A list of lesser known Webflow limitations (2021)

hey there internets nelson here now this video is all about those who are going to jump into webflow for the first time now if you're jumping in and you're wondering what can i build and what can i not build inside webflow this is the video for you i'm going to tell you all about the limitations of webflow so there's a lot of things that webflow doesn't advertise when it comes to limitations makes sense but i just want to tell you this is not about like don't use webflow this is more about the real being honest about webflow and what you can and can't build all right so let's get to it the first thing i want to tell you about is static versus dynamic pages what are they and what are their limitations right so i'm going to go on my screen right here and if you haven't been into webflow this is the webflow ui and i'm using a free template if i go here to the pages panel right here you'll see it says static pages okay and static pages are usually pages that are indicated with a white page icon right and so static pages are used for things like the home page contact page about page or a blog list page basically one-off pages that you only make one of and you don't really use again all right now if you're thinking about a dynamic page if you're wondering what's a dynamic page i'll get into that in a later section but static pages used for one-off pages all right the limitations to static pages is you can only have up to a hundred if you're on a paid plan and even if you're on the enterprise plan or something like that webflow will not give you more than 100. the reason why is because the platform will get sluggish or it will uh your your experience won't be as great but then again if you're using more than if you're using more than 100 static pages you might want to rethink how you're using webflow because again you don't need that many one-off pages if you do need one those many pages you're better off using a dynamic template page and again we'll get into that later so a hundred is the limit but if you're on the starter free plan then you only get two pages to play around with but there is a workaround if you want even more pages what you can do is go to the webflow.com templates then click on free and then choose any of these templates like say i'm going to choose chomp and then i'm going to preview in designer doing this lets me look at the template inside of the webflow ui then i can go ahead and turn off preview mode then go to the pages panel and look there's one two three four five six seven static pages all right so what you can do with these pages is go to one and start deleting everything you don't need even all the way down to a blank page and start experimenting start learning webflow and you'll have seven pages to play around with now if you delete a page while you're in the starter plan you can't get that page back because you're blocked by that two page limit so just delete elements but don't delete the pages okay so that's static pages now let's talk about dynamic pages and collections all right so webflow calls databases collections because a database is a collection of data i i don't know something like that and if you click on this database looking icon you'll see collections okay now actually let me go my project there we go i'm going to do it here all right there so in here i can click on this icon and here we go i have a collection now what is a collection again a collection is basically a database but with webflow you can create a database visually so think about a database as a spreadsheet like in google sheets or in microsoft excel the top row is going to be the label for each column of data and where each row is actually your data entry okay so a collection is a spreadsheet now what is a collection field collection fields are those labels the the first row in your spreadsheet it's the labels for each of your columns and collection fields you can add um up to uh looking at my notes here like up to 30 if you're on the cms plan or up to 60 if you're in the business plan and up all right you can't get any higher than that i'm telling you the limits and the highest limit is something that webflow will not budge on until they later on upgrade their systems so right now it's up to 60. so all of these collection uh custom fields is what you get access to and start playing around with all right now say i want to create a template one one that already has a bunch of uh collection fields made for me so i just click on that one button and there we go i have a bunch of collection uh custom fields and again you can only have you can only have up to 20 or no you can only have up to 30 or 60 depending on the site plan you're on i'm going to create collection and there we go so i've created my spreadsheet i've labeled the columns and now i need to add data and so what you can do just to prototype even faster you can create sample items so i'm going to add 10 items and wait for that to happen and there we go so this is my rows inside of my spreadsheet okay this is what we call collection items so we have the whole collection which is the spreadsheet the collection fields which is the labels of each column and now the collection items for the collection items the limitations to that is you can have only uh 50 if you're on the starter plan or 2000 if you're on the cms or 10 000 if you're on the business or above okay now uh that's the limitations for that and lastly the number of collections or spreadsheets is you can have up to 20 collections on the cms or 40 collections on the business plan and up all right now there is people who come into webflow and they ask can i get more than 10 000 and 10 000 items or more than 60 collections and we have to tell them no you can't because again it's the platform's limitation but there is a workaround okay so what you can do is split up your projects into multiple uh projects and so you can have one for blog and set that up through your subdomains so you have like blog.whatever.com and then keep your marketing site at whatever.com it's the same thing that webflow's doing where they have like blog.webflow.com and then they have university.webflow.com they're different um different projects and they have all their limitations as far as the number of collections and data but they're different projects and they connect to that same main domain name using a subdomain hopefully you understand that all right okay next is the assets panel now if you're familiar with uh traditional web hosts where they give you a certain number of gigabytes to store on your server webflow is different webflow actually hosts all of your files on amazon web servers and serves them through a content delivery network named fastly now what i mean by uploading your assets is this assets panel right here okay so this image icon this is where you would upload all of your images your oops images documents and lottie files all right now you're allowed to upload as much as you want but there are limitations okay for example for files or image files you can only uh upload pngs jpegs gifs gifs or svgs for document