Webflow vs WordPress for Small Business: Which One Actually Gets You Customers?
I build every client site on Webflow. You should know that upfront. I'm biased, and I'm going to explain exactly why.
But I'm not going to sit here and tell you WordPress is garbage. WordPress runs over 40% of the web. It's been around for two decades. Some of the best sites on the internet run on it. The platform itself isn't the issue — it's what happens to a WordPress site after a small business owner has been running it for 18 months with no developer on call and a dozen plugins they forgot they installed.
That's the version of WordPress I keep inheriting. And it's the reason I stopped building on it.
Every conversation about Webflow vs WordPress for small business eventually comes back to plugins. WordPress people love plugins. Need a contact form? Plugin. Need SEO tools? Plugin. Need to stop getting hacked because you installed too many plugins? Believe it or not, plugin.
I took over a site last year — local service business, maybe 12 pages — running thirty-one plugins. Thirty-one. One of them was a slider that hadn't been updated since 2021. Another was a WooCommerce install being used exclusively to power a single contact form. There were two different security plugins that were basically fighting each other. The site took almost six seconds to load on mobile and the owner had no clue because it loaded fine on his office desktop with a hardwired connection.
That's not an unusual situation. That's just what happens to WordPress sites over time. Every problem gets solved by adding another plugin, and nobody ever goes back to clean things up.
Webflow doesn't have plugins. At all. And I know that sounds limiting, but for a small business site — a plumber, a chiropractor, a landscaper, an HVAC company — you don't need plugins. You need fast pages, a contact form, and content you can actually edit. Webflow does all of that natively.
I bring up page speed a lot with clients, and I can tell some of them think it's a nerdy technical thing that doesn't really affect their business. But it does. Directly.
Google uses page speed as a ranking factor. That's documented, not speculation. And beyond rankings, think about how people actually find a local service business. Someone's water heater breaks at 9pm. They pull out their phone and search "plumber near me." Google shows them five options. They tap the first one. If that site takes four or five seconds to load, they don't wait — they hit back and tap the second result. That's a lost customer, and it happened before your site even finished rendering.
WordPress speed is a project. You need good hosting (not the $4/month shared plan), a lightweight theme, a caching plugin configured correctly, image optimization, and the discipline to not install every plugin that promises to fix something. Get all of that right and a WordPress site can be fast. But "can be fast if everything goes right" is a different promise than "fast by default."
Webflow runs on AWS with a global CDN. Images get optimized automatically. The code output is clean because there's no theme framework or page builder wrapping everything in nested divs. I don't do anything special to make Webflow sites fast. They just are.
If I hear "but WordPress has Yoast" one more time.
Yoast is fine. Rank Math is fine. They give you a field to type your meta title and a field to type your meta description, and then they score your content with a little traffic light system. That's helpful for people who've never thought about on-page SEO before. But that's not what gets a small business ranking in their service area.
What gets you ranking is fast load times, a mobile-friendly site, clean heading structure, good content that actually answers what people are searching, and backlinks. The CMS platform you picked is pretty far down the list. I've seen well-optimized WordPress sites outrank sloppy Webflow sites. I've seen the opposite too.
The difference is the floor, not the ceiling. Webflow's floor is higher. A brand new Webflow site with default settings is already fast, mobile-responsive, and outputting semantic HTML. A brand new WordPress site with a random theme from ThemeForest, Elementor, and six plugins is starting from a deficit. You can get it to a good place. It just takes more work and more ongoing attention.
Webflow gives you native control over meta tags, Open Graph data, 301 redirects, sitemaps, and canonical URLs. No plugin needed. For local SEO specifically — schema markup, location pages, service area content — both platforms can handle it. Webflow just requires less duct tape.
This is really what made me switch. Not design tools, not speed, not SEO features. Maintenance.
WordPress is open-source software running on a server you're responsible for. WordPress core puts out updates. Your theme developer puts out updates. Every single plugin puts out updates. And you need to apply those updates, because skipping them is how sites get hacked or break when PHP versions change.
But applying updates isn't risk-free either. I've seen a theme update break a homepage layout. I've seen a plugin update disable a contact form for over a week before the client noticed — a week of potential customers submitting a form and getting no response, going to a competitor, and never coming back. That one still bothers me.
