“Founders do not care what powers the homepage. They care which platform ships faster, converts better, and costs less over a 24‑month burn window.”
The short answer: WordPress still owns the market, but its share is eroding at the edges where design speed and managed hosting matter most. Webflow is not killing WordPress. It is skimming the highest-margin customers: creative agencies, SaaS marketing teams, and funded startups that will pay extra to avoid engineering bottlenecks. The business question is not “Will WordPress die?” It is “At what point does the WordPress maintenance tax exceed the savings from its plugin economy?”
The public numbers point in the same direction. WordPress still powers around 40 percent of the web if you combine all versions and forks. That dominance is unprecedented in software. Webflow sits far below that in absolute terms, but its growth rate in the last few years tracks closer to a venture-backed SaaS story than an open-source CMS story. The trend is not clear yet, but founders who raised money after 2020 show a higher probability of choosing Webflow for marketing sites than WordPress, especially when design and brand are central to the go-to-market strategy.
Investors look for signals that a product choice compounds or drags. A CMS choice looks like a small technical detail on day one, but it turns into a recurring cost line: engineers required per marketing test, hours per content release, plugin updates per month, agency invoices per quarter. WordPress entered the decade as the default. Webflow entered as the alternative for teams that treat marketing websites like SaaS products, not like blogs.
The business value question in 2025 is not about features. Both platforms can publish blog posts, handle landing pages, and integrate with CRMs. The decision sits in three areas: time to launch, cost per iteration, and risk surface over a 3 to 5 year horizon. That is where the market is quietly re-pricing WordPress and where Webflow is picking up the delta.
WordPress vs Webflow: What the market share story really says
Market share slides can mislead founders. A chart that shows WordPress at 40+ percent and Webflow under 1 percent can make the conversation feel over before it starts. But raw share hides where the money is.
WordPress powers:
– Hobby blogs
– Long tail small business sites
– Enterprise media properties
– WooCommerce stores
– Legacy corporate blogs no one wants to touch
Webflow powers a smaller slice of the internet, but a higher share of:
– Design-led marketing sites
– Seed to Series C startup sites
– Agency-built brochure sites with higher budgets
– High-velocity landing page systems for paid acquisition
So the real question: is WordPress losing the *revenue-rich* segment of the market to Webflow?
“Market share by domain count is vanity. Market share by ARR controlled or influenced is what investors care about.”
If you follow agency forums, GTM leaders on LinkedIn, and job posts for “Webflow Developer,” the pattern looks clear: more funded companies are starting with Webflow for public-facing marketing and product sites, then leaving WordPress only where they need deep custom workflows or complex commerce.
Search trends and product usage data from tools like BuiltWith and W3Techs show:
– WordPress growth has slowed relative to past years
– Webflow’s domain count and traffic share have roughly doubled or more across several segments since around 2020
– In “new builds” of marketing sites by modern agencies, Webflow often appears as option 1 or 2, while WordPress is no longer the default
This does not mean a collapse for WordPress. It means the composition of its share is tilting toward the lower-budget, maintenance-heavy side of the market. That matters for agencies that built their business around WordPress retainers, and for founders weighing the total lifetime cost of their web stack.
The market indicates that Webflow is winning where:
– Designers drive the decision
– Speed of iteration matters more than plugin variety
– Teams want SaaS-style reliability more than root access
WordPress still wins where:
– Cost sensitivity is extreme
– There is in-house PHP or full-stack talent
– Plugins and flexibility trump the need for a visual editor
– SEO teams want very deep control and long plugin history
So, is WordPress “losing” to Webflow? In raw numbers, no. In the high-intent, design-forward startup and agency segment, yes, there is a visible shift.
The real ROI comparison: WordPress vs Webflow over 3 years
Founders rarely ask “Which CMS is better?” They ask:
– How much will this cost to build and maintain?
– Who do I need to hire?
– How fast can marketing run experiments without engineering help?
– What breaks, and who fixes it at 2 a.m.?
To answer this, we need to turn the platform debate into a cost and growth model.
Cost structure: build, operate, and change
Think of three cost phases:
1. Initial build cost
2. Operating cost (hosting, plugins, monitoring)
3. Change cost (new pages, features, and experiments)
Here is a simplified 3-year model for a funded B2B SaaS startup marketing site, with a moderate traffic profile and frequent campaigns.
| Cost Area (3 years) | WordPress (self/managed hosting) | Webflow (Business-level plan) |
|---|---|---|
| Initial build (agency or freelancers) | $8k – $25k | $10k – $30k |
| Hosting & platform fees | $600 – $3k | $1.5k – $5k |
| Premium plugins / extensions | $500 – $3k | $0 – $1k |
| Maintenance & security (updates, fixes) | $6k – $18k | $1k – $4k |
| New pages & iterations (content + dev/design) | $10k – $40k | $8k – $35k |
| Estimated 3-year total | $25k – $89k | $20.5k – $75k |
These are broad ranges, but the pattern usually looks like this:
– WordPress wins on day-one license cost.