types pdfs docs excel sheets powerpoint text csv odt ods odp yeah you know me and lastly json file which is for lottie files okay now uh another thing another lot another uh another limitation is that the maximum file size for each of your images is four megabytes and for documents it's 10 megabytes okay so you can't just upload anything but you can upload as much as you want as for video files yes you can upload video files however there's a limitation to that as well so for videos you would scroll all the way down in your ad elements panel and you would click and drag the background video element onto your page so i'm gonna do that and i'll just put it right here and let's just make this with a hundred vw and so it's gonna show up something like this but what you wanna look out for is this supported formats so when you're uploading a video you can only upload webm mp4 movs or oggs and also the video has to be less than 30 megabytes the reason why is because after you upload your video webflow servers is going to compress it even more and remove any audio tracks the reason why is this background video element is just used as a way to enhance the user experience with a background looping video it's supposed to you know just be something generic that helps tell the story of the brand or the mission of the website and nothing else if you do need to upload a video where people can scrub through and also listen to that's when you would need to upload a video to youtube vimeo or another third-party video hosting platform and then drag in a video element and paste in the link to it and then webflow will add the embed code for you okay so that video is actually hosted somewhere else you can't host videos inside of webflow if you're thinking about like an audio player where it's like a dot wave uh file or dot mp3 you cannot host that inside of webflow you need to host it somewhere else like dropbox or soundcloud and then embed that using code inside of webflow okay now let's talk about e-commerce what types of stores can you make in e-commerce what are the limitations for e-commerce inside of webflow so if you're thinking about that here we go to get to e-commerce you would have to click on this shopping cart icon and then enable it once enabled you'll see this setup guide but i'm going to focus on the products to tell you more about the limitations now the types of stores that you can make inside of webflow is things like clothing stores or stores that sell physical products okay for clothing you can sell it on your site and fulfill it on your own or connect it to a third-party tool called printful and they'll do the drop shipping and creating a product for you so you don't have to for digital products like ebook pdfs or digital art you can sell that so for example if you go to your ecommerce products collection and there's a little switch right here downloads okay so what happens is when a customer buys this product an email to the digital product will be sent to the customer with a link all right as far as subscription goes like if you're trying to sell a monthly subscription box full of stuff you cannot do that yet webflow does not allow does not allow you to sell subscription based things or even subscription-based memberships if you're trying to do that you can bypass the webflow e-commerce feature completely and just integrate member stack and you can get to member stack by going to member memberstack dot io and they have a way to integrate uh user login and subscription payments inside of webflow with low code like it's really simple to get into and they even have free templates that you can start from where it's like ninety percent of the work is already done for you alright last thing web host bandwidth limits now every hosting company has their limitations because sending bytes and bits back and forth to different computers does take energy does take time does take resources so here on the webflow pricing page i'm going to click on site plans and explain some of this so for monthly visits the basic you get twenty five thousand cms a hundred thousand business one million enterprise let's talk about it all right so what is a monthly visit a monthly visit is when someone comes to your website and that's that's one if that same person comes back to your website that same month that's still one this is unique visits okay if you get more than what your plan allows webflow is is not going to take down your website it's not going to close your website it's not going to delete your website it's just going to send you a nice email saying hey we noticed that you're consistently going over your limit you should upgrade all right so it's that's nice for that's nice of them um also cdn if you don't know what a cdn is it's a content delivery network all right and so what a content delivery network is it's just a bunch of servers all around the world and so if someone is near a certain server your website will be served from that machine all right if you want to see where all the servers are at you can go to fastly.com and here's their uh map and what they call pops or points of presence this is where they are all right so if someone is uh going to your website and they're from central united states they'll probably be hitting up denver or kansas city whenever your site is being loaded and um if it's south america south america or south africa then these would be the points of presence for uh basic and cms you get the basic cdn but for business and enterprise you get global so what that means is you get some of the uh cdn servers to serve your website for you whereas business and enterprise you get the whole thing you get all the servers all right all right that's it for all the limitations that i can think about but uh yeah this video isn't to downplay webflow i mean there's no such thing as a perfect software solution for every single use case out there in the world it's like trying to imagine telling the whole world hey everyone agree to one pizza topping forever that's it we can only have one it's never gonna happen but under these limitations if webflow still works for you use it it's fun to use it changed so many people's lives including mine but if you still have a question or comment about webflow before even diving in i am here to help just leave that in the comments section below and yeah that's about it thanks for watching and as always make the web beautiful together see ya

Channel: pixelgeek

Views: 10,312

Keywords: webflow, web design tutorial, webflow tutorial, graphic design, web development, pixelgeek, pixel geek, webflow comparison, webflow limitations, webflow 2021, web design

Id: Ui1LJhuif0A

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/loftylabel]

Hit the max 100 static pages recently. Wasn't a nice feeling tbh made do with splitting into separate projects. No thanks to client for not wanting webflow hosting when cms collection pages would've easily fix that.

Personally, after having pushed 800+ cms pages in a few minutes, I'm going full 100% webflow builds only. No ifs no buts.

[u/bluepanther2020]

Is there a list that isn't a 17 minute video?