Webflow has none of this. No software updates to apply. No plugins to maintain. SSL certificates renew automatically. Backups happen automatically. Security is handled at the platform level. The site I launch on day one is structurally the same site running six months later. Nothing degrades.
For my clients — people running service businesses who want to think about their website approximately zero hours per month — that's the whole selling point. I'm not going to call you about a security patch. You're not going to wake up to a white screen. It just works.
Most of my clients don't write daily blog posts. They update a phone number once a year, change a service description occasionally, maybe swap out some photos. For that, Webflow's Editor is perfect. You click on the text on the actual page, change it, hit publish. Done.
WordPress's Gutenberg editor is better for writing long-form content — blog posts, articles, that kind of thing. If you're planning to publish consistently (and you should be, for SEO), the WordPress writing experience is mature and well-designed. Webflow's CMS blog editor is functional but it's not as polished for pure writing workflows.
That said, most small business owners are publishing a blog post once or twice a month at most. Webflow handles that just fine.
People say WordPress is free. And the software is free. But running a WordPress site isn't.
You need hosting. Quality managed hosting — the kind that doesn't make your site slow — runs $20–$60/month. Cheap shared hosting is part of the reason so many WordPress sites are sluggish. Then you've got premium plugins. A forms plugin, an SEO plugin, a security plugin, a backup plugin — you're looking at $150–$300/year in plugin subscriptions for a basic setup. Add a premium theme at $50–$100. And if you're paying someone to handle updates and maintenance, that's another $50–$150/month.
Webflow CMS plan: $23/month. Hosting included. SSL included. CDN included. Backups included. No plugin costs. No maintenance fees.
Run the numbers over a year. It's closer than most people expect, and Webflow usually wins once you factor in the maintenance hours — whether that's your time or money you're paying someone else.
I'm not going to pretend Webflow is the right answer for every project. It's not.
If you're running a real e-commerce operation — hundreds of products, complex shipping logic, subscriptions, inventory management — WooCommerce on WordPress is more capable than Webflow's e-commerce. It's not close. Shopify is also worth considering there, but that's a different post.
If you need a membership site, an online course platform, or a community forum, WordPress has plugins for all of that. Webflow doesn't.
If you're publishing at high volume with multiple authors and editorial workflows, WordPress is built for that in a way Webflow isn't.
And if you're starting from zero dollars and you're willing to learn the technical side yourself, WordPress has a lower barrier to entry. You'll pay for it in time, but the upfront cost is minimal.
If you run a service business — you're a plumber, a roofer, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, a landscaper, a law firm — your website needs to do three things: load fast, show up on Google, and get people to call you. That's it.
Webflow does all three with less complexity, less maintenance, and less ongoing cost than WordPress. You get a custom-designed site instead of a modified template. You get clean code and fast hosting without configuring anything. And you get the peace of mind that your site isn't going to break because a plugin you forgot about pushed an update at 2am.
That's why I build on it. Not because it's trendy or because I get paid to promote it. Because my clients' sites work, they stay working, and I can focus on actually growing their business instead of babysitting their platform.
If you're weighing the decision for your own business — or you're stuck on a WordPress site that's giving you headaches — I'm happy to look at what you've got and tell you whether a switch makes sense.
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For most small service businesses, yeah, I think so. Faster sites, way less maintenance, and you're not relying on a stack of plugins to do basic things. WordPress can get you similar results — it just takes more effort to get there and more effort to stay there.
It's actually about the same or less when you're honest about what WordPress really costs. WordPress itself is free, but hosting, plugins, and maintenance aren't. My clients on Webflow spend less per year than most of them were spending on WordPress once you add everything up.
Yeah. The design gets rebuilt from scratch (which is usually a good thing — most people switching are doing it because they've outgrown their current site) and content gets moved over. For a typical 10–30 page small business site, it's a straightforward project.
It is. Native meta tags, redirects, sitemaps, clean URLs, fast hosting, clean code. I've moved sites from WordPress to Webflow and seen ranking improvements within a few weeks just from the speed gains. The platform gives you a strong technical foundation — the content and link building strategy is up to you (or your SEO person).
Yes, and it's the most common thing new clients are surprised by. You edit content directly on the page — click the text, change it, publish. No backend dashboard, no worrying about breaking the layout. I usually do a 15-minute walkthrough after launch and clients are handling their own updates from there.
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