automation-software

Every project requires regular checks and adjustments to remain on track. With so many moving pieces, from development to design to marketing, knowing what to monitor when is challenging without a clear framework.

Setting project milestones lets you keep tabs on crucial progress markers, identify problems early on, and intervene to avoid setbacks. Read on to learn how to adopt a proactive project approach.

What are project milestones?

Milestones in project management signal the completion of critical tasks or phases within a project’s lifecycle. They’re checkpoints to help monitor progress and ensure your project is on schedule and aligned with its goals.

Milestones aren’t the same as regular tasks. Instead, they represent essential achievements your team must reach before moving forward. Setting these during project initiation allows all parties involved to see the big picture. These milestones are a framework for measuring progress, proactively identifying potential delays or issues, and giving stakeholders a transparent view of the project timeline.

Why are project milestones important?

Milestones are checkpoints that guide your projects from inception to completion. Here are the primary benefits of setting milestones:

• Planning and organization. Milestones break complex projects into manageable segments, letting you plan and organize road maps more efficiently. For website projects, this means creating separate phases for development, design, and launch. A structured approach to the project ensures thorough planning for smoother execution.
• Resource allocation. Setting milestones helps you allocate resources, including time, budgets, and personnel, to different project phases. This way, you can avoid overburdening your team while maximizing your assets.
• Accountability and monitoring. Each milestone serves as a deadline for meeting specific objectives, which allows you to track whether a project is on schedule and within budget. These goalposts make it simple for all stakeholders to assess the project’s progress.
• Risk mitigation. Milestones provide opportunities to identify potential issues early in the project lifecycle. A proactive approach to problem-solving helps you make adjustments before issues escalate. For development teams, this might mean catching bugs during testing, while marketers might change a campaign’s messaging based on early performance metrics.

Project milestone examples

While you’ll choose some unique milestones, here are a few standard ones involved in most projects.

Conducting a project kickoff meeting

The kickoff meeting is typically the first milestone, and it involves all stakeholders gathering to establish a shared understanding of project deliverables, goals, timelines, and budgets. For example, a marketing team might organize a kickoff meeting to overhaul the company website. This meeting sets the stage by defining the vision and roles for the redesign implementation plan to ensure alignment from the outset.

Obtaining key partnerships and collaborations

After establishing the project scope, the next step is finding and collaborating with partners or external teams. For instance, as part of the website redesign, the marketing team might need to secure a partnership with an external user experience (UX) design company. They might also hire freelance designers or contractors to create content.

Completing a design review

A design review is a milestone to assess whether a product or design meets project requirements. This review confirms that earlier work aligns with the project’s vision and uncovers any issues that need to be resolved before moving on. You can also reprioritize upcoming tasks if necessary.

In our website redesign example, this might include checking interface designs to ensure they match brand guidelines and accessibility standards before proceeding with development.

Conducting user testing or feedback sessions

Before launching a new product, you’ll likely conduct user testing and collect feedback from a pilot group or target audience. This milestone allows you to make adjustments based on real-world use.

Our example marketing team could implement A/B testing by providing two versions of their redesigned website and making changes to improve the final user experience.

Launching a marketing campaign

Marketing boosts brand and product awareness. During this project phase, you must create effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels to spread your reach as far as possible.

A milestone for the marketing team redesigning their website might be launching a campaign that coincides with a significant step in the project, like releasing a new feature or a beta version of the website.

How to identify and set project milestones: 5 best practices

Strategic planning and teamwork help establish effective project milestones. Here are five practical tips to help you identify and set them.

1. Define clear project objectives

Before starting a project, ensure your team fully understands its objectives. Having a well-defined project scope from the outset helps you prioritize milestones and resource allocation. It also informs each team member of their responsibilities and makes it easier to lead the project.

For example, if you want to launch a marketing automation tool, a milestone could be to achieve a stable beta version with company branding and the latest security patches. Then, assign roles, set a project schedule, and allocate resources to kick-start the project.

Not every milestone influences a project the same way. Some (like securing a key partnership) significantly impact project outcomes, while others (like regular design review meetings) are necessary to keep the ball rolling but have less immediate impact. Keep this in mind when defining objectives.

You can also use a workback schedule to establish goals in reverse order. Instead of starting from the first deliverable, you map out tasks, roles, and resources and work your way back from the final milestone.

2. Break down the project scope

Divide the project into small, manageable chunks to identify potential milestones. As you break it down, you’ll see opportunities to group similar tasks and create divisions between them for clarity.

