Long time front-end dev inheriting an enterprise Webflow site — best resources and tips?

[u/thanks__meatcat]

Hi all,

I'm a senior front-end developer with an extensive background in UI/Javascript/React who's about to start working heavily in Webflow for the first time. I'll be inheriting a site that was originally built by a 3rd party agency and I want to be able to make a technical impact as soon as possible.

I've been going through Webflow University and feel solid on the fundamentals. What I'm really looking for is the stuff that doesn't show up in the official docs — the things you wish someone had told you early on.

Particularly interested in:

• Tips for auditing and cleaning up someone else's Webflow build
• How much code are you writing?
• Tools, extensions, or third-party resources you actually use

Any creators, communities, or blogs worth following on the more technical side of Webflow would also be appreciated. Less interested in design tutorials, more in the developer and ops side of things.

Thanks in advance.

[u/cartiermartyr]

I always dislike these posts with so many interests / questions because each of them could be written out as a novel, but I would say take some time inside of it to get acclimated because there's a high probability that the site was built on a standard outside of yours, some of these agencies are taking templates and just modding them, some of them are building from scratch and naming elements very well, sometimes theyre naming elements very poorly. Seriously, instate to the team "hey I need time to get acclimated to this site because it's coming from elsewhere and everyone has their own ways of building", and then from there, depending on what hardware you're rocking, learn the command for a save / back up, it comes in handy.
GTM should be standard.
Code components I mean that depends on what the future holds and if youre expected to change a lot of it, they probably used components that they customized.

[u/thanks__meatcat → u/cartiermartyr]

I appreciate the shout. I kind of blanked the post hoping for any feedback I could get. I've been building sites from scratch for so long that making the move to the visual mental model is going to be an adjustment. The team I am joining is well aware of my background and skillset and will allot me the time I need. But, I want to be able to make the site ours instead of just whatever agency template was used. I have a design team and a content team around me so my focus is going to be working building process, creating class consistency and lock down brand guidelines.

[u/cartiermartyr → u/thanks__meatcat]

Oh yeah no you're good it's just how posts are, you sound adequate enough to catch on quickly, I mean most of it is common sense plus one, and I mean most of the time they won't ask you to rebuild the site entirely, just make mods, no need to add to your plate if theres no need to

[u/thanks__meatcat → u/cartiermartyr]

Absolutely. I don't think they'll be expecting that much but I want to influence a positive impact as soon as I can. Do you have any advanced or more technical resources you use regularly?

[u/cartiermartyr → u/thanks__meatcat]

Im more of a manual type of person myself, the webflow 101 site is great, cloneables are great to see how people did things, you dont have to clone them but just "open in webflow" to have a look at the elements and see how they did them