– Webflow recoups its higher subscription fee by compressing maintenance and iteration costs, *if* your team uses its editor properly.
The trade is clear from an investor lens: pay a bit more in recurring SaaS fees to lower the need for backend engineers on marketing work and reduce risk of downtime or plugin conflicts.
“Any hour your senior engineer spends debugging a WordPress plugin is an invisible tax on product velocity.”
In teams where marketing needs 10+ landing pages a month, this tax compounds. Every extra step between “copy is ready” and “page is live” increases CAC and slows learning.
ROI from time-to-market
The core business value of a platform choice is how quickly you can validate ideas without breaking things.
With WordPress, the chain often looks like:
Copywriter → Designer (Figma) → Developer (theme or builder) → QA → Publish
With Webflow, many teams run:
Copywriter / Designer → Webflow Designer → Internal QA → Publish
Engineering only steps in for complex integrations or custom scripts.
If your marketing team runs one new campaign per quarter, that difference is small. If you run new experiments weekly, it is huge.
You can model this:
– Suppose each campaign delay costs $2,000 in lost or delayed learnings.
– If Webflow cuts shipping time by 3 days per campaign across 20 campaigns a year, that is roughly $120,000 in opportunity value over 3 years, just from faster feedback loops.
This is the ROI argument that pushes funded SaaS companies and agencies toward Webflow, even though the absolute subscription cost is higher than a budget WordPress host.
WordPress can match this tempo with the right stack and process, but it often needs:
– A visual builder like Elementor, Beaver Builder, or Gutenberg blocks
– A rules-based workflow for updates
– A developer who hardens the environment and cleans up technical debt regularly
Those extra requirements add people cost and failure points.
Security, performance, and risk surface
Security and reliability are not “nice to have” once your site is tied to pipeline or product. They are line items in a risk register.
WordPress has three structural traits:
1. Core software that needs regular patches
2. A plugin ecosystem where quality and security vary widely
3. A very large install base that attracts automated attacks
That is not a criticism. It is simply the economic reality of running the most common CMS on the planet.
Webflow runs as a closed SaaS environment:
– No server access
– No third-party plugins installed directly in the runtime
– Managed hosting with built-in CDN and SSL
For most non-dev founders, that sounds like one thing: fewer ways to break production.
“Webflow shifts your risk from ‘I misconfigured my server’ to ‘Webflow had an outage.’ For many businesses, that is a net win.”
The trade-off:
– WordPress lets you tune servers, cache layers, and custom workflows for edge cases.
– Webflow gives you less control, but simpler defaults and fewer updates.
In practice:
– A typical SME WordPress site might need monthly plugin and core updates, plus monitoring for slow queries or broken plugins after major upgrades.
– A typical Webflow site needs periodic audits of custom code snippets and integrations, but rarely low-level infrastructure work.
For developers, this constraint can feel limiting. For founders and CMOs, it often feels like insurance.
The market response shows this. A growing share of agencies now position “we build in Webflow so you do not have to manage updates” as a value prop. With WordPress, some agencies build retainer models around handling that maintenance. Both models can be profitable, but the risk sits in different places.
SEO, content, and growth potential
Marketers used to default to WordPress because “WordPress is good for SEO.” That statement is half history, half myth.
From an SEO perspective, both WordPress and Webflow allow:
– Clean HTML output
– Custom meta tags and titles
– Open Graph and structured data setups
– Fast pages with good Core Web Vitals, if you build them responsibly
The real gap has been in plugin depth.
WordPress benefits from long-standing SEO plugins:
– Yoast
– Rank Math
– SEOPress
These tools bundle:
– Sitemap control
– Schema presets
– Breadcrumb logic
– Content scoring
Webflow has improved SEO features and offers integrations, but the plugin library is smaller, and some tasks require more manual setup or external tools.
For growth, the more important factor is how easily non-technical content teams can:
– Create new content types
– Spin up topic clusters
– Interlink content at scale
– A/B test layouts and CTAs
Both platforms can support this, but the path is different.
In WordPress, custom post types, custom fields, and reusable blocks can create a powerful editorial system. It often requires a strong technical setup phase. Mistakes here lead to messy admin screens and content teams that avoid using certain features.
In Webflow, the CMS Collections approach gives designers a fairly direct way to craft flexible content types and views. Non-technical editors can then work in a friendly UI. The limit comes when teams try to mimic highly complex editorial systems or full-scale media properties.