For instance, if you’re scoping a new website project, separate the design and development processes into modules like customer portals, content delivery, and data analytics. Milestones like “Complete authentication module” and “Set up content delivery network” help track step-by-step progress.

3. Engage stakeholders in milestone planning

Invite key stakeholders to participate in milestone meetings so they’re aware of the project’s critical accomplishments. This creates a sense of ownership and provides an external perspective on matters. Plus, it allows you to make changes based on collective input.

For example, including sales and support teams in milestone discussions can highlight customer-facing issues.

4. Use SMART criteria for milestones

Follow the SMART framework for a structured approach to setting milestones:

• Specific. Clearly define each milestone’s objective. For example, “Release a new customer onboarding module” is specific enough to clarify what’s required.
• Measurable. Establish metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress, like increasing the sign-up rate by 20%.
• Achievable. Set realistic milestones you can achieve within the project’s scope and resources. For instance, “Develop a feature-complete website prototype within 60 days” is a feasible milestone for enterprise-level project plans.
• Relevant. Ensure each milestone aligns with stakeholder expectations and the organization’s overarching operational objectives.
• Time-bound. Set deadlines for each milestone to maintain urgency and keep the project on schedule. For example, “Complete testing and debugging by the end of Q2” is well-constrained to ensure your team completes this step without delaying other parts of the project.

5. Monitor progress and stay flexible

A common misconception is that reaching a milestone marks the end of a task or phase. In reality, milestones are checkpoints indicating progress. They’re reference points for gauging if a project is moving in the right direction, and they help you assess your current state and decide on next steps.

And once established, milestones shouldn’t be immutable or rigid. Project requirements evolve, and milestones must adapt to changes in scope, priorities, and unforeseen challenges. This is why design reviews exist — they allow you to reassess and adjust milestones to better reflect new realities.

Conducting design reviews also reduces discrepancies between planned checkpoints and actual progress. For instance, if user testing reveals that certain features need refinement, you can adjust timelines to ensure you don’t compromise on quality. When you pivot, loop external stakeholders and team members in to avoid wasted work and misunderstandings.

The right platform to manage your website projects

Setting project milestones motivates your team to hit these markers. Milestones define moments when your team can feel accomplished and celebrate small wins that lead to successful project outcomes.

When managing website projects, having a centralized ecosystem of tools and features lightens your team’s load. With a collaborative design environment, marketing strategy guides, and a flexible content management system, Webflow Enterprise offers every resource your team needs to meet your project goals.

Design creatively with Webflow and achieve your project milestones.

Produced in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, the Forbes Cloud 100 is a highly competitive list that includes the world’s top tech companies, from OpenAI and CoreWeave to Canva, Rippling, Plaid, Anthropic, and Stripe. 

Webflow empowers marketing teams to visually create, manage, and optimize websites that drive business results. Over 300,000 top companies, including The New York Times, Dropbox, TED, and IDEO, use Webflow to bring their web ideas, projects, and strategy to life —  culminating in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Speed to market matters, and with Webflow, marketing teams are able to manage enterprise-grade websites in a fraction of the time using our Website Experience Platform. At our product’s core is our visual Designer and our visual, composable CMS, which empower teams to create beautiful and performant websites. With our recent acquisition of Intellimize, we’ve also added powerful personalization capabilities to our platform, enabling continuous optimization through AI-powered personalized experiences that drive conversions and growth.

It’s especially exciting that many of the Forbes Cloud 100 are built on Webflow – including Scale AI, Attentive, Ramp, Fivetran, Flock Safety, Vanta, and Harness. As we celebrate this achievement, we remain focused on the future. We’re committed to continuing our innovation journey, enhancing our Website Experience Platform, and supporting our partners and customers. 

Thank you to our incredible team, partners, and customers for making this possible. Here’s to many more years of innovation, collaboration, and success!

Faceted navigation allows you to filter and refine content on websites, helping you find what you’re looking for more quickly. But without proper implementation, this tactic can lead to search engine optimization (SEO) issues like duplicate content and ineffective crawling.

To create a win-win situation, you must craft a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website. Read on to learn how to identify and resolve issues with best practices for a positive all-around site experience.

What’s faceted navigation?

Faceted navigation is a website feature that lets you refine and filter listings or results on category, search, and product pages based on attributes called facets.

For example, you can filter your search on a software solutions website by categories like product type, features, pricing, and user reviews. Each filter represents a facet, and these facets allow you to narrow your search results based on specific needs and preferences.

