Redefining the Website Experience: Key Takeaways from Webflow Conf 2024

The digital landscape is rapidly evolving, and the challenges facing teams building for the web have become more complex than ever. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the way we search and interact online, impacting web traffic across the board. As a result, marketing teams are under increasing pressure to do more with less, making the creation of engaging websites that convert visitors into customers a top priority.

At Webflow Conf 2024, we announced a significant shift in our mission to bring development superpowers to everyone. We introduced the world’s first Website Experience Platform, expanding Webflow beyond simply building and managing sites to include powerful new functionalities that help you analyze and optimize your site’s performance.

Here’s a recap of everything we announced at Webflow Conf 2024:

Extend Beyond the Build with Webflow Analyze and Optimize

Webflow Analyze

Data is an invaluable resource when analyzed and used properly. With our new native analytics solution, Webflow Analyze, we’re putting a unified view of visitor behavior directly into your hands to make data-backed decisions that improve site performance.

No Third-Party Tools Needed: There’s no need to implement or learn a third-party analytics tool to understand site performance.
In-Context Insights: Get digestible insights at the site, page, and click event levels—all within Webflow.
Empowering Teams: Designers, content creators, and developers—who traditionally might not have access to marketing analytics platforms—can now see how their work is performing.
Easy Setup: It takes just one click to set up, with event tracking being completely automatic.
Privacy-Focused: Since Analyze is native to Webflow, your data doesn’t sprawl across third-party ecosystems. For specialized consent management, you can integrate with solutions like DataGrail and Finsweet.

Availability: Analyze will be available this month as an add-on for all customers on Basic through Enterprise Site plans. Learn more about Analyze here.

Webflow Optimize

Building on the insights from Analyze, we’re excited to introduce Webflow Optimize—Webflow’s native A/B testing, personalization, and account-based marketing solution.

Maximize ROI: Gives marketers the tools to maximize return on investment from their sites.
Run Multiple Tests Simultaneously: Create and run multiple experiments to see what resonates best with your audience.
AI-Powered Personalization: The real magic happens with AI Optimize, which uses AI to learn from your visitors in real time and automatically adjusts which experiences are shown to whom.
Dynamic Personalization: Dynamically personalize the experience for each unique visitor, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.
Seamless Integration: Integrates key data from your tech stack so you can import and export the information you need.

Availability: Optimize is available today as an add-on for all customers on Basic through Enterprise Site plans. To learn more, visit webflow.com/optimize.

A New AI Assistant to Speed Up Your Workflows

Our team has been thinking critically about how we can leverage AI to empower you and your teams to move faster without sacrificing the creativity that makes your sites special. At Webflow Conf 2024, we introduced the new Webflow AI Assistant with its first two powerful skills:

Design Assistance

Designing your site can take time. With the AI Assistant, you can:

Generate New Page Sections: Quickly create common site sections like pricing, features, testimonials, and more using your existing design system and site context.
Customize Easily: Adjust backgrounds, colors, or add custom prompts to get the copy just right.
Maintain Control: Bring new campaigns to market faster while maintaining full control over the content you publish.

Availability: Designing with the AI Assistant is available in limited beta today, starting with select templates, and will be expanded to more sites this year.

Please note: Generating sections with the Assistant is available to all users regardless of plan while in beta and will likely be a paid feature once fully available.

Writing Assistance

In addition to design capabilities, the AI Assistant can help marketers create relevant content quickly inside Webflow.

Generate CMS Items: Prompt the Assistant to generate a full CMS item with contextually relevant content.
Brand Consistency: Uses the context of your content fields and recent items to match your brand’s tone of voice.
Accelerate Content Creation: Perfect for content marketers or designers needing realistic content quickly.

Availability: New CMS item creation powered by the AI Assistant is available starting today. Learn more about how it works here.

A Note on Privacy and AI

We stand by the principle that your data belongs to you. In the products we announced today, we do not use your data to power any of our generative models. If this were to change in the future, we would always be explicit about it and enable you to opt in, rather than opt out.

Welcome to Webflow, GSAP!

We’re thrilled to welcome GreenSock, the company behind GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform), to the Webflow family!

