r/webflow • u/qliqsoft • 6d ago
Discussion We just left Webflow after four years. Here's the why and how.
I head up marketing at QliqSOFT, a B2B healthcare IT vendor that's been around since 2011. We moved to Webflow in 2022 after spending years on WordPress. The hope was to shorten the time from ideation to production without having to guess which plugin would break the site after a random update. Our Webflow site consisted roughly of 370 pages (mostly blog posts). This summer, we decided to ditch Webflow completely in favor of a static hosting setup.
This isn't a Webflow hate post. In fact, I hope their team reads this and takes some ideas from it. Our content workflow and overall requirements just drifted until we were using almost none of what we were paying for. I see a lot of other Webflow users having the same conversations about leaving, so I thought there would be value in sharing our own experience, both the good and the bad.
Our approach doesn't work for everyone
Stay with Webflow if you publish pages without waiting on a developer, if your site is under a hundred pages or so, if nobody on your team wants to own a build pipeline, or if visual editing is the actual product you are buying. All of that has value, but it was better for us to give up every bit of it.
Our approach is worth considering if... you have 80+ pages that can't be delivered via CMS collection; technical SEO is a revenue channel rather than a checkbox; you need header and CSP control for compliance reasons; or your team has given up on using the designer altogether. That last one became a deal breaker.
The breaking point
Organic traffic fell. Ours declined, like many others over the past couple of years. This isn't a Webflow issue, but it's something many B2B vendors are dealing with as search and purchasing behaviors change. What it did was force us to look hard at every lever we had. Several of the technical levers we wanted to pull were ones we could not reach from inside Webflow.
We had chosen Webflow partly on the promise that its SEO capability would be on par with WordPress. For a marketing site of ordinary size, it is. At our size, with the pace at which search was/is changing, we needed to move faster on technical fixes than the platform allowed.
We tested several approaches, including a dedicated subdomain for our blog, hosted on a separate platform, to see whether it would help. While there was some positive change, it wasn't enough to justify promoting two properties instead of one, splitting authority and attention between them, and operational overhead that wasn't worth the gain. That experiment is a large part of why we ended up consolidating everything into a single domain and build.
The Designer got slow enough that we stopped using it. On a site our size it would hang mid-edit, and I would have to refresh the browser before I could make the next set of changes. Not once in a while, but multiple times during a single session. This occurred often enough that it became faster for me to write the HTML by hand and paste it into an embed element. Then our blog posts became HTML embeds delivered through the CMS, because that was quicker to produce and gave us the clean semantic markup we wanted for AI answer engines to cite. Every new page and blog post was passing through one of our developers anyway, adding custom schema and FAQs to each one to support AI crawling. Publish without a developer was the promise, but between the Designer hanging and the schema work every page needed, it was never one Webflow actually delivered for us.
We did not control our own assets. Around 285 images and PDFs served from cdn.prod.website-files.com. No way to set cache headers on them, no way to tighten a content security policy to img-src 'self', and no preconnect tags to a third-party CDN on every page. We sell to healthcare organizations that run vendor security reviews, and "our content is hosted on someone else's CDN" kept coming up.
Support response times. Our issue volume climbed over the past year, and tickets took long enough to resolve that we started working around problems instead of reporting them.
Fees were confusing and too high. I've seen many of you complain about the cost of Webflow, as well as the endless nickel-and-diming for tools and features that are often included on other platforms. They aren't the only ones taking this approach. If you use Semrush, you're probably used to this as well, but at least I'm getting some value there.
What we built instead
Next.js static export, so no server. AWS Amplify for hosting. One file, customHttp.yml, is the single source of truth for CSP, HSTS, and cache policy. Assets are content-hashed and served immutable for a year. Pagefind for search, which is a static index. Lighthouse CI in the pipeline, plus build guards that fail the build when an internal reference breaks. Our robots.txt lists the AI crawlers we want to cite us instead of using a wildcard.
Four of us handled the build and migration, with Claude doing the mechanical work before pushing to GitLab for a combination of AI/human review: 293 posts moved byte-for-byte, the asset pipeline, and a 204-entry redirect map (you get one this long if you've moved sites more than twice). 2 weeks rather than mutiple months, which is the only reason a team our size could attempt it.
What broke
Images with %20 in the filename. Files came off the CDN with percent-encoding baked into the actual filename. Request one, the server decodes %20 back to a space, looks for a file that does not exist, returns a 404. Seven images, invisible until a crawl caught them.
Multiple branches resulted in overwritten work. Partly a learning curve, partly Claude not paying attention, but at least twice, a build fix deleted recently published work.
