History and trends overview
As you embark on the process of creating a website and write your brief down, the crucial question of “which tool should I choose?” quickly surfaces.
If you've already done some research on the subject, you can't possibly have missed Wordpress.
Indeed, among the many tools dedicated to website creation available on the market, Wordpress has been convincing more and more users since 2012.
So much so that by spring 2024, 43.2% of the world's websites were using WordPress.
This growing adoption of Wordpress and other content management systems (CMS) has caused a significant decline in hard-coded sites.
One of the main reasons for this is that fully-coded sites offer companies less autonomy to manage their content than CMS.
On the face of it, Wordpress seems to be the ideal solution: numerous customization possibilities, without being dependent on a developer for every modification. Yes, but only under certain conditions...
To customize your Wordpress website, you need to install themes and plugins. On average, a site uses 9 different plugins, but it's not uncommon to be greedy and get lost in the vast library of over 59,200 free plugins. Without code skills, for every new feature or upgrade, you'll find yourself installing an additional plugin. “So what? It's great to have so many possibilities!” you might say.
Yes, but be careful! By downloading a multitude of plugins, you expose yourself to significant problems.
Firstly, the performance of your website is likely to suffer, which can have a negative impact on its SEO due to slow loading times.
Secondly, your site's security is at stake: plugins that are not regularly updated leave it vulnerable to hacker attacks. Nearly 50% of WordPress sites are affected by a security vulnerability caused by an outdated or poorly coded WordPress plugin or theme.
Furthermore, many plugins operate on a freemium model (basic free version, additional paid features), which can incur certain costs to achieve your goals.
To get the most out of Wordpress, it's crucial to keep these issues in mind and plan regular maintenance. This mainly involves making backups, updating the theme and plugins, and ensuring that there are no incompatibilities between plugins.
If getting to grips with and managing Wordpress seems too complex, bear in mind that there are other tools available for building your website, such as Webflow. The software has grown in popularity in recent years and is increasingly seen as an excellent alternative to WordPress.
To help you see things more clearly, we've listed below the advantages and disadvantages of the two platforms, and why, after years of using Wordpress, we now prefer Webflow to create websites for our customers. Let's get started!
Webflow vs Wordpress, a 4 step comparison
Conception
Webflow
With Webflow, say goodbye to themes, extensions and manual editing of PHP to customise the design of your website, and instead benefit from an intuitive interface in the form of an entirely visual canvas. This means you can let your creativity flow freely and make modifications without any restrictions, even on e-commerce sites.
You can even bring your site to life with customised interactions and animations using the editor's advanced design tools.
For a web design or UX professional, the ability to design pages from A to Z without constraints will make it much easier to turn your ideas into reality.
On the other hand, this creative freedom can have its drawbacks, particularly for beginners. Indeed, the lack of advanced web design knowledge and the absence of frameworks and limitations can very quickly lead to a disorganised result that does not comply with web design standards and generates responsiveness problems.
It should be noted that there are more than 2,000 templates in the Webflow library, as well as additional tools and easily accessible resources.
Wordpress
Wordpress offers great design flexibility thanks to its vast library of themes and extensions. Although it can be complex to get to grips with and can vary greatly from one installation to the next, once you understand how it works you can do almost anything with Wordpress.
Bear in mind that for some design ideas you'll need to do some research beforehand to find out which plugin to install and under what conditions. When you install a plugin, you'll need to understand how it works, make sure it's compatible with your other plugins and themes and check its restrictions and cost.
Wordpress offers a wealth of design possibilities, provided you take the time to get to grips with it.
Maintenance
Webflow
With Webflow, there's no need to update your theme or manage obsolete plugins. All the design follows good web design practices in html, css and javascript, as well as benefiting from a multitude of daily backups that are very easy to restore.
This means not only that you save a considerable amount of time when it comes to maintaining your website, but also that you drastically reduce the risk of your site crashing, which is often linked to a lack of monitoring of extension updates.
