Companies Who Use Webflow (2023)

Who uses Webflow?

A lot of companies, agencies, and professionals do.

There are over 387,000 live sites using Webflow. Spanning across 3.5 million designers, developers, and teams who use Webflow to create those sites.

When the University of Calgary surveyed the most popular no-code tools, they found Webflow to be the top visual design tool for its category.

Webflow was named in the Forbes Cloud 100, the definitive ranking of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world, for its 2nd consecutive year valuing the company at over 2 billion dollars.

The Forbes Cloud 100 reviews hundreds of cloud companies and evaluates them across four ranking factors:

Market leadership (35%)
Estimated valuation (30%)
Operating metrics (20%)
People & culture (15%)

"For market leadership, the Cloud 100 enlists the help of a judging panel of 34 public cloud company CEOs who assist in evaluating and ranking their private company peers."

Webflow has set the standard by creating & hosting the definitive conference in its industry, the No-Code Conf. The only source for anything within this space, and that started back in 2019.

Well, that all sounds great!

The Problem

This is the first time anyone in your company has used ( or even heard of ) Webflow.

...and listing all the marketing statistics in the world isn't going to convince everyone that this is the tool to fix all of your problems.

Because, of course, your company ( like most other companies ) has unique needs.

Custom systems with lots of organizational and business structure baked into your existing solution.

Ripping that apart and moving over to something else will be a time-consuming nightmare that can ( in many cases ) put the very livelihood of the company at stake.

So.

How can you be sure that Webflow is the tool that meets all your needs?

Well...

The Solution

What if you could read the behind-the-scenes details about how other companies use Webflow?

Understanding exactly what problems those companies hit with their legacy setup, their fears of switching, what prompted them to try Webflow as a potential solution, and what issues it did ( or did not ) solve for them.

...and now you can.

I've done a massive amount of research, digging deep into some of the recognizable names, big and small, that have transitioned to Webflow:

What were their issues before using Webflow?
What was important for any new solution to have?
What happened after they migrated to Webflow as a solution?
What problems did they encounter during this transition to Webflow?

Let's get started and dig into it right now.

Discord

Before using Webflow, Discord would get many requests every quarter for new pages - marketing, sales, website pages, etc...

But everyone was so heavily focused on product engineering work. The company's mission was to make the core product amazing.

Marketing, sales, and new website pages all suffered because of it. So maybe one new page per quarter would actually get created.

Not enough.

The Blog

Beyond just marketing, sales, and website pages, their blog used to be hosted on Medium - a popular blogging platform.

At the time, anyone could hop onto Medium and create a blog post for a company of twenty to forty people. And this worked for many years.

But after several years, it was glaringly apparent that an upgrade was needed.

Discord as a brand was evolving. Not only did it want to grow its customer base, it also presented its brand consistently to that customer base.

The Medium platform had too many limitations from this perspective.

There needed to be more control. For example, they couldn't track metrics important to the company, and cross-promotional marketing was something they had zero say in.

If they created a blog post on Medium about their company, having Medium suggest another blog post from their competitors wasn't beneficial.

Suddenly, this was very apparent, and there was no solution within Medium to address these needs.

So with the push to add more speed and flexibility to the marketing, sales, and website pages. They looked for a solution to fix their problems with their blogging platform.

After much trial & error, they landed on a test with Webflow.

Switching to Webflow

At this point, Discord had hundreds of blog posts on Medium. The transition to Webflow was challenging and didn't happen in a day. That said, the entire migration was handled by two people and done over two weeks. Not bad.

The blog was their first transition to Webflow. And while not easy, it was a success.

The rest of the company saw that almost every department uses Webflow for some aspect of their work today.

Product teams, legal, custom support, etc... Their bots & apps team used Webflow to create a big launch and use it to communicate this launch to their customer base.

Again, no product engineering is required.

No waiting for programming resources to become available.

A small team within the company had the autonomy to jump onto Webflow, pull from their consistent branding, and put together a successful launch quickly.

HelloSign

HelloSign (now owned by Dropbox) uses Webflow for all of the website marketing pages without any developers needed. Instead, the marketing and design team owns the entire process.

They have quick turnaround times and total autonomy. HelloSign grants content editors permission to add & update only the areas of the site they need to access.

"Before we moved to Webflow, updating an existing webpage or adding a new page would take a minimum of 3 weeks."

