It’s no secret that the 253 Media team loves Webflow. With platform updates coming almost weekly, the most powerful no-code building tool on the market, and versatility suited for nearly any business, Webflow is a website powerhouse.
But could it be even better?
Contrary to the old saying, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” Weflow is continuously pushing the envelope based on their user feedback.
To put it simply, Webflow just gets better and better.
If the 2022 Webflow Conf was any indicator of what’s to come, Webflow users should be very excited for 2023.
But what are we excited for with Webflow in 2023? Here are our top 5 Webflow upgrades that we are looking forward to.
Improved ecommerce capabilities for more scalability
It’s no secret that Webflow’s ecommerce capabilities aren’t quite up to par with the other platforms on the market.
But after a private meeting with the Webflow ecommerce team and the 253 Media team, one thing was clear: Webflow is looking to make some serious upgrades to their ecommerce platform.
Although we don’t know exactly what Webflow has in the works, we are expecting the upgrades to be centered around 3rd party integrations and customer management.
With the release of the Webflow Marketplace, we have reason to believe that Webflow is gearing up for more integrations with 3rd party apps. From what we’ve seen so far, the Marketplace is a much more exclusive and vetted marketplace compared to the other ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce.
Aside from integrations, the next big area for improvement is going to be on customer and order management. This partially stems from 3rd party integrations as well.
Many ecommerce brands use logistics tools such as ShipStation and many 3PLs have direct integrations with Shopify. For brands that need to use these tools, Webflow isn’t a viable option.. Yet.
With ecommerce updates on their horizon, these are the updates that we are looking forward to.
Memberships to move out of beta
One of the biggest announcements of the year was the release of the Webflow Membership Beta.
With this huge update, Webflow users gained the ability to gate content with multiple levels of subscriptions including paid subscriptions, users can give their members the ability to easily manage their subscriptions, and you even have native tools for sending transactional emails to your subscribers.
As of now, the Membership functionality is new. It’s in beta so access is still somewhat limited. Webflow even gives Membership users a warning that says some features may be incomplete.
There are so many use cases for Memberships so gaining more versatility to the Membership feature is going to be huge for so many companies.
Webflow users who are in the education, info product, saas, non-profit, or other subscription model businesses are going to be able to natively build no-code memberships all within their Webflow project.
Before Memberships, Webflow users had to rely on other platforms like Memberstack or Memberspace.
Sure, these are excellent platforms for building membership functions, but at the end of the day, they are 3rd party apps and can always have their own issues.
For 2023, we are looking forward to more widespread availability for Memberships so more companies can natively make membership functions on their site.
Internal libraries for faster website growth and internal team / agency relations
Another massive release in 2022 for Webflow was their integration of component libraries. As of now, this is still a beta release that is very much a work in progress and still feels pretty limited.
For us, one of the most important aspects of a client project is ease of use and ongoing updates. With every project, our goal is to make the ongoing maintenance as easy as possible.
Unfortunately, Webflow has a learning curve and most non-technical team members have a tough time making structural updates to their site while causing havoc with spacing and classes.
For 2023, we are looking forward to an expanded library function to further improve our client’s buildability with reusable sections.
Sure, there are workarounds for element libraries for internal teams, however, a more built out library functionality within the Webflow project will be incredibly helpful for internal teams who need to make updates to their Webflow website.
Page branching for non-enterprise partners and customers
One of the coolest, and probably unknown for 95% of users, features that Webflow released in 2022 was page branching.
To put it simply, Webflow’s page branching allows developers to work in the Designer on separate pages simultaneously. Historically, the Webflow designer only allowed one person in the Designer at a time. This can create issues for more complex projects that have multiple teams working on the same site.
So why is page branching cool?
Now you can drastically reduce the time needed to launch your website because you can 2x, 3x, 4x+ the working efficiency with multiple developers working on the same project.
As of now, page branching is only available to Enterprise level Webflow users and agencies so for 2023, we are looking forward to the page branching feature to trickle down to the more basic user accounts.
Webflow Marketplace - boost your Webflow site's performance with new apps and increased functionality
For years, Webflow has been a closed source platform that didn’t offer a 3rd party app store. However, Webflow has recently revamped their Marketplace.
Part of this revamp included the Libraries (in Beta) that you learned about earlier as well as the new Webflow app center, which is also in Beta.
As you learned in the ecommerce section at the beginning of this resource, Webflow is looking at boosting their ecommerce platform and one of the biggest areas for improvement is their 3rd party integration options.
To take functionality even further, the Webflow app marketplace offers apps for anything from analytics to integrations to ecommerce optimization tools.
For 2023, we are expecting the Webflow app marketplace to exponentially grow with apps for virtually anything! With that being said, we are also expecting the marketplace to remain small with only high-end apps from qualified developers.
With Webflow being closed source for so long, it would be tough to imagine that the Webflow team would let just anybody publish an app like some of the other platforms.
As of now, these are the main Webflow updates that we are looking forward to, but with updates being so frequent, there’s no telling what magic Webflow could release this year!