Powerful Animation Capabilities: GSAP is a robust JavaScript animation library that lets you animate virtually anything, bringing your creative visions to life.
Continued Availability: GSAP will continue to be publicly available for use on the wider web. Both Webflow and the GreenSock team are committed to maintaining and evolving the library.

New Features to Help You Build and Manage Your Sites

Design Systems

Visual development is at the heart of Webflow, and design systems help bring this power to your whole team.

Component Style Variants: Allow your team to define multiple style options on the same component. This means fewer components to maintain and more flexibility for everyone.

Availability: Component style variants will be available to everyone later this year.

CMS Enhancements

We’re expanding the capabilities of our CMS to give you more power and flexibility.

Bulk CMS APIs: Support for bulk operations, allowing you to create, read, update, and delete up to 100 CMS items in a single request. This makes bringing data into Webflow from third-party sources more efficient.

Availability: These new CMS API endpoints are available to all customers today. Learn more about them here.

CMS Publishing Improvements: More control over how new content and changes to existing content get published. Draft changes to existing CMS items without unintended publishing, and publish individual CMS items without publishing the entire site.

Availability: These updates will be available to everyone later this year.

Increased CMS Nesting: Launching increases to CMS nesting in beta later this year, giving you the freedom to design with CMS data at scale.

Localization

Localized Styles Support: Now available for all Localization plans.
Increased Locale Limit: Advanced plan users can now access up to 10 locales, up from 5.

Availability: Both of these updates are available for Localization users starting today. Learn more about Localization here.

Forms

Forms are critical to the success of any website, capturing lead data, collecting feedback, and building email lists.

Bot Prevention Feature: Runs seamlessly in the background to prevent unwanted form submissions without compromising data privacy.
Revamped Form Settings View: Brings form connections and submission notifications into one place, reducing the need to switch between the Designer and your Dashboard.

Availability: These form improvements are available to all customers now.

Capabilities to Help Teams Build Better, Together

Page Building for All

We’re releasing page building to all customers, allowing all members of your team to build on-brand pages quickly and safely.

Drag-and-Drop Experience: Marketers, clients, and less-technical teammates can quickly build landing pages with designer-approved building blocks.
Designer Control: Designers can maintain control over the design system while marketers can safely self-serve brand-consistent landing pages.
New Marketer Role: Assign a teammate or client the Marketer role to give them access to page building.

Availability: Page building is available today on all plans. Learn more about how it works here.

Design Approvals

We’re making design approvals more powerful with improved visibility and fine-tuning.

New Review Experience: A brand new review interface.
Flexible Approvals: Ability to designate required versus optional reviewers.

Availability: Design approvals are available for Webflow Enterprise customers and their Partners.

Updated In-Product Navigation

We’ve streamlined collaboration and productivity with our new tab-based navigation.

Easy Switching: Quickly switch between the Designer, CMS, Analyze and Optimize, and Preview.
Real-Time Collaboration: See who’s working with you on the same page, drop comments, or publish your site—all while working with your team.

Availability: The updated in-product navigation will be available to all customers this year.

Updates to Grow the Thriving Webflow Community

Webflow University

New Practitioner Certification (Beta): Validate your skills and gain recognition.
Dedicated Help Center: Quick and easy access to documentation and support.

Template Marketplace Improvements

Access to Insights: Better understand demand and top trends.
Improved Discoverability: Updated categories and enhanced search functionalities.
Create Free Templates: Opportunity to contribute to the community.
Sell Outside the Marketplace: Officially open to selling your templates outside of the Webflow Marketplace.

Client Payments, Site Transfers, and Project Fees

For agencies and freelancers building sites in Webflow for customers, we’re introducing:

Client Payments: Request payment information from your client to cover the cost of hosting and other billing add-ons while their site is built and hosted within your workspace.
Seamless Site Transfers: Transfer a site to a client’s workspace without disrupting the site subscription.
Project Fees: Starting early next year, you’ll have the ability to charge recurring project fees for the services you offer.

Availability: Client payments and seamless transfers will be available later this year to all users on Agency and Freelancer workspace plans, with project fees launching early next year.

The Future of Website Experience

These announcements—and every update from us moving forward—are building toward the singular goal of empowering your full website experience. From collaboration to analysis to AI content generation and design, these updates are about unlocking the potential of your website on Webflow.

Let’s build better, together!