The performance of Webflow: a comparative study

Sammanfattning

The amount of active websites on the internet is claimed to have increased by almost half a billion in the last decade. With that, the amount of tools available to help develop them has increased as well. One type of these tools is called website builders. In the past few years, the market has seen a big increase in software often referred to as no-code tools. By visualizing most, if not all, of the otherwise manual coding process, they aim to give users an increased amount of flexibility without having to possess a lot of previous web development knowledge. However, despite their current popularity, no-code tools do not seem to be the target of much research. This study aims to measure the performance of Webflow, a browser based software that fits both the category of a website builder as well as a no-code tool. This is done by comparing its performance to Wordpress, arguably the most established website builder on the market. The performance analysis is conducted through automated performance audits using Google Lighthouse and its 6 performance metrics. By developing an identical website using both builders, two versions of the website have been analyzed; one static snapshot deployed on the same hosting environment and one dynamic version deployed using Webflows’ internal cloud hosting environment, and Wordpress deployed on an AWS EC2 instance. The results showed that while Wordpress outperformed Webflow in a majority of individual performance metrics in both experiments, Webflow performed better overall on the desktop breakpoint on both the static and dynamic version of the websites.