10 Reasons To Migrate To Webflow
At Khula Design Studio, we’ve tried and tested just about every low-code and no-code website builder out there, from Wix to Squarespace.
Why Your Website Builder Matters
When it comes to marketing assets, there’s nothing more powerful than your company website. It’s a window into your world, a critical touchpoint for your brand, and the first place most customers go to learn more about who you are, and what you do.
Running your website should be simple, easy-to-do, and cost-effective, without the need to put in a call to a local developer every time you need something updated or fixed.
That’s why migrating to Webflow, an all-in-one no-code platform, is a complete game changer for your business. You can make live, on-page edits on the fly through the frontend, and maintain your website with ease through a powerful CMS and super intuitive backend. No additional development time needed.
Clients almost never ask us: why Webflow? And who can blame them? At the end of the day, what difference does our choice of website builder make to their website project?
Quite a lot as it happens.
You might think that these days, the market is crowded with no-code and low-code website builders. And you’d be right. They all do pretty much the same things, they work in similar ways, and they each help designers create beautiful-looking web pages.
There’s also no question that a good designer can take any website building tool and make something beautiful out of it. But what happens when they hand it over to the client? How easy is it to maintain?
With over 3.5 million users, Webflow is a robust platform on which you and your team can collaborate, design, and scale beautiful and functional websites in no time.
The good news is that maintaining a professional website in Webflow requires little to no technical knowledge, so you and your marketing team have more time for work which adds greater business value.
So ultimately, you and your team can focus on what they do best.
Why Migrate To Webflow?
Let’s be honest, as a Webflow Professional Partner, of course we’re going to be singing its praises, right? The important thing for our clients is why. More specifically, why Webflow?
Here are 10 reasons why we recommend our clients migrate to Webflow:
1. Drag And Drop Simplicity
As a design studio serving small businesses owners, and solopreneurs, we want the best and most sustainable solutions for our clients. So we need web building software that’s streamlined, fast, efficient, and powerful enough to create professional-looking sites.
At the same time, once we hand it over, we don’t want our clients to get stuck down a rabbit hole of technical know-how and YouTube guides every time they need to update their website. With Webflow, they can simply drag and drop cleanly-coded HTML elements into the design, and style them.
For us, the real beauty of Webflow is that it once we’ve built the site, it’s simple for our clients to makes updates and maintain it themselves — no technical knowledge or coding skills required. So there’s also no need for them to hire an external contractor to handle ongoing maintenance, and no lengthy processes for getting changes signed-off.
Through a drag and drop visual canvas, you can custom design the dream website you’ve always wanted. In Webflow, you can easily add animations, interactions — even 3D transforms — without writing code. You can also bring in features like customizable forms, tab components, dropdown menus, background videos, HTML/CSS carousels and sliders, simple social sharing all from an intuitive no-code interface.
But these aren’t the only reasons why we recommend migrating to Webflow.
2. It’s Almost Unbreakable
Webflow’s intuitive design tools keep everything simple and safe — so nothing gets easily broken. It’s perfect for when clients need to start building-out content without bringing down their entire site.
For both our clients and us, there’s peace of mind that they can mess around with their site in a controlled environment — without worrying about breaking it. That’s all thanks to Webflow’s Staging Environment and Editor Mode, which also allows users to easily manage collections of content — such as blog posts and case studies.
Using Webflow CMS, it’s also easy to control which elements can be customized in order to prevent any unwanted breakages. Not only that, it automatically backups your website as well as saving the current version of your website whenever you restore a previous one.
With automatic site backups, or versioning, you can restore a change at the click of a button. Just in case.
3. Creativity Over Coding
If you have difficulty visualizing your future website by scanning through lines of code — join the club. Like many of our clients, our designers prefer to work visually without getting bogged down in complex coding.
For us, it means we can iterate faster in the development stage and make changes with instant visible feedback. There’s no need to code, save, and refresh on repeat.
For our clients, this means they don’t need to learn an entirely new skill set or programming language to simply update something on their site or build out content.
Best of all, we can all spend less time on the technical side and more time getting creative with content. Without having to log into the backend of your Webflow account, you can update text and images in seconds — and even your CMS content — while live on the site.
4. Stability And Reliability
If you’re someone who’s been running an older website or using less advanced web builders, you’ll be familiar with the false hope and general frustration caused by plug-ins.
Whilst on first impressions they seem to offer an answer to all your website woes, it quickly becomes apparent that plug-ins almost have a mind of their own, and need constant updating in order to run smoothly.
Often unpredictable and unstable, plug-ins need micromanaging, taking up valuable time that most of our busy clients simply don’t have. Not only that, a poorly performing plugin can lead to a negative user experience and cause untold damage to a company’s brand.
Webflow is an all-in-one solution — so there are no client-facing plugins — giving you complete reassurance and your website the stability it needs.
5. Peace Of Mind Over Security
When a website is running multiple plugins, each one comes with its own security risks. Unlike some of its competitors, Webflow alleviates potential holes in plug-in security by integrating core functionality like CMS, SEO, and forms. In addition, it only allows integrations with reputable companies who have their own high standards of security.
