WordPress vs Webflow: Which one ranks better?
WordPress and Webflow are two popular platforms used for creating a simple or complex website. They are both great options since they don’t require any tech skills or an experienced programmer or developer.
No two websites are ever the same, each of them having a different set of needs. Business owners looking to start their online business have the opportunity to choose which platform is best for building their website.
Let’s dive deeper into this article to find out more about which platform is the ideal choice for you and which will ultimately rank better.
A quick review of both platforms
Let’s take a second to review the two platforms to see what they are all about.
WordPress: One of the most popular content management systems (CMS) and is used by more than 40% of websites. It’s open source and has grown a lot in the past years, receiving massive support from developers and companies around the world.
There are two versions of WordPres: .org and WordPress.com
WordPress.org is self-hosted and it’s powerful, making it a fierce competitor to Webflow.
Webflow: This is an all-in-one software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for hosting and building your website. Just like other website builders, Webflow can be a great option for WordPress because of how easy it is to set up and run.
Features are already built in, meaning no extra stress to install extra plugins or find a host. Just like WordPress, Webflow also offers a CMS site option if you want to blog or create content. For businesses looking to leverage this platform effectively, partnering with a Webflow development agency ensures expert design and functionality tailored to their needs.
WordPress vs. Webflow SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a must in today’s competitive digital landscape. A content marketing firm can help you succeed in optimizing your SEO strategy and help you choose which platform is the best to use for your website.
If you want to know which choice to go with between Webflow and WordPress when it comes to optimizing your SEO practices, let’s see what they both have to offer.
Is WordPress a good choice for SEO?
WordPress has many great advantages when it comes to easy site updates, blog integrations, and upfront costs, but limitations sometimes overtake these benefits. WordPress heavily relies on third-party tools and plugins for SEO optimization, which sometimes leads to conflicts and compatibility issues.
Default themes are known to have slow loading speeds due to bloated codes, which negatively impact your ranking. Your website’s loading speed should be no more than three seconds otherwise your bounce rate will go up and negatively impact your SEO efforts.
How successful you are with your SEO practices when using WordPress will strongly depend on how well tools are utilized since the platform heavily relies on plugins and third-party tools.
Is Webflow a good choice for SEO?
The truth is that Webflow will offer you many advantages for SEO. The platform offers many on-page optimization tools:
- Sets 301 directs for maintaining search engine rankings
- Features necessary meta descriptions, meta titles, and image alt tags
- Prioritizes indexable pages on a site
- Backend SEO execution
- Direct editing capabilities with CSS and HTML for more in depth analysis
For online businesses, the advanced SEO improvements and responsiveness of Webflow’s no-code design will outweigh a website that is code-based.
The best platform for cookie consent managers
Data compliance is at the forefront of any online endeavor due to global data privacy regulators like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) asking for websites to first obtain consent from users before they collect their data.
The real question is which platform is the best for handling cookies? Let’s find out!
WordPress:Offers many plugins designed specially for cookie consent management. For instance, CookieYes acts as a cookie consent manager, offering full support for GDPR and CCPA while remaining legally compliant.
These plugins support many more global privacy regulators other than the GDPR and CCPA. They offer customizable options, allowing you to tailor consent forms and banners for matching your website’s design needs.
Integrating a cookie consent plugin into a WordPress website is fairly straight-forward. You need to regularly maintain and update them, otherwise your website’s speed can significantly drop.
Webflow: Webflow offers native options for adding custom codes, which are great for implementing cookie consent tools and banners. It can integrate third-party cookie consent services like Cookiebot by adding their scripts to your websites.
If you are concerned about the design of your cookie consent banner, Webflow offers a variety of design tools that can match your requirements.
It doesn’t have a dedicated plugin ecosystem for cookie consent, meaning you have to rely on custom codes or external services. You will require tech knowledge compared to when you use a WordPress plugin.
