WordPress is the world's most popular content management system, powering about one-third of the top one million websites. However, while the platform makes it easy to write content, it's not the most intuitive when designing sites. Webflow is much more intuitive for designers looking to build pixel-perfect designs.
Let's look at how to integrate WordPress with Webflow to realize the best of both worlds – WordPress's fully-featured editor and Webflow's beautiful designs.
The most popular integration involves using WordPress as a headless CMS for Webflow. That way, you can design a pixel-perfect website in Webflow while letting writers create content in a familiar WordPress backend. It's a win-win that makes it easy to manage content-heavy websites without sacrificing design.
Zapier and other tools facilitate these integrations, but you'll quickly hit some significant challenges. For example, Zapier misfires can leave your Webflow and WordPress databases out of sync. And, if you update historical posts, there's no easy way to tell Zapier to come back and edit those posts on your Webflow site.
PowerImporter makes it easy to keep your WordPress CMS in sync with Webflow. Rather than relying on a ping for each new post, the solution regularly syncs up the two data sources to identify and resolve any differences. As a result, you don't have to worry about misfires, editing posts, or other edge cases that make Zapier integrations a challenge.
The platform automates things like:
Currently, PowerImporter's WordPress integration is in beta and available by request. The platform is free for up to 50 CMS items with manual syncing from Webflow.io sites. Paid plans start at $29 per month for 500 CMS items with support for hourly auto-syncing and custom domains. And you can expand from there with the high-end $99 per month plan.
Another popular approach involves building a website on Webflow and then serving one or more pages on a WordPress website. Fortunately, Webflow's WordPress plugin streamlines the integration process. The only drawback of this approach is that you must ensure that your non-Webflow pages have a compatible design with your Webflow pages.
Webflow's WordPress plugin makes sending specific WordPress paths to Webflow pages easy. Source: Webflow University.
There are a few steps to the process:
Note: A Webflow badge will appear for users on free Webflow plans, but you can remove it by upgrading to a paid site plan. While you won’t see the badge when publishing to staging subdomains, you will when you use a staging subdomain for websites outside Webflow (e.g., using it on a WordPress website or with reverse proxy configurations).
WordPress is among the best content management systems for the web, mainly because it's so widely known. But, it may be overkill for websites that don't have large amounts of content. In addition, WordPress may be too complex for non-technical individuals to use. A more straightforward solution, like Airtable, might be the right choice in these cases.
As a simple spreadsheet, Airtable is easy for anyone to read, add, change, or delete content. But, with support for rich text fields, it's also powerful enough to use to manage website content. Additionally, you can use Airtable as a single source of truth for multiple platforms and tools.
While Zapier is the most popular way to integrate Airtable with Webflow, PowerImporter addresses many of the same concerns mentioned above. As a result, you can avoid edge cases that inevitably arise over time and ensure that your data is always in sync and up-to-date. You don't have to worry about time-consuming workarounds, either.
Since most people are familiar with Wordpress’s backend, using it is an ideal way to manage website content. However, it's not very flexible in design for non-technical individuals. Fortunately, that's where Webflow can step in and help.
Most people integrate WordPress with Webflow using a headless CMS approach (e.g., PowerImporter) or a WordPress plugin that imports specific pages. By doing so, you can realize the CMS benefits of WordPress and the design benefits of Webflow.