Wordpress
On Wordpress, it is very important to update your extensions and themes regularly to avoid any security problems. So it's essential to set aside some time and budget for maintaining your site.
SEO
Webflow
With Webflow, everything is native, so you can easily edit all the elements necessary for your website's SEO: HTML tags (titles, meta tags etc.), redirects, sitemaps and, of course, your content.
In addition to offering you simplified control over these parameters, Webflow websites are directly built to be optimized for SEO, thanks to :
- Clean, semantic HTML and CSS feeds that search engine spiders can easily parse.
- An optimized infrastructure to improve your website's performance and loading speed.
Webflow is therefore a very complete and practical tool for SEO. However, if you have no experience in this field, you can download the Semflow application, a personalized guide to help you with the SEO of your Webflow site. However, this is a paying application.
Wordpress
On Wordpress, there are powerful extensions like Yoast SEO, to give you control over your SEO optimizations.
The advantage of a plugin like Yoast SEO is that it tells you directly what adjustments need to be made to improve your site's SEO. For example, the number of times your keyword should appear in the content of your page or the number of internal links to add to your article. It's a real guide to good SEO practice. Yoast SEO also has a premium version with additional features.
However, where you can be penalised by search engines by using Wordpress is in the performance of your site. Indeed, as mentioned above, if you're not careful about the extensions and themes you choose, they could impact the loading time of your pages, prompting you to install an additional plugin such as WP-Rocket or WP Optimize to solve the problem.
Wordpress also offers many options for optimising your SEO, as long as you install the right extensions and don't overload the loading speed of your pages with heavy scripts.
Support
Webflow
If you need help using Webflow, there are plenty of resources at Webflow University. You'll find video courses, documents, glossaries and you can even take a certification. If you have specific questions, you can also submit your requests in the support section to get help from other Webflow users or employees.
However, if you have trouble with the English language, you can also visit our website, where we've put together a few resources on the subject.
Wordpress
Due to the age and success of Wordpress, you can find a wealth of resources online on virtually any subject related to this platform. The vast Wordpress community makes countless resources available to other users, such as forums, articles, tutorial videos, etc., provided you can find use cases similar to your own.
What's more, some experienced Wordpress users have created comprehensive online courses to help you quickly master the tool and adopt best practices. Many courses are also available in French.
Webflow vs Wordpress, our experience as a web agency
Since the Coteries adventure began in 2012, we've worked on hundreds of WordPress sites. Its powerful base and easy-to-handle nature make WordPress an ideal tool for creating simple sites with easy-to-update content. Although we're convinced of its power, the subject of maintenance remains a recurring issue for our team and our customers.
This is the main reason why, since 2020, we've been using Webflow to design and build our customers' websites. Furthermore, Webflow gives us a great deal of freedom in the design, creation, animation and evolution of our websites.
A testimonial from Sébastien, our Head of Design:
‘There is no universally good or bad choice: personally, I've worked with Wordpress for many years and I recognise that it's a very powerful CMS. However, the real challenge with a Wordpress website lies not in its design, but rather in its maintenance, particularly when it's time to change the design, add new features or update pages. Taking over a website built by a third party can be complex and risky, especially when it comes to managing compatibility between existing plugins and the new plugins a customer wants. What's more, plugin updates are entirely dependent on third-party developers. For over 4 years, I've mainly used Webflow for website design and maintenance. With a fairly quick learning curve, using and maintaining websites built with this platform offers a great deal of freedom. The speed of implementation, design and modification of the pages is excellent and increases productivity when creating a website. The platform's interface is clear and intuitive, and provides a direct overview of implementation.’
As a web agency, we're constantly looking for the best tools to optimize our productivity, creativity and collaboration with our customers, in order to deliver high-quality websites.
Even if Webflow is our little favorite, the choice of tool depends above all on the objectives and needs of your web project, so let's talk!
