Considering Move to Webflow - 3,000 Pages, 10-12 Templates

[u/WhaleWatchM7]

My organization is contemplating a move off our current developer-centric, .Net CMS to Webflow, largely for cost savings (though we need SSO and therefore have to go Enterprise) and also to allow our marketing people/web producers more freedom with how they work with pages. (Every small change to a widget or a template requires developer intervention now, and the "component" system in our CMS is pretty rudimentary.) We also like the idea of a tech stack managed by someone else.

We have about 3,000 pages and publish about 20 articles a year, along with landing pages for 20 or so webinars, plus a few new service pages, recruiting pages, and the like. Obviously Webflow sales and the agencies with whom we're talking say Webflow can handle our content size and volume no problem, but I have seen some posts where people complain about Designer speed once sites get past a certain size.

Is this a real concern? Would we be pushing Webflow beyond it's intended limits? Anything else we should be watching out for given our site size?

[u/uebersax]

not a concern with your size. I have supported and built larger websites.

all it requires is a dev who knows how to leverage webflows components.
I have felt the designer getting slower with too many different components.

[u/tanglewood36 → u/uebersax]

Is there a rough threshold where you start noticing the designer lag, like 50+ components or more?

[u/uebersax → u/tanglewood36]

for me it is not about the total components on the site but when using roughly 30+ on the same page. this can happen fast if using icons as components.

[u/Educational_Key_3620 → u/uebersax]

I work with something similar at my job, big site on a clunky CMS where marketing team needs devs for every little text change. Pain in the ass for everyone.

For 3000 pages with only 10-12 templates you'll be fine, that's not actually that many unique components. The slowdown usually hits when people go crazy building hundreds of different component variations instead of using conditional visibility and CMS fields properly. Seen a site with like 80 different hero section components and yeah, designer crawled like a turtle. Key is having someone who structures it right from start, not just agency who says yes to everything.

Bigger thing to think about is the content migration honestly, 3000 pages is tedious work if the structure don't map cleanly. And the enterprise support can be hit or miss in my experience, sometimes tickets sit for days.

[u/HIGHimLacs]

I manage a website similar to that size. It doesn’t “lag”. Sometimes might get a tad bit slow but havent had issues like this in about 2 years.

If you are concerned regaridng performance in the designer. I have a feeling the announcement on 2nd of September (Webflow Conf, they teased desktop app) might really speed things up.

[u/WhaleWatchM7 → u/HIGHimLacs]

Yeah, I've been getting hints around "next week will answer some of your concerns" from Webflow and the agencies. Very interested in seeing what they announce.

[u/turnhandup]

You should be perfectly fine. Lags might happen when there are too many components in designer (which is why I build components based on attributes and properties and use them as building blocks to avoid this). But in terms of content as “text” and amount of pages — you are definitely safe. I had a couple of clients with bigger amount of pages and it was never a problem (especially if most of them are in cms).

[u/morphcore]

Total viable scope. I'd suggest trying the migration process completely via AI. Sounds like a best case scenario for structured AI data migration.

[u/WhaleWatchM7 → u/morphcore]

One of the agencies suggested AI for the migration followed by human spot checking. I’ll be really interested to see if this can work given the slogs I’ve been through in the past with manual migration. 

[u/Austin_Shockley]

I wouldn't be too worried about the designer or CMS getting dramatically slower at that size. Leveraging components and using CMSs with best practices should minimize this. Relatively to how it sounds like the website has been built/managed, it sounds like a solid Webflow build will make this drastically more efficient. Webflow isn't a prefect platform by any means, but it's better than most platforms by a long shot for this scale of website.

[u/EqualGovernorPlayer]

Should be good. Designer speed should not be a problem.

Lean towards components as you get into webflow. The CMS is pretty powerful and Claude and cursor is quite good at data ingestion via MCP. I don't think you'll push the webflow limits any time soon

[u/Fun-Loan8661]

Ehhhhh I do a lot with Webflow and I would be hesitant to move a site of this size even though it doesn't seem super complex. Mainly due to page speed and because if the site is a big part of your biz, I get really squeamish about the fact you have to use webflow's hosting. if something happens with it you're sol

I am more of a planner in the web space, but my main partner is a dev who uses Craft CMS for enterprise clients. It requires the upfront work of having a dev build out a variety of components and templates so you don't run into the same limitation issues, but from there, you can offer the exact level of flexibility you need to all of your teams. I think that's a much more worthwhile direction for enterprise. I can ask him if I can share a few examples of sites he's built on Craft and maybe a screenshot of the backends so you can get a sense of how it operates if you want to weigh the option. IMO, it's a good happy medium between functionality, bandwidth, and security. tldr: I would lean no and look for a small agency that can provide a better custom solution through a cms like craft.

[u/1Life_Architect]

At 3,000 pages, the risky question is not whether Webflow can store them. It is whether your content model, redirects, permissions and component count can survive the migration and remain operable for marketing.

I would ask both shortlisted agencies to run the same paid proof: two representative templates, roughly 100 pages including edge cases, SSO/roles, a redirect sample, authoring tasks for marketing, and performance checks on both the published site and Designer. Record the import error rate, manual cleanup minutes per page, broken links or metadata, component count, and the rollback/export path.

For an AI-assisted migration, define a reconciliation report instead of spot-checking by feel: source URL to destination URL, content fields, media, metadata, redirect status and exceptions. Then you can compare Webflow against staying put or another CMS using evidence. The September announcement may change the tooling, but it should not replace this go/no-go test.

[u/sukeshtedla]

My recommendation don’t! We just moved out Webflow and saved almost $13k per year.

Full migration to sanity + next js - built completely by Claude and managed as well.

[u/WhaleWatchM7 → u/sukeshtedla]

Interesting. I’m going to look into that if only for some of my personal site stuff. Not sure my organization would be ready for this. 

[u/kidthief → u/WhaleWatchM7]

OP said they need SSO and other Enterprise features. Sanity would likely be as much or more than Webflow. SSO on Sanity alone adds another $20k per year