Webflow also locks down non-public data, through industry-standard SSL Encryption. Each Webflow site has an SSL certificate visible to users, making it safe for them to sign-in and share personal data, without risk. For complete peace of mind, all Webflow data has end-to-end encryption.
And that’s not all. Webflow provides two-factor authentication for the personal account where your website lives, as well as a choice of site-wide or per-page password protection to avoid authorized changes to content. You can even setup client log-ins with access rights to their private data.
Running in AWS (Amazon Web Services), Webflow provides protection against cyberattacks and security threats as standard. And for complete peace of mind, compliance with SOC 2 (Service Organization Control 2) recognizes a full third-party audit of Webflow’s security practices.
6. Edit On The Fly
A common concern for many small businesses and solopreneurs is how easy it is to keep their site updated once we hand it over to them.
In an always-on world, it’s important to be able to update and evolve your website quickly and easily. With Webflow Editor, there’s no need to go into the backend to make on site changes to copy and visual elements.
Webflow removes the technical barriers so that you can make edits right there on the page, through the frontend, without delving into the backend CMS or a complicated dashboard. Simply visit your site, sign into Webflow CMS, and start editing.
It really is a case of making the changes, seeing what they’ll look like, and when you’re happy, clicking to publish. Webflow streamlines your editing process, and you can even use access controls to prevent unauthorized edits, and facilitate an approvals process before edits go live.
7. Post Blogs With No Fuss
With Webflow CMS Template, it’s easy to update your blog posts with fresh content. In fact, once you’ve crafted your content, adding it to your site is as easy as filling out a form.
There are two ways to do this: on-page editing and Collections. Collections just means content types, and you can either edit existing ones or create your own in Webflow Designer.
To edit on-page, you simply launch Webflow CMS and your website, click the text you want to edit, and away you go. With Collections, you can get a little deeper under the hood, so you can easily tweak your blog’s style and fonts in Webflow Designer.
The great thing about Webflow Editor is that it lets you navigate your site using actual links — so you can make sure you’re happy with the look and feel of your content before you hit publish. There’s no need to preview because what you’re editing is what you’ll get on site.
Got existing blog content to migrate into Webflow? Not a problem. Even for content heavy sites with hundreds of blog posts, it’s a straightforward process: convert existing blog content to CSV, import it into your Webflow Collections, and it’s ready for upload.
Inside Webflow CMS, you can even structure your blog collection on-the-fly using the data in your CSV. If your import includes images, these can be mapped to an image field in Webflow CMS for automatic upload.
And should you ever need to export it to a new site, you can follow the same process in reverse.
8. SEO From The Get Go
In Webflow, SEO fundamentals are baked in as standard, and makes managing your sites’ SEO settings a breeze. Through CMS Collections, you can even automate SEO by defining meta title and descriptions using CMS fields.
Having a sitemap helps your site get crawled and indexed by search engines. Without a map, it’s hard for search spiders to discover your content. As you may have already discovered, site mapping is not a standard feature for many website builders, so it requires the introduction of a third-party site-mapping product. Thankfully, Webflow auto-generates an XML sitemap for you.
With Webflow, you can even manage settings such as your sites’ Open Graph (OG) protocol to control how your content looks when it’s shared on various social media channels.
The benefit of Webflow is that it helps you easily optimize your web pages so that in terms of SEO, it’s ready-to-go, with clean code, fast load times, and responsive design that looks great on any device.
9. Everything In One Place
If you’ve ever been confronted with the task of getting a website hosted, then you’ll be aware of the complexities involved with doing it right to ensure fast response times and crucial security updates, whilst avoiding potential downtime.
As a complete website management platform, Webflow makes managing your website easy through an ultra-fast hosting product. So you can enjoy the convenience of everything being in one place, whilst being free of the complications and slow performance associated with hosting on a local server.
Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Webflow hosting security comes as standard with regular monitoring and free SSL certificates which helps your Google rankings and builds trust with your site visitors.
After Khula Design Studio have built your site, it’s just a case of buying your custom domain, which can be done inside Webflow, selecting the right site plan for your business, and connecting your custom domain.
And the great thing is you can invite other Collaborators to work on the site, giving you complete oversight and control over who’s working on what, and who’s made changes, keeping track and approving them before going live.
10. Migration Without Complication
We’ve saved the best till last!
For Khula Design Studio and our clients, probably the most important thing about Webflow is how easy it is to import content from their current site. For clients with existing content they wish to preserve, and carry forward, this can save hours of manual ‘copy and pasting’ into the new site.
Remember how easy it is to import existing blog posts? With the help of a handy plug-in, such as WP CSV for WordPress sites, it’s possible to convert current content into CSV format and bring it inside Webflow Collections for editing and recreation.
Whether you’re currently using Wix, Weebly, WordPress or others, it’s good to know that you can migrate to Webflow with minimal fuss, and without losing precious content.
Feel The Flow
Webflow gives our designers the creative freedom they need to produce beautiful and stunning websites without complex HTML coding. At the same time, it enables our clients to walkaway with a sleek and modern website that’s quick and easy to update and simple for them to build out in the long term, without expensive maintenance costs.
Want to see what Khula + Webflow can do for your business? Book a call with Khula today.
Originally posted on www.khula.studio
Source: https://www.khula.studio/insight/10-reasons-to-migrate-to-webflow