Painful Process

Before Webflow, it took HelloSign weeks to make even the most minor changes to their marketing pages.

The product team owned the site's marketing pages, so any updates were tied to their release cycle - which was 3 weeks.

But that didn't mean any marketing changes needed would be done in a 3-week cycle. That would only happen if a product engineer could make the changes.

Often, engineering resources would already be reserved for other projects.

To get any website marketing changes made, the team had to lobby for a product engineer's time.

Miserable Uphill Battle

Enter into the product development cycle meant lots of meetings and getting many people up to speed and in sync.

Creating low-fidelity wireframes and ensuring that engineers could build what the creative team needed.

Once approved, create pixel-perfect high-fidelity mockups and get buy-in from everyone on the creative team.

Now they were ready to start lobbying various product managers to get slotted some time from an engineer to do the work.

To make that happen, they needed to write and submit tickets to the product team ticketing system.

Those are classically a blocker. So tickets go in, never to be seen again.

More lobbying is needed.

Finally, there is some engineering availability, and the build begins.

It gets reviewed, goes through revisions, is approved, and is moved to the quality assurance team to ensure these updates don't negatively affect the rest of the site.

Once that team signs off, it sits and waits. Until the current 3-week cycle ends and it gets released to the live site.

Only to discover there is a typo.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

A New Hope

What's needed was complete end-to-end control of the entire process by the non-technical marketing team.

They needed full autonomy from product & engineering so that they could change and publish whenever they needed to.

The turnaround time had to be quick. Not in 3 weeks, best cast. But instead, minutes. Marketing teams to be fast reacting to market changes if a product wants to stay relevant.

Moving to Webflow ( in 10 weeks )

So they decided to use a free Webflow account to see if they could move the needle themselves.

Remember, they're not software engineers, so this had to work for non-coders like themselves.

This quick test worked, and putting it in front of the higher-ups was met with approval.

The next step was for them to hire a Webflow Expert.

They needed to rebuild the website, maintain SEO, and integrate tools that power their marketing funnel infrastructure.

So they got started.

Created a style guide.
Rebuilt all of the old pages in Webflow.
Integrated the new marketing funnel infrastructure.
Nailed down all of their SEO resources within Webflow.

And launched.

The total turnaround time was only 10 weeks.

Using Webflow Day-to-Day

Webflow changes can be live in minutes, not weeks.
Full autonomy, no more lobbying for engineering resources.
Content editors had permission to change the content without permission to change any of the designs.
New marketing tools can be embedded in minutes, again without engineering resources. Tools like Zapier, Make, and Integromat can be leveraged instead.

Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM has been rapidly growing. At some point, they realized that their current website couldn't scale along with this growth and the changing demands of the company.

Their website was 100% custom code running on their own servers. When the company started, this made sense. The founders were programmers, and it gave them the control and flexibility they needed to move fast.

But that approach started to break down as fast as their growth increased.

The founders had to pull away from day-to-day tasks like updating their website and keep their focus at a higher level to meet the company's needs and customer demands.

A new marketing team needed to get into and update the website regularly. But they aren't programmers, so they couldn't.

...and the marketing site was vitally important for the company. It's the primary way Less Annoying CRM convinces people to sign up for their product.

So the common theme always mentioned is that now simple copy updates had to go through the engineering developer cycle. Taking programmers away from focusing on improving the core product.

Less Annoying CRM needed a solution that empowered the non-technical marketing team to have complete control to experiment, update, create, and improve any aspect of the public-facing site.

So they started looking for other solutions. The problem was that they needed to give non-technical teams more control of the copy and the site's design. Any solution they tried had to be "done their way." You had to fit into their box.

This didn't work for the company.

As a result, the company tested many solutions but turned to Webflow. As a result, it met all the company's needs for flexibility and control.

The company switched its help site and the entire marketing website to Webflow.

Now they've become empowered to move fast, experiment, and make changes in real-time based on customer demand (and the company's needs) without any engineering resources. Instead, the non-technical marketing team owns it and makes the updates and additions themselves.

Not only did this solve their bottleneck problem (requiring engineers to make updates), but it also significantly improved the Google search rankings:

Pacific Funds

The Pacific Funds website is their primary marketing asset playing a crucial role in displaying their funds to potential customers and as a tool for their sales team to communicate with their advisors and investors.

