The Future of Web Design & Development in a No-Code World

It's 2025. You're searching for where to build your site or move your old site to, and there are options EVERYWHERE. From old-hat but well-established platforms like Wordpress and Wix, to industry-specific platforms like Shopify for ecommerce, to growing in popularity platforms such as Squarespace, Framer and Webflow, you are flooded with choices of where to go.

I'm sure you could guess, as a Webflow developer, where my opinion would point you to... but let's discuss it.

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Develop Visually, Test Independently, Publish Instantly.

Many Web Development platforms these days let you develop in a visual editor and it makes sense why; seeing what your customers see while you build it lets you iterate fast. I still believe after using other platforms, though, that Webflow offers one of the smoothest and fastest pipelines to go from creating to a usable site for your viewers to see.

Being able to, in a matter of clicks, publish your editor changes to a staging site, test it from a viewer perspective, then publish it to your live site, makes for an easy process for a developer. With other platforms, you can often have to duplicate pages and not link to them, or copy the whole site or, if you are a huge risk taker,  just hope your changes work on the live site when you publish your changes. Webflow solves this problem, allowing you to develop a live site without affecting customers, letting developer and customer work on changes together and publishing it when it's ready.

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Hosting: Competitive with Alternative Options

Webflow can comes with many benefits, but the pricing can often not seem to scale for the really small businesses or non-profit pages. Fortunately, Webflow doesn't lock your site to one platform as many other builders will - allowing us to export a site build to a 3rd party host in many cases for a fraction of the cost. This does mean we're leaving Webflow now, but for sites with low-feature requirements, this can be a very viable and cost-saving method to build a smooth Webflow site and move it to a cheaper platform.

If you build on other platforms, you're often stuck on it, so it is worth considering your future path when picking a platform. The great thing is, if you build on Webflow and host it elsewhere, you can keep your designed site in Webflow, continue editing it and export it everytime you have an update. That's why for some clients at Bespokists, we use this method to maintain sites for some long term customers who just want simple, low-cost sites.

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A Thriving Community

Why does this matter to you? The community behind any platform is the driving force of updates, creativity and development. Having your website's platform associated with a community that is actively working on building sleek sites and out-doing each other means your site is on a platform with a large community who can help with updates, provide inspiration that is 100% possible on your platform, and ensures future development keeps your platform up to date and not falling behind the competition. You're not limited to one of a handful of grey-beard developers on a dying platform, charging you eye-watering fees per hour to do basic changes (Sorry, WordPress Customers).

Webflow has a huge and growing community of developers and designers producing exquisite sites, responsible for a huge number of web awards in the last few years. And while it's an exciting time for Webflow growth, it's also a platform with over 10 years of development under its belt, cementing it as a stable industry-leading platform.

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When might Webflow not be for you?

As a Webflow Design & Development company, we love the platform, but there may be cases where we suggest you go with another platform and company to build it for you.

You have an enterprise-level complex backend: Webflow shines from small to large websites, but on its own, is not really the ideal choice if you're trying to build a complex site with a large back-end. While you could design the site in Webflow, you would have to export it to a third party platform to integrate in complex backend code to build sites with heavy functionality.

Large-Scale Ecommerce Stores: One of the weak points of Webflow, in my opinion, is it's ecommerce support. We can and have built ecommerce stores, but we find that this suits smaller-scale productions rather than large ones. If you have heavy flow of customers, orders and money, a dedicated platform specialising in ecommerce may be better suites, such as Shopify.

You don't like having the most designer-friendly platform with one of the greatest web-design communities: If you want to, in 2025, make your site feel 10 years old from the very start, feel free to build on Wordpress. However, if you want to be modern, adaptable, and future-proofed, Webflow provides an excellent point to launch from and that's why it's the only platform we build on.

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