is producing some of the most distinctive work in modern web design, particularly in the brand-led marketing site space.
If I were starting today and had no platform allegiance, I would seriously consider Webflow as my primary stack. The argument for it is real. The argument against it is mostly inertia, sunk cost, and client base.
That’s the honest framing. Now let me explain why I haven’t switched anyway.
1. WordPress fits my client base better
The bulk of my clients are small business owners. Tradespeople. Consultancies. Charities. Local services. These are not design-led brands. They want a website that works, that’s easy to update themselves, that can be picked up by another developer if I get hit by a bus, and that doesn’t lock them into a platform-specific contract.
WordPress is the right answer for this audience. Open source. Massive ecosystem. Any developer in the country can take over the project. Cheap to host. Simple to migrate. The client owns it without ambiguity.
Webflow is a brilliant tool for design-led brands willing to pay a premium for a better experience. It’s a less obvious fit for a plumber in Worthing who wants to update his prices without phoning anyone. The Webflow CMS is genuinely good but it’s not as quick to teach a non-technical client as the WordPress block editor.
If my client base were primarily startups, agencies, and brand-led businesses, my answer would probably be different.
2. The total cost of ownership is real
Webflow’s pricing is fine for the agency or designer. It’s less fine for the small business client.
A typical Webflow site for a small business runs $39 a month for the basic CMS plan, which is roughly £370 a year. Over five years that’s £1,850 in hosting alone, before any maintenance, design changes, or platform-fee increases.
The equivalent WordPress site can be hosted for £5 to £15 a month. Over five years that’s £300 to £900. The cost difference is real money for a small business owner.
Webflow defenders will point out that the hosting includes things WordPress hosting doesn’t (faster CDN, integrated SSL, no need for caching plugins). True. But for a typical small business website, those benefits don’t justify a 3-5x cost differential to the client.
If I’m building a £15,000 marketing site for a Series A startup, the platform fee differential is irrelevant. If I’m building a £1,500 site for a local business, it matters.
3. My existing portfolio gives me leverage on WordPress that I’d lose on Webflow
I’ve built a custom WordPress starter theme over years. I’ve refined it. I know its quirks. I can build a new site faster on it than most designers can build on a fresh Webflow project, because I’ve already solved the problems I’d face on day one with a new tool.
If I switched to Webflow tomorrow, the first six months would be slower. My margins would shrink because I’d be relearning processes I’ve already mastered. The work would be worse than my current standard until I’d built up new muscle memory. None of these are reasons not to switch — they’re reasons it would be expensive to switch.
I think this is honest about why a lot of established designers haven’t moved. Switching tools at scale is genuinely costly. The case for switching has to overcome that cost, and for me it hasn’t quite.
4. The platform-lock-in argument is more nuanced than the flag-wavers admit
WordPress fans love to bang on about platform lock-in. Webflow is a “walled garden”. You can’t take your site with you. You’re at the mercy of one company’s pricing decisions and platform changes.
This is partly true. It’s also partly true of WordPress. If you’re using a heavy page builder (Elementor, Divi), you’re nearly as locked in as you would be on Webflow. Migrating an Elementor site to a different builder is genuinely painful. The “open source” argument loses some force when half the WordPress sites in the wild are functionally locked into a specific builder.
The honest version of the argument is that well-built WordPress sites are portable in a way Webflow sites aren’t. Badly built WordPress sites are about as locked in as Webflow. The platform matters less than the build approach.
I build WordPress sites in a way that’s intentionally portable — custom theme, block editor, minimal plugin dependence. That’s a real advantage over Webflow for me. It’s a smaller advantage over WordPress sites built differently.
5. What might change my mind
I’m not closed to switching. Specifically, the things that would push me towards Webflow are:
- Webflow CMS becoming as easy for non-technical clients as the WordPress block editor. It’s getting closer. It isn’t there yet for the kind of client I serve.
- The price gap closing. If Webflow’s basic plan dropped to £15-20 a month, the cost-of-ownership argument would soften considerably.
- A change in my client mix. If my work shifted toward design-led brands, agencies, and startups, the case for Webflow would strengthen.
- WordPress doing something genuinely stupid. The Matt Mullenweg / WP Engine drama in 2024 was a wake-up call. If WordPress as a platform becomes unstable politically, Webflow’s controlled stability becomes more attractive.
None of these has happened to a degree that’s pushed me over the line. Several of them are creeping toward it.
6. What I think most “WordPress vs Webflow” debates get wrong
Most pieces on this topic frame it as a binary choice that all designers should care about. They shouldn’t. The honest take is that the right platform is a function of three things — your skill set, your client base, and your business model — and the answer is genuinely different for different designers.
If you’re a brand-led studio building marketing sites for design-conscious clients, Webflow is probably right.
If you’re a generalist freelancer serving small businesses with mixed budgets and varying technical comfort, WordPress is probably right.
If you’re an in-house team at a SaaS company, you probably want Webflow for marketing pages and something else (often React-based) for the application itself.
If you’re a developer-leaning designer who values code-level control, neither — you’re building in Next.js or similar.
The platform isn’t an identity. It’s a tool that fits some shapes of work better than others. The strong opinions you read online are usually proxies for the writer’s business model rather than universal truths.
7. The long view
I’ve been wrong before about platforms. In 2014 I assumed Squarespace would never be a serious tool for professional designers. It now is, in some niches. In 2018 I thought Wix would cap out at hobby sites. It now powers some genuinely competent small business sites. I’ve watched Webflow grow from a niche tool into a serious challenger to WordPress in some segments.
The pattern across all of these is that I underestimated how much these tools could improve and overestimated how much WordPress’s incumbency would protect it. WordPress isn’t going anywhere — it’s still the platform behind most of the internet — but its share is being eaten in specific segments by tools that are genuinely better for those use cases.
The healthy version of being a long-time WordPress designer in 2026 is acknowledging that. Not switching defensively, not switching reflexively, but staying open to the possibility that the right answer for a specific client might not be the platform I’m most comfortable with.
I’ll probably still be building most of my sites on WordPress in 2027. I won’t be surprised if I’ve moved a chunk of my work onto Webflow by 2028. The honest answer is that I don’t know yet, and I don’t think anyone should be too confident about predicting where the tools land.
If you’re a client deciding
If you’re a small business owner trying to decide which platform your new website should be built on, the practical advice:
- Pick the designer first, not the platform. A great designer on a good-enough platform will produce better work than a mediocre designer on a great platform.
- Ask the designer why they use what they use. The answer should be coherent. If it’s “because I always have”, that’s a flag.
- Think about who’ll be updating the site after launch. If it’s you, choose the platform whose CMS you find easier. Try both — sign up for Webflow free, install WordPress with a basic editor, see which one you can navigate without crying.
- Think about what happens if the designer disappears. WordPress is easier to hand over to a new designer. Webflow is increasingly viable but the talent pool is smaller.
None of this is a wholehearted Webflow recommendation or a wholehearted WordPress recommendation. The reality is more boring than the LinkedIn debate suggests. Both tools work. Pick the one that fits your situation. Don’t worry too much about being on the “wrong” side of an industry argument.
If you’d like to talk specifically about a project — and you’d like a freelance designer who’ll be straight with you about whether you should hire him at all — the contact page is the place. If your project is more of a Webflow shape than a WordPress shape, I’ll tell you and recommend somebody who’d do it better.