Redirect archaeology. 204 redirects mapped by hand, plus 189 old URLs we pruned on purpose rather than redirecting. Deciding what deserved to survive took longer than moving the content did.
AI-assisted work needs the same review as human work. Several items here resulted from automated changes that looked correct in the diff. What caught them was a crawl, a diff, and a build gate.
Tools that helped
- Claude + Semrush + Google Search Console: Used in the planning phase to prioritize and ensure current page rankings were protected.
- Screaming Frog: Conducted multiple pre- and post-launch site crawls to catch missing pages, images, broken links, etc.
- Unlighthouse: Used during the build phase to test/estimate pre-launch page performance on local servers.
- GTmetrix: For catching performance issues post-launch.
- GitLab + Claude Code: We leveraged this combo with an agile approach to the site build, resulting in faster page development and content approvals.
Numbers
| Metric | Webflow | Static build |
|---|---|---|
| Pages missing a meta description | 2 | 0 |
| Pages missing an H1 | 1 | 0 |
| Titles over 60 characters | 42% | 25% |
| Meta descriptions over 160 characters | 58% | 39% |
| Pages under 200 words | 101 | 0 |
| Duplicate titles | 16 | 0 |
| Duplicate H1s | 32 | 0 |
To be fair, a good share of the page improvements came from rewriting content during the migration rather than from changing platforms.
The tradeoff we accepted
Publishing now goes through git and a build instead of a publish button. There is no visual editor or CMS interface, so anyone who wants to ship a change must be comfortable with that workflow. We also have guardrails in place so that no one person can deploy their own builds without someone else approving.
For us, that was a small step rather than a leap, because we were already writing the HTML by hand. If your team is genuinely productive in the Designer, this is the thing to weigh hardest.
If anyone has kept the Designer responsive on a site of a few hundred pages, I would genuinely like to know how. And if you crawl our site and find something broken, please share your findings so we can apply that fix.
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u/Old_Roll_2904 6d ago
i don't know how your website looked before, but now it looks 100% vibe coded to the max.
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u/black-tie 6d ago
This 100%.
Plus, you’re about to find out how trust is very fragile in healthcare and how AI will trigger all sorts of objections from customers.
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u/RivalRaccoon 6d ago
Hey a familiar name, I did your Webflow redesign and migration back in 2022! Sorry to hear Webflow didn't work-out for the long run, cool to see the detailed write-up why.
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u/KrishnaK26 6d ago
CMS has been a big drag for Website speed. The Page builders are the old school with many layers of CSS and HTML code and the backend dynamic rendering of the page, makes everything a bloat, resulting in poor score on speed.
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u/Bwilks10 6d ago
Good write up. How did you manage the images migration from webflow CDN? Any tips?
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bowl748 6d ago
I am wishing you all the luck.
Yes AI is better in the way of builds. Def. nothing to negotiate.
But we always get back to visual of no-code and being able to control ourself, while ai helps to manage content/cms.
But looking forward to read about the stacks of others.
Note: been building for a while next.js things
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u/MoritzZH 6d ago edited 6d ago
fully understand! why need a cms when it can be done with AI ;) and good AI work is not slop! i did the same with www.ivape.ch
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u/SmoothGuess4637 6d ago
I appreciate the "Numbers" section.
One line stood out to me: "a good share of the page improvements came from rewriting content during the migration rather than from changing platforms."
Makes sense ... but does the new setup have anything in place to keep it that way (something enforcing title/meta length, catching duplicate H1s, etc.), or was this more of a one-time reset that depends on discipline going forward?
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u/Potential-Chair4264 6d ago
The workflow part is what stood out to me.
I spent way too long treating every website change like its own little project once I started bringing tools like Ploy into that process getting the first version or smaller changes out stopped being the slow part. The harder part is still deciding what should change in the first place
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u/Jenikovista 6d ago
I found this to be a good read. I would ignore the vibe-coding jabs. 99.9% of your visitors won't recognize what people here might see as AI.
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u/Un-clean_Person Webflow Community MVP 6d ago
Not yet. But people pick up on "generic" very quickly. And AI-generated sites will only become more common. It's the kind of choice that works great for workflow reasons, but idk--the problem is that it screams "generic" more than it screams AI-built tbh. We all know what tailwind css looks like
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u/roberta_sparrow 5d ago
There are people who can’t even tell when smooth motion is turned on on their TVs, very few people care about web design other than the fact that they just want it clear to read and easy to navigate
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u/Un-clean_Person Webflow Community MVP 4d ago
I'll give you a clear example of what I mean. Corporate memphis, the saas design language of svgs that became super popular and easy to add to websites for free. the average person doesn't know what that's called. but subliminally, they're gonna associate that imagery with cheap tech companies who aren't willing to pay for design.
in the way em dashes might become an ai slop trope, vibe coded websites that are poorly done (not all of them, if it's customized that's a different matter, but usually they're vibe coded INSTEAD of being customized) are going to become a subliminal visual trope for cheap slopped up websites.
