5 Essential Webflow Tips for Beginners: And where to start
By optimizing your website’s loading speed, mastering the Navigator, embracing interactions, utilizing Webflow's CMS, and engaging with the community, you'll be a pro in no time.
Tip 1: Optimize website’s loading speed
Webflow offers powerful tools to help you create highly optimized websites to save loading time as explained here. Here are three tips;
- Minimize elements and interactions - Too many interactions and elements on your website can slow down the loading speed, since it increases the size of your CSS file. By only using the elements and interactions that provide truly important value, you will have a faster website.
- Webflow’s responsive image feature - Responsive image feature in Webflow automatically generates multiple versions of each image you upload, and adjusts them to different display sizes and resolutions.
- Analysis tools - By using analysis tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse, you can measure the impact of images, third-party scripts, etc. This will later on help you with understanding how you should use all elements, to optimize your loading speed.
Tip 2: Master the Webflow Navigator
So, the Navigator is where you manage the site structure, and provides a visual representation of elements and their hierarchy. This allows you to navigate, select, and modify elements without selecting them directly on the visual canvas.
As you become proficient with the Navigator, you'll be able to maintain a clean and organized site structure.
Practice with the Navigator
To come to that point, spend some time getting acquainted with the Webflow Navigator and practice using it regularly.
- As you navigate, select your chosen element.
- Modify the chosen elements within your site's hierarchy.
Tip 3: Get Comfortable with Interactions
As the name suggests, Interactions are Webflow’s name for anything related to moving elements. Embracing Webflow interactions will allow you to create dynamic, engaging websites with a unique look. Interactions allow you to add animations, transitions, and user-triggered events to your website's elements, taking your designs to the next level.
By harnessing the power of interactions, you can craft unique user experiences that captivate your audience and elevate your web projects.
Gradually advance with Interactions
Begin by experimenting with simple interactions in Webflow. A step-by-step approach will help you build a solid foundation;
- Hover effects and basic animations.
- Gradually explore advanced options - such as multi-step animations.
- Experiment with scroll-triggered events
Tip 4: Utilize Webflow's CMS
Webflow’s built-in Content Management System (CMS) offers numerous benefits for managing and organizing your site's content. With it, you can create custom data structures, simplify content updates, and maintain consistency across your website by pulling in dynamic content wherever necessary.
Common use cases for Webflow’s CMS
There are of course many ways to use the Webflow CMS, and here are some of them:
- Blog content – Probably the most common one. If you’ve got a blog, you should be using the Webflow CMS.
- Global content such as announcement bars – Although not super common, this is a great way to let the client turn on/off announcement bars without having to dig into the Designer.
- Customer testimonials – Instead of having to manage testimonials individually in each instance, pulling them in from a CMS collection allows for super simple global management of them.
- Landing pages – Less common, but great nonetheless. If you’re creating multiple pages for things such as service offerings and keeping the same layout while just swapping out copy then the CMS is your choice. And it’ll also allow the client to easily update, create, or delete existing pages without relying on you as the developer.
- Anything you want the client to be able to edit themselves
Tip 5: Utilize the community
For you to truly excel with Webflow, it's important to embrace continuous learning, and engaging with the community is a great way to do so.
Through community events, forums, webinars and collaborations you can gain insights and inspiration to constantly elevate your projects.
Remember, the Webflow community is a treasure trove of shared knowledge, so dive in and reap the benefits of collective wisdom.
Seek Knowledge
Even the most successful Webflow freelancer should still be seeking ways to improve and gain new knowledge. This can be through personal projects, watching tutorials, or challenging yourself with complicated client projects.
Anything that gets you outside of your comfort zone is generally a good thing! Because if you’re not improving, you’re actually moving backwards.
Starting your journey to mastering Webflow is exciting, filled with opportunities to learn, grow, and create stunning websites. Remember, practice and experimentation are the keys to unlocking your full potential.
By learning to optimize your websites, mastering the Navigator, getting comfortable with interactions, utilizing Webflow's CMS, and engaging with the community, you'll develop the skills and knowledge necessary to excel with Webflow. Your persistence and curiosity will absolutely pay off!