Pacific Fund's most significant challenge with their existing setup was the need for more agility and control to create and update site content and test creative campaigns.

Their last major update was six years prior. Unfortunately, they didn't have the time and resources to take on this challenge with their legacy setup.

Without developer resources, they could implement new designs. Instead, they required help to make simple copy changes or test new ideas for their customers.

When it was time to finally invest company-wide resources to completely redesign their site, they evaluated other options.

They landed on Webflow and used the venerable Finsweet agency to help transition.

Once this was up and running, it took them to a new level they'd never experienced.

Instead of focusing 100% of their time fighting a legacy system for simple changes, they could spend most of their time thinking through and creating site content that engages with their customers. Helped move their customers further down their funnel. Personalize the experience for their customers.

Things that were never possible before.

Getaround

Before Webflow, the Getaround public-facing website pages were built into their main product codebase.

It was owned by software engineers.

That means the only folks who could make changes were the software engineers. So everything needed to go through the engineering development lifecycle.

...and that could take weeks.

As a result, Getaround went eight years without any significant public-facing redesigns. Unfortunately, that means no major marketing initiatives for those areas of the website.

Limiting your marketing team like this can kill a product. You can't update and account for the current, best SEO practices. You can't rapidly experiment to test and meet conversion targets.

It's untenable.

But...

With a few people inside the organization, they took some of their smaller landing pages and broke them off from the main site.

They rebuilt them in Webflow to move the needle and show what kind of rapid improvements could be made when not held hostage to the long, slow grind of a software development cycle.

After a few months, they saw huge improvements with these small tests.

This convinced the company to move all its non-logged-in pages to Webflow. Then, put the control into the hands of the design and marketing teams, and see what they could do.

Now their software engineering team could focus on making a great product. In contrast, the marketing team could focus on communicating an excellent product experience.

Win-win.

SmugMug

There wasn't one person on the SmugMug team that could dedicate full time to their website. Sound familiar?

The website only saw attention when engineers and product managers had spare time.

Which was rare.

They had to switch to something better.

They tried a bunch of different solutions, including Unbounce. But nothing met their needs until one of the last solutions, Webflow, was used.

A single team member built a simple 3-page site with rich design, interactions, and animations. Then demoed how fast it was to create.

It was the first solution that looked like it would work.

webflow quote more powerful and flexible

So the company got behind the idea of using Webflow as a rapid yet rich design and hosting platform for their user-facing site.

Long story short, they spent one month with a small team migrating their existing site into Webflow.

Upwork

The Upwork teams always needed to catch up. But unfortunately, they couldn't get their updates onto the live site fast enough to keep up with marketing trends.

With their legacy approach, updating pages that followed their brand guidelines or simply adjusting copy took a lot of work.

Upwork's marketing and design teams needed access to edit the landing pages. Even the most minor copy changes, fixing a typo, had to go through the typical Jira ticket filing workflow.

Then, it would be handed off to the engineering team, who spent their time on the copy instead of making the core product awesome.

Empowering the Marketing Team

They gave Webflow a try.

It empowered the marketing and design teams to have complete control of making changes and publishing new pages on the live site themselves.

No engineers, ticketing system, and no waiting.

They could not easily swap imagery, update copy, update links, test the page, and publish to the live site with a button click.

The team now adds or updates brand and copy changes with the click of a button, and they are empowered to quickly address all of their real-time marketing needs.

Dell

Dell uniquely uses Webflow.

Instead of removing engineering resources from the process, they use Webflow to deliver high-fidelity prototypes.

This approach is far from the norm, but it works well for the company.

This allows their team to have a super quick turnaround versus going through wireframes, mockups, reviews, etc...

Going straight to pixel-perfect prototypes makes implementing them much easier and quicker for their engineering resources.

Why?

Because you can export the code behind every Webflow site. So they are just "showing" their engineers what it should look like. Nope. They are giving them the actual code that creates the finished product.

Before Webflow, their team used a prototyping solution that took their group of 50+ non-technical members to maintain it.

Needs to be more effective.

When they tried Webflow, they were startled. Designers were giving engineers functional prototypes. These did not need to be more pretty-looking mockups. Nope, they handed off the code.

With Webflow, you design visually.

One of their features is that the visual design, behind the scenes, creates the actual code it took to build it, and you can export it. Handing that off to your engineering resources.