For most SaaS and B2B marketing teams, Webflow’s feature set is enough. For heavy publishers or content businesses with thousands of articles, WordPress still usually offers more mature workflows, more plugins, and more battle-tested patterns.
Developer experience vs marketer experience
A quiet part of this debate: who holds power in your org.
WordPress is friendly to developers who:
– Want full source code control
– Know PHP, JavaScript, and database tuning
– Prefer to debug everything in their own stack
Marketers sometimes feel blocked in that world, especially when every change needs dev review.
Webflow inverts that:
– Designers and marketers get a visual environment they can “own.”
– Developers step in only for custom pieces, integrations, and advanced scripts.
This shift is not about platform ideology. It is about cost per decision.
In a venture-backed startup with a 12 to 24 month runway, each month where marketing waits on development has an explicit cash cost. The salary of a growth team that cannot experiment kills more value than an extra $100 a month in platform fees.
“Marketing-controlled websites are not about ego. They are about reducing the number of people required to change a headline.”
For agencies, this shift also changes the business model:
– WordPress agencies have often sold complex themes, custom plugins, and long-term maintenance.
– Webflow agencies often sell faster builds, cleaner handoff, and smaller retainers focused on growth, not plugin updates.
Investors look for consistency and margin in those models. WordPress shops can earn strong margins with large retainers. Webflow shops can earn strong margins with faster project cycles and less firefighting. Both can work, but the platform choice sets constraints.
Feature comparison that matters for growth teams
To move past high-level arguments, here is a feature and value comparison focused on growth, not developer preferences.
| Area | WordPress (typical modern setup) | Webflow (CMS / Business plan) |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting model | Self-hosted or managed WP host | Fully hosted SaaS |
| Visual design control | Theme + builder plugin or custom front-end | Built-in visual designer with CSS-level control |
| Content modeling | Custom post types + fields (via code or plugins) | Collections (built-in, UI-driven) |
| Security surface | Core + many plugins + server | Platform managed; custom code limited to embeds/scripts |
| SEO capabilities | Extensive via mature plugins | Strong core features; fewer deep plugins |
| Performance | Varies by theme, plugins, and hosting | Generally strong by default; CDN built-in |
| Integrations | Huge plugin ecosystem; can connect to nearly anything | Good API and third-party integrations; smaller library |
| Developer control | Full stack control; custom code everywhere | Custom scripts and attributes but no server access |
| Non-technical editor UX | Depends on theme/builder; can be cluttered | Clean editor UI for content; visual edits simple |
| E-commerce | WooCommerce + addons; powerful but complex | Built-in e-commerce; more limited but simpler |
| Best fit | Complex content sites, blogs, stores with tech resources | Marketing sites, landing systems, design-led sites |
Where WordPress keeps a durable advantage
Even with Webflow’s growth, WordPress holds strong ground.
Price-sensitive and long-tail markets
If your budget is a few hundred dollars a year, WordPress wins almost every time.
– Cheap shared hosting
– Free themes and plugins
– Massive library of tutorials and community support
For freelancers serving small local businesses, WordPress remains attractive. Clients can pay a small upfront fee, then handle minor content changes themselves or pay for low-cost support.
Webflow’s subscription pricing will feel high for these segments, even if the total cost of ownership could be lower. Perception matters.
Complex editorial and publishing needs
Media sites, large blogs, and content-first businesses often lean toward WordPress because:
– Editorial workflows are mature
– Plugins cover complex needs like multilingual content, paywalls, membership areas, and deep search
– Many content teams already know the admin interface
Recreating those workflows in Webflow can be done, but often with more custom work or third-party services. For high-volume publishers, the plugin ecosystem and experience around WordPress still carry significant weight.
Heavy custom development and edge cases
If your site is not just a site, but a complex app, custom marketplace, or deeply integrated platform, WordPress can act like a full framework.
– Direct access to the database
– Ability to build complex plugins
– Mature patterns for role-based access, custom dashboards, and so on
Webflow is not trying to be a full application framework. It is closer to the “front of house” for your brand and content. For heavy back-office logic, most teams pair Webflow with a custom app or a headless backend, then connect them.
Where Webflow is gaining real ground
The pressure on WordPress is most visible in a few clear segments.
VC-backed SaaS and tech startups
Take a random sample of post-2020 SaaS startups fresh off a seed or Series A. You will see a higher-than-random frequency of Webflow.
Reasons:
– Seed decks promise rapid iteration; Webflow supports that story.
– Founders often come from product and design backgrounds, not PHP.
– Agencies pitching to these startups position Webflow as the “fast growth” stack.
