The Total Economic Impact™ Of Webflow

Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Webflow

A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study Commissioned By Webflow, September 2024

In today’s fast-paced digital enterprise, the ability to rapidly create, design, and publish digital experiences has become an essential part of the overall marketing strategy. Organizations seek user-friendly, scalable technology platforms that allow their teams to focus on impactful work to drive marketing performance through collaboration, management, and faster time to market.

Webflow is a website experience platform that allows in-house teams and agencies to create dynamic websites that traditionally require a team of developers, saving time and reducing costs by eliminating the need for highly skilled developers. Enterprises across all industries use Webflow to build best in class digital experiences.

Webflow commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Webflow.1 The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Webflow on their organizations.

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Return on investment (ROI)

332%

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Net present value (NPV)

$2.12M

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five representatives from organizations currently using Webflow. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is an agnostic organization with revenue of $2 billion per year.

Interviewees said that prior to using Webflow, their organizations relied on complex content management systems (CMS) that demanded extensive technical expertise. They also used cumbersome, siloed tech stacks that impeded scalability and left their organizations with complicated processes for simple content updates and new page development. These processes often took months and overburdened full-stack/back-end developers and visual designers. These limitations led to frequent website outages, the inability to align business needs to marketing strategies, lengthy and costly development cycles, and high labor costs — all of which hampered their agility and market responsiveness.

“I’ve done a number of localized implementations in the past and it’s one of the most expensive and time-intensive elements of web implementations. Seeing Webflow’s approach actually building all of that natively and streamlining that process significantly is just a huge unlock because it opens those doors to be able to scale and grow in ways that are much more blocked in other platforms.”

Director of web strategy, security software

Key Findings

Quantified benefits. Three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits for the composite organization include:

  • Better business outcomes due to new customer acquisition through the website. With Webflow, the composite organization can collaborate, build, launch, scale, and optimize its web properties. Webflow’s visual-first website experience platform allows the composite’s marketing teams to have more agility and autonomy in the page-building process, translating their messaging into a better visual brand representation. This ultimately leads to increased website traffic, profitability, and growth.
  • Up to 94% faster time to market due to increased content management efficiencies. The composite organization experiences a 94% improvement in the time required to create and develop digital experiences due to Webflow’s user interface that allows nontechnical users to build, launch, scale, and optimize content experiences and collaborate with designers and developers in real time. The AI Copilot built into Webflow’s Designer feature helps marketers at the composite create and iterate on content faster, including styling and content changes. Additionally, Webflow’s headless APIs support composability, further increasing content management efficiencies by plugging into adjacent software systems.
  • Efficiency gains of 80% for web content editing cycles. The composite organization experiences an 80% efficiency improvement in the time needed to make changes and corrections on its main website and microsites. Prior to using Webflow, making a change or correction required opening a support ticket for the development team to address, followed by rounds of feedback. With Webflow, users at the composite can now create new content or make changes to existing content items directly on this canvas in the visual-first CMS, bypassing a lengthy development process. This new content editing process empowers marketing teams and frees up developers to focus on more business-critical tasks.
  • More than $850,000 in cost savings on decommissioned legacy systems and reallocated labor. After implementing Webflow, the composite organization decommissions its previous content management system and associated hosting over a three-year period. This is because Webflow’s hosting capabilities are included in enterprise service-level agreements. Additionally, the number of full-stack developers needed to maintain and work on Webflow is reduced due to efficiency enhancements in content management development. This allows full-stack developers to focus on other areas of the business.

“The ability to implement designs quickly is just spectacular. It’s very fast for our internal team to make [website] changes and update content. … They love it, there are no complaints at all. [Webflow] is the system we want to use.”

CIO, waste management

Unquantified benefits. Benefits that provide value for the composite organization but are not quantified for this study include:

  • User-friendly platform and team empowerment. Webflow’s visual canvas has empowered nontechnical teams to engage in creative and development activities for the website. Webflow opens the door to more team collaborations, thanks to its streamlined creation-development process. Multiple teams at the composite organization are now empowered to create and shape messaging on the website given the speed at which the visual-first platform allows teams to transition their ideas to execution.
  • Reliable managed hosting environment. Webflow’s hosting infrastructure allows internal IT and engineering teams at the composite organization to save time that would otherwise be spent on maintaining and optimizing their own hosting environment.
  • Enhanced scalability through composable integrations. Webflow’s approach to scalability is multifaceted, focusing on a robust core while embracing third-party integrations through turnkey connectors. By leveraging content from adjacent systems, Webflow users at the composite organization can rapidly create, edit, and deploy experiences that would otherwise demand additional development and content creation time. This strategy not only accelerates the rollout of new experiences but also allows businesses to scale faster globally.
  • Efficiency gains through localization features. Webflow’s native localizations capabilities translate and localize content for different geographies quickly, permit live previews for changes, and include the ability to conduct user testing before launch, therefore providing the composite with the ability to manage multiple international sites with minimal effort.

Costs. Three-year, risk-adjusted PV costs for the composite organization include:

  • Enterprise service-level agreement. Ongoing licensing spend is based on the composite’s project plan and the number of sites run on Webflow. Hosting capabilities are also included in the platform cost. The composite organization, which is a scalable enterprise, is billed annually for its multiyear subscription, incurring costs of around $470,000 over three years.
  • Agency implementation and maintenance fees. The composite organization chooses to engage with an external agency to support the initial implementation that includes the lift-and-shift of one main site and two landing pages. Once the implementation is completed, the composite organization retains the agency services for ad hoc projects throughout the years, incurring $143,000 in costs over three years for the composite organization.
  • Training and ongoing costs. Webflow’s users at the composite organization have different titles and roles and, therefore, different levels of technical expertise. Training and ongoing learning processes are minimized for development roles, making them more design- and content-oriented for business teams in shorter stints. This cost is about $22,000 over three years for the composite organization.

The representative interviews and financial analysis found that a composite organization experiences benefits of $2.76 million over three years versus costs of $638,000, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $2.12 million and an ROI of 332%.

Time saved on content management corrections

80%

Key Statistics

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    Return on investment (ROI)

    332%
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    Benefits PV

    $2.76M
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    Net present value (NPV)

    $2.12M
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    Payback

    <6 months
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Benefits (Three-Year)

Increased profit due to new customer acquisition through the website Increased productivity on content management development Operational efficiencies due to improved content quality Cost savings from labor and licensing costs

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester constructed a Total Economic Impact™ framework for those organizations considering an investment Webflow.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Webflow can have on an organization.

  1. Due Diligence

    Interviewed Webflow stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Webflow.

  2. Interviews

    Interviewed five representatives at organizations using Webflow to obtain data about costs, benefits, and risks.

  3. Composite Organization

    Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewees’ organizations.

  4. Financial Model Framework

    Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewees.

  5. Case Study

    Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling the investment impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication of ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology provides a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.

Disclosures

Readers should be aware of the following:

This study is commissioned by Webflow and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.

Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the study to determine the appropriateness of an investment in Webflow.

Webflow reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.

Webflow provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.

Consulting Team:

Carmen Serradilla Ortiz

Maria Kulikova

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