If you haven't come across it, Webflow is a no/low-code website builder that sits somewhere between Squarespace and writing everything by hand. It gives you a visual editor, a built-in CMS, hosting, and enough rope to hang yourself with when it comes to CSS.
The last few months I've been working on various bits of analytics and technical SEO for this website. The site is built in Webflow and I have a few observations that I'm noting here mostly for my own benefit. They're in no particular order, other than the order they fall out of my head. Also this is written from the POV of someone doing SEO and analytics on a Webflow project, rather than as a seasoned web developer.
Things Webflow does well
It audits as you go. Webflow flags simple and obvious things like missing alt text as you build. It can then use AI to fill in the blanks, and it does a pretty reasonable job. If you're inheriting a site where nobody has thought about accessibility or SEO since day one, this is a huge timesaver. On the FRA Projects site there were dozens of images with no alt text at all — Webflow's suggestions weren't perfect but they got us 80% of the way there in minutes rather than hours.
The app marketplace is decent. There's a healthy selection of integrations that can save time in a lot of situations. Need a cookie banner, a form handler, some basic analytics? There's probably something already built. Nothing revolutionary, but it means you're not reinventing the wheel for common problems.
The CMS templating is genuinely flexible. Building new page templates and controlling exactly which fields appear — adding them for data-heavy situations, stripping them back for simpler pages — is pretty nice. Nothing that couldn't be done with other systems, but Webflow lets you build what you actually need rather than forcing a bunch of standard fields that don't quite fit. For the FRA Projects site we had a lot of project pages that needed specific data fields (location, project type, completion date) and it was straightforward to set those up as structured CMS fields rather than dumping everything into a rich text block.
Things Webflow does not do so well
The interface is overwhelming. The visual editor honestly looks like Photoshop. I have used no end of CMSs, page builders, and site editors over the years — WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, you name it — and Webflow took me a few weeks to feel even vaguely comfortable with where everything is. Panels on the left, panels on the right, a navigator, a style panel, a settings panel, interactions, breakpoints. It's a lot.
CSS class inheritance is baffling. Trying to understand why links don't have underline decorators when the "All Links" style clearly has them, and there doesn't seem to be anything intercepting or overriding it, is genuinely maddening. Webflow uses a system of base classes, combo classes, and global styles that sort of makes sense once you've internalised it, but debugging why a style isn't applying often means clicking through three or four different panels to find the one place where something is being overridden. If you're used to just opening DevTools and reading the CSS cascade, this feels like a step backwards.
You can't put arbitrary files in the root. This is a surprisingly annoying limitation. Need to verify your site with Google Search Console using an HTML file? Or set up IndexNow with a key file? Or verify ownership for TrustPilot? You can't just drop a text file at example.com/google1234.html like you would on any other host. Instead you're stuck using DNS TXT records or meta tag verification for everything, which works but isn't always an option depending on the service. For an SEO person, this one stings.
Would I use it again?
Probably, for the right project. Webflow is good when you need a visually polished site with structured content and the client needs to be able to update things themselves without breaking the layout. It's less good when you need fine-grained control over the technical details — the kind of things an SEO person cares about.
For my own projects I think I'll stick with something closer to the metal (hence this site being built with Next.js and Vercel), but for client work where the priority is "looks great and the client can manage it"? Webflow is a solid option. Just budget extra time for learning the interface.