Startups are amazing at their advertising, and one such startup is web flow. While advertising can be great, the reality of situation is that the end result is not up to par with what businesses need.

Your business definitively needs total control over your website environment, but instead of reiterating as to why you need FTP/SSH access to your server side environment, this time around I will focus on third party platform issues.

Technology and server side issues of Web Flow

Webflow platform that doesn’t create real websites. While they’ve tried to address a lot of issues, their startup is facing a lot of upwards scalability issues. When deciding where you want your website to live and reside, the last place you want is centralized silo that you can’t run your Sys ops on. Linux/FTP access matters.

Secondly, your business becomes dependent on WebFlow support. If you are observing your website as a critical piece of your business marketing strategy (and you should), you don’t want to run your platform on unreliable and expensive shared hosting that doesn’t provide support or server side access.

One of my consulting priorities when dealing with new clients is to emphasize the importance of ease of SSH access to sys-ops, dev-ops and programmers. This way you can truly tackle and control your website. The less you need to interact with third party support, the better.

Labor related WebFlow Issues

WebFlow vendors are not technical individuals. They are designers that want to compete in the cheap website space. Serious business can not operate in a toy environment, and with toy affiliated vendors.

No matter how skilled graphic designers behind these projects are not tech savy individuals, and can’t truly resolve technology related challenges that websites truly face. I won’t even mention all the challenges that you will face if you want practice SEO that stem out of having .htaccess modification privileges and fine tweaks only available through raw instance access.

And final labor related issue, probably the biggest one, is that the talent pool of WebFlow is extremely low. It is a proprietary tool, dealing with a small segment of clients. Most real client onboarding is coming from the freelancers themselves. You are facing being trapped with a single, mostly one man band vendor for a while.