What are the limitations of Webflow right now?

Hi everyone, Webflow is the most mind-blown thing for me in 2019, I’m considering to use it to start my freelacing career this year.

Webflow to me seem to be so perfect but I am not really an expert right now and I’m still learning thing everyday to prepare well for this year’s debut.

So being that perfect, what are the limitations of Webflow right now? Have you experience any frustrations in any progress using it compare to other like Elementor, Divi,… ( I’m not…for now ) and what features you anticipated the most?

Thank you everyone for reading and have a great day!

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The two big things that are difficult to mimick without an official feature are, at the moment:

  • user system
  • multilanguage
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Slider component does not support thumbnails without custom code.

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Easy integration of 3rd party plug-ins
Not enough components
No easy way of copying items between projects
No use of Master page.

There’s loads more - including bugs - but to be honest asking this question is like asking “how long is a piece of string?” - saying that - it’s easily the best WYSIWYG web designer available.

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  1. I believe less 3rd party plug-ins is more safe option since I don’t want Webflow become Wordpress and I know the pain using 3rd party plugin with Wordpress. :((
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But the requirement for 3rd party plugins is because there is not enough functionality as standard within Webflow… besides you asked for limitations so I provided my answer.

You’re right.

I just hope we don’t happy to deal with the pain of waiting for those plugins to be up to dated like Wordpress smiley:

Something to be aware of, Webflow’s form system does not let you have multiple forms on a project going to separate email addresses. And they don’t have an autoresponder system yet. So, not good. There are methods to get around this, but in my opinion it shouldn’t involve an external system or approach. It’s on the list of things to make better. (Saying that however, the actual tools for building forms in Webflow are terrific).

Webflow copy-paste is unique “crazy” feature (hard to find this feature on another tools). Open two projects on two browsers tabs - copy - paste. This is not limitation.

Plugins

No need for plugins on webflow for small tasks (use any js libary you want. Any structure you want and any data).

About smart auto complete search, sort/filter and other “mega features” you find most of them under webflow wishlist.

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Thanks for the laugh - copying between projects in this way is indeed crazy and never works …in fact having more than one tab open for a project is dangerous on so many levels as any changes can easily be “lost” and hours wasted - search the forums - there are plenty of reports of this issue.

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I’m sorry Pete, but @Siton_Systems is actually right on this one. The copy and paste in Webflow does wonders!

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@PeteM, I never experienced a problem with copy/paste. I use it all the time. It works great!

Backup is something else. You should backup your sites before big change. Also on Word or Photoshop you should open two docs to copy-paste between X to Y.

Totally, that would be a nice Quality Of Life update and could be a paid option 5$ / month ( server load is not free ) for a bundle of 3 different email destinations. We’d make HR and Sales divisions of our clients happy :slight_smile: .

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Import of existing html and CSS to a new project.

Webflow is great for virgin sites but adaptive re-use could be vastly improved through at least being able to open CSS and HTML files for existing projects on other platforms.

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Still waiting on a partner program of some kind for resellers. From my understanding it is in development, but still waiting for some solution after bulk hosting was dropped.

As some have mentioned, the pricing could use work as the designer seems underpriced and the hosting is over priced (depending on use needs). Anyone on a professional plan is going to likely have more than 1 site, and flatrate pricing means hosting elsewhere (for me, anyways).

I’m with PeteM here; I usually just give a heart to agree, but since others disagree, let me add some color: copy-paste has always been a 60% working and 40% “what? why?” feature for me.

  • plenty of “no native clipboard data” errors that are fixed after copying again
  • keyboard shortcuts are a perpetual hit-and-miss (click the panels first…)
  • page interactions can’t be copied
  • multiple divs cannot be selected
  • frustratingly slow lag on longer pages & more complex divs


I’ve opened at least 10+ different bug reports in the past year and I’ll still go to Webflow first. They have a good thing going. But, limitation-wise, I think you all are just playing games.

Let’s really dive into Webflow’s limitations:

  • the Asset Manager is an anarchic mess and useless “manager”: there are no folders :exploding_head:, you cannot multi-select images :exploding_head:, you cannot replace images throughout the site :exploding_head:, you cannot rename images, and you cannot reorder images once they’ve been uploaded

  • Responsive images are half-baked: no support for object-position still and background images are not responsively resized

  • Page interactions underscore that Webflow was kind of designed for landing pages: page interactions are not activated between separate pages :exploding_head: and page interactions cannot be copy pasted :exploding_head:

  • Interactions overall have a high friction: no way to organize interactions :exploding_head: and an absurd amount of clicks are needed just to assign an interaction :exploding_head:

  • Symbols, oh, symbols are also half-baked: interactions cannot be set on symbols :exploding_head: , symbols cannot be nested :exploding_head: (kill me now, multilingual), and symbols are extremely rigid that every pixel must be identical (though this is “apparently” getting fixed soon)

  • Webflow forms cannot feed into the Webflow CMS (why would anyone ever want to submit organized data into Webflow’s CMS?)

  • hard agree on multilingual, which again falls into the “landing page web designer moving into full-fledged website” theme you’ll see throughout Webflow

  • the hosting is heavily biased towards US/European users: the only way to get images (the bulk of your bandwidth) on more than HK & SGP Asia-based CDNs requires the costliest package.

  • the bugs, oh, the bugs. There are many little bugs hiding in every corner of Webflow. SVG rendering issues, interaction bugs, Designer crashing bugs, font-loading degradation, etc. I work 8+ hours a day in Webflow and, golly, does that give you some insight!

I have a lot of little pet peeves, which I won’t list, but I think the list above covers most “wow, I can’t believe it’s actually still like that in 2020” limitations of Webflow that most typical users will hit.

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I’ve not had any bad experience with copy/pasting, seems to have worked ok for me on the few times I’ve needed to do it, though it’s largely been basic stuff. But I would have to agree with you, there are some pretty basic requirements that have been overlooked for some reason.

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And…most of the “limitations” have been well-vocalized by a large minority of Webflow users on the official Webflow Wishlist. Do remember to sort by “Popular”.

I completely forgot about real-time filtering of the CMS and table support: these are probably highly likely to hit the most users.

Then we go move onto “would be really nice to have, but not quite a limitation”: CSS calc() (responsive fonts!), AMP support, SVG CSS, psuedoclasses, mobile CMS entry, add/remove classes via interactions, etc.

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