I’m finding it strange to be believe, I can’t FTP my site to my custom domain directly from Webflow. Making designers to resort to using 3rd-party tools to export/publish site. Publishing site from web design tools using FTP have been around for over 20 years. Why is Webflow different?
It will be nice this feature can be integrated as soon as possible. Thanks
Hi there,
Welcome to Webflow! The reason why there is no FTP with Webflow, is to completely remove that middle step in your design workflow.
Gone are the days of locally developing/designing websites then publishing them up to your webhost via FTP. With Webflow everything is saved in the cloud. The cloud is your webhost.
If you still need to export your website form Webflow, just press the export button. No need for 3rd party tools. From there, you’ll able to FTP it up to anywhere you want! =)
Also, we haven’t had time to implement it yet, and there honestly has not been much demand. Believe it or not, but you’re one of the very first to ask about FTP since we opened up our beta a year ago - and we’ve had over a hundred thousand people publish sites 
From there, you’ll able to FTP it up to anywhere you want! =)
I don’t understand this line. Can you show me how I can FTP it up to my preferred webhost within Webflow without a 3rd-Party tool?
@callmevlad. Am surprised. Is it that all Webflow customer have been hosting their website with Webflow or they have been exporting and publishing to there domain via 3rd party FTP tool?
Let me share a little bit info with you. I have been with Webflow since the beta days. I just don’t dig the browser idea and the pricing still sound ridiculous. Seems Webflow is the only tool out there that is 60% matured out of all the tools for responsive web in the market. Trust me I have tried all (Macaw, Adobe Edge Reflow, Pinegrow, Briqs, Sparkle)
But they all have one single no-brainer feature integrated FTP/SFTP publishing to your preferred webhost right from within Webflow.Please look into this. Great software.
Exporting from Webflow packages your whole project into a ZIP which is then downloaded into your computer. After you have downloaded your ZIP package, you can un-zip it, then u load it into any webhost or web environment you choose.
What is included in your ZIP package will be your HTML, CSS, JS, and Images.
More information can be found here: http://help.webflow.com/exporting-to-html-and-css
Well then I’ll say it to: feature wanted!
I’d like to be able to configure it for each site. I’d like to be able to “publish to dev” (set SFTP to dev server) and “publish to prod” (set SFTP to prod server) on top of keeping the webflow host.
For the moment, I try to use a folder action made with Automator that is looking for {projectName}.weblfow*.zip, unpack, move to another folder and Git push pub to location. It’s so crappy coded that there’s no way I share it, sadly :/. I’ve asked for a better script from a coder I know. For a start it would be easier if I could set a destination for the downloadable .zip.
The whole process is a bit long. Click on Download, wait for the Prepare zip button, click on button, wait undefined & unpredictable time, click to download. Then best case scenario is switch focus to finder, focus on /Downloads right-click expand archive, right-click to Git push pub if you’ve set such shortcut.
So it’s safe to say Webflow publishing is only designed to be efficient if you want to be hosted by Webflow, through siteName.webflow.com or a custom domain set in Webflow… which I hope should become a minor usage as Webflow features and adoption progress.
I don’t think it’s wise to implement FTP capability to Webflow for external servers… Once Webflow make asset manager we won’t need this one anyway. And if you really want to FTP your site somewhere else - use external/3rd party tools. It’s not complitcated and takes a minute TOP.
The only thing I like is the dev and prod publish options. When you have a site published to a production domain I’d love to have an option to change few stuff around and publish it to test domain. That way I’d be able to see all changes and not publish them on a production website.
I disagree bartekkustra. Working with websites most of the time and making changes in design requires efficiency. Design is not like development. Design is continuous itertions which requires most times uploading to your server asap within your IDE/wysiswg tool like webflow. It is stressful having to export first then find a 3rd party ftp to export. I think it is silly. Why can’t I just design then FTP to my server, refresh on the browser, see the changes. Bingo! That is how the workflow of webflow show be.
Think you’re missing the point of Webflow.
Also exporting and ftping takes like … 15 seconds. You’re not iterating faster then that and if you need immediate design previews, you can preview your site within the app.
Considering you’ve tried all of the responsive design tools out there and they don’t seem to work for you, you might try learning to code responsively in the first place then you can eliminate the need for a tool like Webflow.
Well maybe I am stupid. I love WebFlow. But I am doing same think export to zip unzip and than upload to ftp. At first moment it was okay to me, but now I am searching for a shortcut.
Me too but I haven’t put time on it yet. I’m on Mac, I know Automator can watch for a webflow zip file in .Downloads, copy it, move it elsewhere, put a version number on it, delete it from downloads, unpack it in the other directory and upload the content with FTP.
FTP access would grant the ability to access 3rd party CMS systems for easy integration 
How is FTP not a feature?! I have trouble believing it’s not requested…
I feel a bit cheated that I’m paying more than the avg per-month web host, yet I can’t even upload a 10-second video (youtube videos wont embed without controls, for instance)
I’m also looking for some sort of automation for publishing somewhere else. Internally we use Octopus deploy, and it’s less than awesome for my designers to have to download a zip file and then upload it somewhere else.
As for the “Webflow is the awesomest host evar, why host anywhere else”, I’m sure webflow’s hosting meets your needs, but it doesn’t meet mine. I use webflow to template over the top of a custom Asp.Net MVC based engine, and it needs access to my database servers. 
@StormRider you export and modify your template… read the db server and present the page ?
the web server should still be segmented from the db server ? yours is not ?
@Revolution The exported site gets extracted into a template directory on our web servers, and at page load it replaces tokens (set into the webflow content) with content pulled from the database servers. The database servers are separated from the web servers.
The point I was making is that for WebFlow’s hosting to work for me, they would need to support IIS/Asp.Net, AND have some kind of database service I could sync my on premise data with.
I understand. I develop applications.
My process is similar to what you do.
Just wondering if this is still on the roadmap for Webflow. I’d love to have the ability to publish to a folder at my host, rather than host with Webflow or download as a zip and then upload to my host.
I vote for this too. It’s very easy to push project to webflow or custom domain, so why it wouldn’t be easy to push through FTP as well? Export is a fine feature, but it’s annoying when using often. FTP publish would be nice for me when i travel with tablet where i dont have tools for that. Another reason : Collaborators. If my client want to change some text or add something into a collection, he expect a possibility to publish from webflow. Problem is, my clients dont want webflow hosting, they have 1 or many sites saved in their prepaid 3rd party hostings which is often very cheap etc.
Do you think nobody wants this feature? This thread has 3000 visits.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add this feature.
If I make a change on WF, I export the site, unzip the file, open up Filezilla, copy the files over.
I go to my godaddy hosted domain, and there it is.
Then I notice a mispelling… Ugh!
Now I go back to WF, make the change, export it again, extract the file, copy using Filezilla. It is very tedious.