This navigation method improves UX and is an effective way to find information without sifting through irrelevant content. Faceted navigation is useful for various site types, including:

• Ecommerce sites. Customers can filter products by categories like price, brand, and color to find exactly what they want.
• Publishers. Visitors can narrow articles down by topics, authors, and publication dates.
• Travel platforms. Travelers can search for accommodation by location, price, and guest ratings to choose the best options for their budget and needs.
• Online directories. People can filter listings by industry, location, services, and customer reviews to find the right business or service provider.
• Job portals. Applicants can refine their search by job type, experience level, location, and salary range to find suitable opportunities.

How faceted navigation works

Faceted navigation lets users filter search results according to various attributes. Here’s what might occur when choosing an attribute, depending on the site:

• The listings immediately update without reloading the page.
• The page reloads and the listings update.
• The website doesn’t provide feedback or reload the page after you choose specific filters — until you select an apply button to trigger the update or reload.
• A new page loads in a separate tab to show the updated results.

If people will likely choose multiple filters, it’s best to ensure the functionality waits until the visitor clicks the apply button to update listings. Otherwise, the site keeps reloading, wasting time and frustrating visitors.

As you apply each filter, the page URL should append parameters to reflect the selected filters. For example, filters for “Price: Low to High” and “Category: Project Management Software” might change the URL to:

example.com/software?category=project-management&sort=price-asc

You can continue to add more filters, like “Features: Time Tracking” or “Rating: 4 Stars and Above.” Each new filter refines the search results and updates the URL accordingly. With the added filters, the browser address would change to:

example.com/software?category=project-management&sort=price-asc&features=time-tracking&rating=4-up

As you add each filter, the page shows you precisely what you want based on the selected criteria. This instant on-page feedback helps you quickly find what you’re looking for.

SEO-related faceted navigation issues

While faceted navigation improves the user experience, the multiple unique URLs it creates can cause the following SEO-related problems:

• Duplicate content. Faceted navigation results in multiple URLs with similar or identical content, and search engines might view these URLs as duplicate pages. This might mean the original page isn’t accurately crawled, indexed, and ranked.
• Diluted link equity. Link equity, or link juice, is the value and authority that passes from one webpage to another through hyperlinks. It influences the receiving page’s ranking potential, with more authoritative pages ranking higher on search engines. When faceted navigation creates multiple URLs with similar content, the link equity initially concentrated on a single page is spread across several URLs, diluting its value.
• Crawl waste. Search engines have limited crawl budgets for each website. With multiple URLs, they might index duplicate or low-value pages but leave high-value pages unindexed. For example, a website with numerous filters can generate hundreds of URLs for the same filtered results, causing search engines to spend time crawling these variations instead of the primary content.
• Crawl trap. A crawl trap occurs when search engines are stuck in a never-ending loop of faceted navigation-generated URLs. When this happens, search engines waste budget and potentially miss out on crawling important pages. If a website allows near-infinite filter combinations without restrictions, search engines might endlessly crawl each URL variation and dilute rankings.

How to conduct an SEO audit for faceted navigation

Conducting an SEO audit helps you identify and resolve these potential SEO issues. Here are a few auditing tips:

• Create a facet list. Start by listing all the areas of your website that have faceted navigation, such as the blog, category pages, resource pages, and product pages. Then, list all the facets within these areas, like price, category, industry, etc. Understanding how visitors filter content can help assess faceted navigation’s impact on SEO. Create a comprehensive list of all filtering options and their combinations to see how many unique URLs they can generate.
• Identify traffic, crawl waste, and search demand. Determine which faceted pages receive significant traffic and which consume crawl budgets without adding value. You can use SEO tools to analyze traffic patterns and find high-performing faceted pages.
• Execute a site search. Use Google to perform a site search using the format “site:example.com” followed by faceted terms and keywords to see how many faceted URLs Google indexes. Review the search results for unnecessary or duplicate pages and choose which ones to deindex or manage differently.‍
• Validate with Google Search Console (GSC). GSC provides insights into how Googlebot crawls and indexes your site, including issues related to faceted navigation. You can check GSC’s performance reports to find faceted URLs causing issues.

How to prevent and fix faceted navigation issues: 6 steps

Here are six faceted navigation best practices to ensure your website maintains a healthy SEO profile.

