CMS Webflow: The Best Way To Build And Manage Your Website

A website that is not regularly updated will produce different results than one that is. A CMS (content management system) allows users to easily edit, change, or delete any text, image, audio, or video from a website with no hassle. A CMS will enable you to keep your website current and lead to a significant increase in your business.

CMS Webflow is one of the best interfaces for content management that allows users to have complete control over different processes without the need for coding knowledge.

This article provides a comprehensive understanding of how CMS Webflow works and how it benefits you and updates websites with the proper guidance of a Webflow Agency.

What Is Webflow?

Webflow is a platform that allows users to design, build, and publish websites visually without writing any code. It includes a drag-and-drop interface for creating and styling web pages and tools for adding functionality like forms, slideshows, and e-commerce capabilities. Webflow also offers to host published websites, making it a complete solution for building and maintaining websites.

Webflow is particularly popular among designers and creative professionals who want to control their websites’ look and feel but don’t necessarily have the coding skills or resources to build them from scratch. It’s also used by businesses and organizations to create professional-looking websites quickly and easily.

What Is CMS In Webflow?

With CMS Webflow  you can manage and update without writing a single line of code. You have complete control over how your control is structured and displayed in your project.

The “visual” content management system (CMS) from webflow enables you to create, design, and update structured content without writing a single line of code. Websites that use a CMS only have to update dynamic content once, and then it will automatically be updated on all the pages where it’s used. This is much more efficient than having to update each page separately.

Related Read: Introduction To Webflow CMS

Content Structure In Webflow

Structuring your collections is a matter of defining entities and then creating relationships between those entities within the context of the websites. When creating your collections, it can be helpful to understand how these entities relate to the real world. Still, ultimately, the relationships between things in your collection aren’t important until you start using them to design something.

In the structure, the aspect we have is the site. The site is nothing but the website you are trying to build. It can be a blog, landing pages, an e-commerce site, etc. Every site will have its own CMS. And the next important thing has a collection.

A collection works as a database where we can store our content. This content is used throughout our project programmatically. Finally, we have the items. The items here are the individual data records in each collection.

Let’s understand this structure with a basic example. Suppose you want to create a website that sells books online. You will have to start with creating a new site on Webflow.

Now the CMS here will act as the central repository where all the books will be stored. But as we know, books have different genres like horror, fictional, non-fictional or mystery. We can use collections to define our books categorically.

Therefore, the items can be the individual books present in that collection. So one can leverage this simple CMS structure of your flow to create a CMS which handles their needs. As mentioned earlier, Webflow also allows you to build your website.

You can combine this CMS functionality with a website builder to create a full-fledged website all in one place. You can also use Webflow as headless CMS. The head represents the content in the front end, and the body represents the back end. Headless CMS is where the head, i.e., the front end of the client side, is removed only using the body that is the backend.

This means you can host your content elsewhere and use the flow only as a database. To achieve this, there is a developer portal in Webflow where you can find every API. These APIs can talk to Webflow CMS, and you can easily display your data on any device, be it mobile or desktop.

Webflow Dashboard Walkthrough

1. After understanding the content structure in Webflow, we will be looking at how it works and how we can create the site CMS collection and the items. Let’s jump to the Webflow website.

2. After logging into the webflow website. To create a site, go to the dashboard and click on the “new site” button. You are taken to many templates when you click the button. We will start with a blank template to make you understand every aspect of Webflow. 

3. Click on the blank template and name your website. Next, click on “create site” to start the process.

4. To create the CMS solution, click on the “CMS” icon.

5. We will now create a collection in CMS. Click on the “plus” icon and name the collection. Our web page will have multiple data types, like image, multi-image, plain text, etc. Webflow allows us to add the field of the various data types and the custom field. 

6. Click on add field, which is under customization field.

7. Click on the plain text to create a custom field. You need to give a name to the field. Here we have given the name “heading.” On this heading, Webflow will provide us with the limitation of this field like maximum or minimum character count. If you want, you can mention the maximum and minimum character count. Lastly, click on the “check box” and “Save” the field.

8. You can add multiple customized fields to your Webflow CMS collection. After this, we will add an image. Click on the “image” button and again give a label name. Like the plain text, you can add limitations to the image like maximum image size, width or height. If the field is required, click on the “required check box” and “Save.”

9. If you don’t have any content at the beginning of the website, Webflow has the feature of adding dummy data in the collection item. You get options as below,

10. For now, we will select the “five items” button.

11. As you can see in the above image, Webflow added dummy data. When you click on the first item, you see the customized screen with the heading, image and video.

12. You can edit this data easily. You can replace any items with any other items or URLs. To add a logo, you can click on “Multiple images” and select the desired images for the logo.

13. After editing your items, click on the “Save” button.

14. With Webflow you can easily manage and create your website in one flow. To create a website and map this data on the website, click on the “Plus” icon. 

You are exposed to multiple options like layout, basic typography, CMS collection and other media items. 

15. To integrate the CMS data into the website, click on the “Plus” icon on the top left. Click on “Home Page” and click on the CMS collection you created.

16. Add the layouts as per the CMS collection items to the page. Here we are adding a heading, so click on the “Get text from the (name of the collection)”

You can manage the CSS from the dashboard itself easily. After integrating the data from the CMS and managing the data, you can now publish the website

Webflow Case Study

In this use case, there are three modules- client-side, back end, and CMS Webflow. The client side, our content, will call the back-end API; similarly, the further back end will call the Webflow CMS API. This will get the latest data store in the Webflow CMS. 

We need to integrate the Webflow CMS API in the back end, which will get the updated data. To understand the whole process deeply, you can see the video below. 

Webflow Advantages And Disadvantages

After understanding the content structure and how to create one, let’s deep dive into the advantages and disadvantages of Webflow;

Webflow Vs WordPress 

Webflow and WordPress are both popular for building and managing websites, but they have some key differences that may make one more suitable for your needs than the other. It’s important to consider your specific needs and goals when deciding which platform to use.

▶️ There’s no 3rd party plugin support in webflow but it also helps to keep our website secure

▶️ Webflow offers better out-of-the-box performance optimization.

▶️ Webflow offers direct customer support for paying customers.

▶️ Webflow doesn’t have a huge plugin library like WordPress. While this makes things simpler, it’s also more limiting.

▶️ WordPress gives 3rd party plugin support but some plugins are very risky to use and not secure.

▶️ You can make WordPress sites load very fast, but it requires some manual effort.

▶️ WordPress doesn’t offer direct customer support (though it’s easy to find community support).

▶️ WordPress sites can feel more complicated because WordPress relies on plugins to add key features.

Related Read: WordPress Vs Reactjs: What Should You Choose?

Webflow Vs Joomla 

Webflow and Joomla are both platforms that can be used to build and manage websites, but they have some key differences. Webflow is a good choice for users who want a visual editor and design-focused websites, and Joomla is a good choice for users who want more flexibility and a wider range of features.

✅ Webflow loads every website faster because of its better optimization.

✅ Webflow feature library has a lot easy to use features.

✅ Webflow support almost all browser which is mostly used on the internet.

✅ Webflow offers a lot of in-built customization options.

✅ Joomla can be slow to load,especially on large website.

✅ Joomla doesn’t offer as many features as Webflow.

✅ Joomla is not compatible with some of the most popular browsers.

✅ Joomla doesn’t offer as many customization options.

Webflow CMS Pricing

Webflow offers a range of pricing options for its website design and development platform. It currently offers four plans as follows;