From a board’s point of view, a marketing site not blocked by engineering is a risk reducer. Fewer GitHub PRs tied to copy changes, fewer obscure hosting issues, less attack surface from outdated plugins.
Design-led brands and agencies
Agencies that pride themselves on visual craft like Webflow because:
– The Figma-to-browser translation can stay within the design team.
– Fine-grain control over layout and interactions is easier without touching PHP templates.
– Handover to the client leaves fewer chances for them to break layouts with bad theme edits.
This matches Webflow’s own go-to-market focus. The product speaks the language of designers and front-end folks. WordPress speaks more to developers and site owners who want total control.
Companies burned by past WordPress builds
There is an emotional side: many founders have a horror story about a slow, fragile WordPress site weighed down by 30 plugins and a theme no one understands anymore.
Those experiences create a bias. When they hear “managed SaaS platform with fewer moving parts,” they listen.
The competitor here is not “WordPress the core software,” but poor WordPress implementations that have accumulated over a decade. Webflow benefits from being the fresh start.
How AI and new tools affect the decision in 2025
One more dimension in 2025: AI-assisted site building and content.
Both WordPress and Webflow are integrating AI features:
– Content suggestions
– Layout generation
– Automated image handling
AI lowers the skill floor for non-technical teams. That favors platforms that already give those teams direct control.
If your marketers can prompt out a new hero section, tweak it visually, and ship it without dev, that compounds the Webflow story. If AI plugins in WordPress still need developer oversight, the bottleneck remains.
That said, WordPress benefits from a deeper third-party ecosystem. Many AI-focused plugins target WordPress first, given its install base. Over time, this could rebalance some of the marketing-facing features.
Signals investors and buyers will watch next
When investors evaluate a startup’s platform choices, they rarely block a deal because of WordPress or Webflow. But they infer things:
– WordPress with heavy custom code and no documentation suggests technical debt.
– Webflow for a data-heavy application suggests a mismatch.
– A clean separation of marketing site (Webflow or WordPress) and app (custom stack) suggests clear thinking.
For agencies, procurement teams now ask directly which platform they use and why. Webflow proficiency has become a line item in RFPs for marketing site projects. WordPress expertise is still required for content-heavy and complex builds.
Over the next few years, watch:
– Whether WordPress core or major hosts ship improvements that reduce maintenance overhead and plugin fragility.
– How far Webflow extends its CMS and logic features without becoming too complex for its core users.
– The growth of headless and composable architectures, where both WordPress and Webflow can act as components rather than monoliths.
“Platform choice used to be one big bet. In a composable stack, it becomes one module you can swap if it stops returning ROI.”
Practical guidance: who should pick what in 2025
To tie this back to business value, imagine three profiles.
Bootstrapped founder with limited budget
– Priority: low cost, reasonable control, lots of plugin options.
– Likely choice: WordPress with a modern theme or builder, on a good managed host.
– Risk: technical debt from too many plugins or poor configuration.
Here, Webflow’s subscription feels expensive unless you are very serious about brand and expect high growth soon.
Seed to Series B SaaS with strong growth targets
– Priority: fast experiments, designer-led changes, predictable reliability.
– Likely choice: Webflow for marketing and docs; custom app for product.
– Risk: hitting limits on complex content or internal tools, needing to extend with separate systems.
In this case, the compounding gains from faster marketing iterations usually outweigh hosting savings from WordPress.
Content-heavy business or media site
– Priority: advanced editorial workflows, extensive plugins, SEO depth.
– Likely choice: WordPress, possibly in a headless setup for performance and flexibility.
– Risk: higher maintenance, more complex upgrades, need for experienced devs.
Here, Webflow can still play a role for hero marketing pages or microsites, but WordPress retains a structural advantage for the core content engine.
Is WordPress losing market share to Webflow in 2025?
By raw global install numbers, WordPress still dominates and will continue to do so for years. There is no credible near-term scenario where Webflow overtakes WordPress in total sites.
By *growth quality* and strategic accounts, WordPress is giving up ground to Webflow:
– Among design-led agencies
– Among venture-backed SaaS and tech companies
– Among teams that treat website iteration as a growth engine, not an IT project
The market indicates that WordPress will keep most of the long tail, complex editorial sites, and developer-driven deployments. Webflow will keep compounding in the higher-velocity marketing segment where time-to-test and risk reduction justify higher subscription costs.
For founders, the rational move is not to pick a side for life, but to treat the website stack as a portfolio decision:
– Use the platform that matches your current stage, hiring plan, and growth strategy.
– Treat replatforming as a possible future cost, not a failure.
– Measure the real ROI: campaigns shipped, leads generated, hours saved, and incidents avoided.
The platform that wins in your business is the one that turns website changes into a weekly habit, not a quarterly project.