Comparing pricing options of both platforms
Pricing plans play a huge role when it comes to choosing which platform is the best option for you. Let’s dive deeper to see how they compare to each other.
WordPress: Is known as a free and open-source software that you can download, install, host, and manage by yourself. However, it’s the recurring costs that can become expensive at times, which are:
- Web host costs
- Domain name registration
- Plugin licenses
- Memberships
- Themes
Theme and plugin licenses will either offer one-time membership charges or recurring charges. There’s no set price of how much you’re going to pay, since prices of themes, hosting, and domains all vary.
There is a range though for every category, so let’s dive deeper into looking at how the estimated costs add up:
- Website hosting: Prices range from $2.99-$29.99/monthly
- Domain name: $0.99-$39.99/annually
- SSL certificates: Can be free and cost up to $1,000/annually
- Premium themes: $2-200/annually and you might pay up to $1,000 for a lifetime license
- Premium plugins: $2-1,000/annually/year/plugin
This means that the total costs should add up to anywhere between $6.98 – $283 monthly.
Webflow: Pricing plans vary based on the capabilities and features offered. The higher the tier plan, the more advanced features you’ll get. Let’s take a closer look at the plans they offer:
- Free plan: Offers you a domain alongside 50 CMS items to allow you to see if the platform is the right choice for you.
- Basic plan: Starts at $18 per month and offers you a custom domain but doesn’t have any CMS you can use for blogging, so you’ll only be getting a simple website.
- The CMS plan: Starts at $29 per month with up to 2,000 CMS items that you can store in your database. You have access to up to three content editors for your blogs.
- The business plan: Offers you up to 10,000 CMS storage items, up to 10 content editors, and over 2,000 monthly form subscribers. The pricing plan starts at $49.
- The enterprise plan: custom pricing plan.
We showed you the plans, now it’s your turn to choose which one is best fit for you.
The level of security of both platforms
Any website on the internet is vulnerable to online threats regardless of the platform they are using. The whole idea is to find which platform can offer you the right level of protection.
WordPress security level: Considering that it’s available to the public, and depends on third-party themes, plugins, and hosting providers, there are security measures you need to take.
There are plenty of security plugins available. They help you monitor activities, automated backups, perform malware scans, and secure logins.
Seeing as it’s such a popular website builder, many hackers have learned how to navigate the platform and breach security.
Webflow security level: Webflow uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main host. It has advanced measures for securing how to handle payment processing, customer data, information, and more. They have strong encryption for protecting data from any unauthorized access.
Webflow has advanced built-in security features that won’t require much effort from your side, but unlike WordPress, you don’t have full control over your site’s security.
The platform that offers the most customization options
Everytime you come to making a decision about which web platform to choose, customization features are important factors. The good news is that both platforms offer many customization options, but just in different ways.
WordPress customization: WordPress offers limitless options when it comes to customization and flexibility. It has more than 50,000 free plugins to use to help you extend your site’s functionality in many ways.
If you have enough tech skills, you can make WordPress even more customizable and use your options to your advantage.
Webflow customization: If you are just getting started, Webflow offers you a range of templates that are both free and paid. However, take your time in choosing your template as deciding on a different template means you need to start from scratch again.
With Webflow, you receive more than 20 design elements that you can use for customizing your website by using the visual builder feature. Not as varied as WordPress, however.
The real winner goes to…
Now, we come down to the real question, who is the winner? Well, the real answer is there isn’t any winner. It all depends on what you are looking for.
If you’re looking for a platform that offers much better pricing options, WordPress is the way to go. If you are someone that lacks tech skills, and doesn’t want to spend too much time working on a website, Webflow is your upper hand.
If you love customization options, WordPress is the winner for you. However, if you want maximum protection and don’t want your website to be a main online threat target, Webflow is your best bet.
Once you answer what your business needs are for a website, you’ll know which platform is the right choice for you.
About The Author
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.