1. Set up faceted navigation on your website

Ensure you’ve properly set up faceted navigation on your website before optimizing it. Create a hierarchical order for adding facets to the URL and limit the number and types of facets visitors can apply simultaneously to avoid endless combinations. Define which pages should be indexed to prevent Google from crawling low-value pages.

For example, you can structure facets on a job portal site with “Job category” being the first facet added to the URL, followed by “Location” and then “Experience level.” The URL would be example.com/jobs/category/engineering?location=new-york&experience=mid-level. Restrict each URL to three to four facets to avoid excessive combinations and ensure search engines index pages with 10 or more job listings to maintain a healthy SEO performance.

2. Optimize search engine indexing

Ensure search engines only crawl and index primary or valuable pages to avoid duplicate content. You can fix this in HTML by using a noindex meta tag on low-value faceted pages you don’t want Google to index. For example, add to faceted pages with minimal unique content.

3. Use nofollow tags and remove internal links to faceted URLs

Nofollow tags instruct search engines not to follow or pass equity through certain links, allowing specific webpages to maintain authority and rankings on search engine results pages. Add the rel=”nofollow” tag to internal links that point to faceted URLs.

You can also remove or reduce the number of internal links to these URLs. For example, you could only link to primary category pages in your website’s navigation menu.

4. Fix crawling with robots.txt files

A robots.txt file tells search engines which parts of your website they can and can’t crawl. Configuring this file prevents search engines from indexing low-value faceted pages and allows you to manage your crawl budget.

Regularly review and update your robots.txt file to reflect your website’s current structure. While you can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing low-value faceted URLs, you can also allow them to prioritize crawling pages that provide significant value to improve your search ranking.

5. Use canonical tags

Canonical tags help search engines understand which webpage version has primary content or which version you prefer when multiple URLs have similar content. The primary page should have a self-referencing canonical tag indicating that it’s the original, most important version. For example, if example.com/main-page is your primary page, the tag on this page should point back to itself.

On the other hand, duplicate faceted pages should have a tag pointing to the primary page. This tells search engines to prioritize the primary page in search results to avoid confusion and improve SEO.

6. Provide alternate crawl paths to primary pages

Create clear, straightforward crawl paths to ensure search engines can quickly access and prioritize these pages. Use a sitemap (a list of webpages describing a site’s content and the relationship between those pages) and internal linking strategies to guide crawlers to pages efficiently. For example, ensure your homepage or main category pages link directly to high-value pages to avoid crawl traps.

Fine-tune your site’s SEO with Webflow

By implementing SEO best practices and optimizing your faceted navigation strategy, you can improve the user experience without compromising SEO performance. But web development languages can be complex and time-consuming, especially for websites with hundreds of pages.

With Webflow, you can use a dedicated, visual-first design environment to create high-value webpages with authoritative content — with or without coding. Plus, the built-in SEO features help keep your site well-ranked and visible.

Drive more traffic to your website with Webflow.

Every year, dozens of our community leaders and ambassadors host localized World Wide Webflow events in their hometowns.

Here are just a few of the creative ways the Webflow community gathered together in 2023:

• Watch parties from Nigeria to Manila to Minneapolis 
• A pre-conference brunch in London
• A developer meetup in New York City
• A pizza party in Copenhagen
• A yoga-themed “Watch, Code, & Flow” in Virginia
• Morning 5K walk in San Francisco (before the in-person main event)

Some events go all out, with supplemental workshops, local speakers, photo booths, and killer swag (leave it to the Parisians community to design branded popcorn buckets!). Other hosts keep things simple with a livestream of the conference and time for discussion. 

Either way, building a local community and enjoying the camaraderie are what World Wide Webflow is all about. And if you want to host your own local event this year, we’re here to help.

Grow your local Webflow community

Hosting a World Wide Webflow event is an ideal way to attract and engage web development enthusiasts in your own community — but you don’t have to take our word for it. Here are some insights directly from a few of the Global Leaders who hosted standout events last year. 

