Hello!
My company wants to use Webflow to build an entire website for a business with somewhat sophisticated forms, lead generation, payments, data/CMS, fancy pixel-perfect designs (with animations) that are created in Figma and need to be implemented on the website **with little-to-no coding**. A couple people think we should use **hosted** WordPress.com (not self-hosted WordPress) to do this. My past experience with WordPress tells me that it is totally not the tool for this but my experience is very old.
From the years of about 2007-2013, I set up many, many WordPress blogs for myself and paid clients. I always did it as self-hosted and never used wordpress.com or any managed kind of hosting. Being a very experienced frontend and backend developer, I still found the maintenance of a WordPress site (with plugins) to be cumbersome and messy.
Back then, PHP was crazy. WordPress… built on top of the crazy. WordPress plugins…. stacked even higher on the house of cards. Upgrading plugins? Breaks your site. Installing a new plugin? Might work, might not.
Yes, plenty of times things worked fine, upgrades went fine often but they often did not! But you absolutely need a PHP developer on call to put out any fires.
So the entire purpose of this website rebuild is that the end result is a website that can be managed (and scaled) by non-developers 97% of the time. And we want the initial build to be low/no-code. We do not want a PHP developer building a big spaghetti theme for WordPress to get this started. And then later, need a PHP developer to make any decent changes to the spaghetti theme – or to fix any custom code when a plugin upgrade breaks something.
I’m also under the impression that we’ll need to cobble together 20 different plugins, from different vendors, to get the functionality of Webflow (but in a much jankier way).
Is all of this still true and is this even possible with the hosted version of WordPress?
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I have no experience with webflow or your exact design from figma but you should look at Elementor Pro (containers) and see what you think. They even have their own cloud offering now, but I use self hosted. Having a company website that isn’t self hosted doesn’t sound like a great idea because you technically can be shut off at any time.
Well, it really depends on what kind of site you are building.
You mentioned that the designs are already built in Figma, so I will guess it’s an informational site. If that’s the case, nowadays you have Elementor which is basically a plugin that allows you to build sites using drag and drop. It’s solid, I use it on a daily basis for my clients.
Now, if you want to add extra functionalities, it’s very likely that there’s a plugin out there that does the job. And of course, the more plugins you add the higher the chance of some conflict when there’s an update.
So unless it’s absolutely necessary, I try to keep plugins to a minimum.
Please don’t use Elementor. It will make your website slow and filled with junk code. If you really want to build it on WordPress, try Bricks instead.
Webflow is great for what you want and they have a Figma to Webflow plugin
>My company wants to use Webflow to build an entire website for a business with somewhat sophisticated forms, lead generation, payments, data/CMS, fancy pixel-perfect designs (with animations) that are created in Figma and need to be implemented on the website with little-to-no coding.
I’d like to know if this exists.
It has gotten a LOT better, I was also building sites then. There are a lot of great things that can be done in WordPress, and it seems to be getting better everyday thanks to amazing contributors. It is definitely not “no code” and “pixel perfect from Figma” is a phrase that makes me cringe as a WordPress developer. You’d probably be better served by something else, it DEFINITELY won’t be WordPress.com
I’ve been using and WordPress for 15 years. It was never a “hot mess”. Some people just add too many plugins and/or don’t know their way around it!
How are you doing your website/websites now?
Honestly this sounds like a great fit for WordPress. You don’t need a php developer on call for any of the functions you want. And you’ll likely only need about 10-15 plugins but as long as you are using reputable ones you will have no issue. And don’t host on WordPress.com. That is a locked down version of WordPress and not the same as the self hosted WordPress.org option. Host it on your own VPS server through AWS or Google. You can do so through a portal like Gridpane or Cloudwaya and get a much faster site without the lockdowns of WordPress.com
I have built and managed hundreds of WP sites. It’s a good platform based on the brief you provided.
I had a taste of WordPress and went on to code my own CMS. I don’t give WordPress all the credit, wix really pushed me over the edge to this.
It’s fine. WordPress hasn’t been a hot mess for maybe 10 years. There’s been controversy about the Block editor but it’s just one of a couple dozen editors you can use. And will be able to use for years.
Otherwise?
* server configuration is a solved problem for business hosting – most controversy you hear about is about cheap/commodity tiers
* core WP is secure
* excellent plugins can be found for virtually any feature you’ll need
* same with base themes
* there are a huge number of integrations
* the core dev contributors are now supported by companies with hundreds of millions
WordPress is to programmers as HVAC systems are to nuclear engineers. But most businesses want HVAC in their buildings not reactors, and they want steady, reliable, accessible websites their staff can use basically out of the box.
Important: every large town has a WordPress meetup that’s open to *website end users.” How many React, Python, C#, etc., devs can say the same about their platform du jour?