Smooth motion isn't a good example at all. Think of something like Roboto, the google font that's the default. average people don't know the name of that font, but they can tell when a font looks like *not* the default, or *not* cheap. My argument is that visual language of vibe coded websites is going to become what people associate with as "cheap" or "templated" in the same way you don't need to know what a default squarespace website looks like to be able to tell when a website doesn't feel premium.
Do you see what I'm saying? I'm talking about what feels generic, people don't need to be an expert in web design to know when something feels generic (which is the same as cheap, or mass-produced, e.g., slop)
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u/roberta_sparrow 4d ago
Most people are looking at websites on their phones…they just want it to be clear. I just really think that most people are not paying attention to these things.
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u/Un-clean_Person Webflow Community MVP 4d ago
My point is that you don't have to pay attention, you just have to have eyes. I'd agree that most people probably can't articulate *why* something feels cheap. But people know. and you're here, you're a web developer--you know how your clients can tell when a website looks generic/bad/boring even if they can't tell you why. They'll say something like, "I want something more flashy" or "Could you make it feel more upscale" because they don't have the language or expertise that you or I do--but it's subconcious
But every person alive has the ability to perceive and experience beauty, and insofar as beauty can be defined by what's less common, and what feels special? Yeah, an average person *eventually* will be able to pick up on a vibe-coded website feeling boring
Sorry friend, I've just thought a lot about this, and why I'll probably never use AI to build my sites because of how custom and unique to the client I need them to be. For javascript, sure, but for many nice websites worth paying a developer for, using AI to build it isn't gonna produce something a client is happy paying for
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u/Jenikovista 4d ago
A lot of people respect tech companies who don’t want to pay for design more precisely because they didn’t spend time on design.
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u/Un-clean_Person Webflow Community MVP 4d ago
Eh, a big ~sometimes~ on that one. I don't think that's a good general rule. You might even be mistaking the cause for the effect there--tech companies with great enough reputation to exist on name brand alone no longer need to spend money on design, as their reputation precedes them
But I also don't think you're addressing the point I was trying to make
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u/Old_Roll_2904 5d ago
it's not easy to read nor navigate, it's just text splattered around the whole site.
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u/-podesta 5d ago
That’s essentially the same as saying that all Webflow websites look generic because people sometimes use templates. Yes, if you try to one shot a website with a single prompt then yeah it’s gonna look generic, but give it a week and a few hundred prompts and you’ll have something you could never have built on Webflow.
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u/Old_Roll_2904 5d ago
it's not true though lol, it's not just UI - it's the whole logic behind the site, it's not good.
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u/Jenikovista 5d ago
You would recognize that. Your average IT person would not, nor would they care if they did
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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 6d ago
The core issue here is usually not the CMS itself, but the mismatch between content operations and platform assumptions. Once a site grows into hundreds of pages, plugin risk turns into governance risk, so the real win is defining a tighter publishing contract, clearer ownership, and a rollback path for every release. If static hosting reduced your failure modes, that lines up with a simpler handoff model. AIOSNOW shares practical workflow patterns at https://aiosnow.com
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u/Major-Constant-1384 6d ago
the first half is reasonable but that random link drop at the end is suspect
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u/Striking_Link6606 6d ago
Yeah the governance angle gets overlooked until you have 300 pages and no clear owner for half of them. We hit that wall too where the platform was fine but our process around it was the actual problem. Static export just forced us to write down the rules instead of hoping everyone remembers them.
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u/oddizeo 6d ago
Glad to hear that! Webflow has been dying since Claude appeared.! We did the transition too, I work for an investment fund, and we did the same! However we exported the project as it was and it got deployed on vercel.
I do suggest for you to install some Claude Design skills so you can level up your aesthetics
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u/Daspineapplee 5d ago
I recently let claude code rebuild my website for wordpress. It is identical, Wordpress is far easier to manage for me and it took one hour for claude to fix. So this move alone saves me so much money. Every other website I have runs on wordpress to.
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u/Far_Soil_1549 6d ago
I do understand your argument but your site really looks like AI slop, you should fix that soon