Nerding out in Amsterdam

“During the Webflow Conf on the 5th of October, we gathered around 40 enthusiastic no-coders at the iconic Adam Tower in Amsterdam for the World Wide Webflow event. The Skybox venue offered a breathtaking view of the Amsterdam skyline, providing an inspiring backdrop for the party. We organized a Webflow Conf Watch Party, where we all nerded out over the exciting new features announced.” – Rick Bossenbroek, Global Leader of our Amsterdam, NL community chapter

‍

Connecting in Hamburg

“We had a blast last year watching the Conf with our team, everyone was there and we had a really good time. It was so amazing to connect with the local Webflow community and we saw many new faces. We learned a lot from each other and had so many mind opening discussions about new features and projects.” – Cedrik Dudek, Global Leader of our Hamburg community chapter

Partying in Paris

“These moments enabled us to create meaningful connections by sharing wonderful experiences centered around our common passion.” – Thibaut Legrand, Global Leader of our Paris community chapter

“In less than two years, it’s amazing to see the boost and energy this program has given to the Webflow community.” – Florian Bodelat, Global Leader of our Paris community chapter

We know our community is full of talented and driven professionals, and World Wide Webflow is a great opportunity to bring your local Webflow enthusiasts together. We can’t wait to see the creative events you come up with in 2024. 

Host your own World Wide Webflow event

This year, Webflow Conf happens on October 15-16 in San Francisco (and online), and on October 21-22 in London. You can host a World Wide Webflow meetup leading up to, during, or after the main events. 

Once you have your plan in place, just create an event listing on a platform like Meetup or Eventbrite, and submit your event to World Wide Webflow. 

Assuming everything looks solid, we’ll get your event listing approved and published on our official World Wide Webflow landing page to help local community members find and attend your event. 

Webflow Conf is just over two months away, and we can’t wait to see what all of the amazing global programming our incredible community organizes this year!

Delivering project success involves analyzing past data, prioritizing current requirements, and considering future timelines instead of making decisions along the way.

To accomplish this, you’ll need a strategic plan to optimize your resources and achieve your goals. Resource forecasting prepares you to tackle unforeseen challenges and pivot mid-project to stay on track. This proactivity reduces your team’s workload and positions them for maximum productivity and optimal results.

Read on for actionable tips and learn how to implement resource forecasting for your next project.

What’s resource forecasting in project management?

Resource forecasting is the process of predicting a project’s asset requirements. When forecasting, you estimate the personnel, equipment, time, and budget necessary to complete the initiative.

Proactively anticipating these needs lets you plan more effectively and avoid resource shortages or overallocation. By maximizing your available assets, you can ensure tasks are executed smoothly and projects stay on track.

How resource forecasting works: A step-by-step example

Say an enterprise is undergoing a website redesign. The project manager can use resource forecasting to ensure all contributors complete the project on time and within budget by considering these factors:

• Project scope and timeline. Start by defining the project’s deliverables and establishing a time frame. For example, marketing campaign and promotional assets must be created within 1-3 months (at which time the site must also be ready to launch).
• Historical data analysis. Review data from similar past projects to estimate the requirements for each phase, like market research, design, development, testing, feedback, and launch.
• Resource identification. Then, determine the resources needed based on the project’s scope, including:some text
  • Personnel: Two user experience (UX) designers, three front-end developers, two back-end developers, a project manager, a quality assurance tester, and three marketing professionals.
  • Resource forecasting tools: Licenses for design software, hardware equipment, change management tools, and marketing platforms.
  • Budget: Project forecasting software costs, third-party vendor payments, and additional tools or services.
• Future requirements. After identifying current project needs, consider potential roadblocks or scope changes that might shift needs. For instance, the marketing phase might demand a higher budget for paid advertisements if initial campaigns underperform.
• Allocation and scheduling. Use your forecast to allocate resources efficiently by assigning tasks to ensure the schedule meets milestones without overwhelming team members.
• Monitoring and adapting. After kick-starting the project, continuously monitor resource use against the forecast and make adjustments as necessary.

By accurately forecasting the initiative’s needs and tactfully leading the team, you can avoid delays, stay within budget, and deliver high-quality outcomes on time.

Resource forecasting vs. resource planning

Forecasting and planning are closely related but separate processes. Resource forecasting involves predicting future needs based on historical data and current goals. It estimates the personnel, equipment, time, and budget required for a project.

Resource planning organizes these predictions into actionable steps. It involves allocating the necessary resources to ensure they’re available when needed. The plan outlines how to use these resources to meet deadlines and stay within budget.

With project forecasting, you might identify a need for additional marketers during a campaign’s peak traffic phase. With a project plan, you’d assign specific tasks to the marketers, schedule their work, and ensure they have the necessary tools and support to complete their tasks.

How to improve resource forecasting: 5 best practices

By following these best practices, you can optimize allocation, avoid bottlenecks, and drive project success. Here are five tips to effectively forecast.

1. Know your personnel resources

To make accurate predictions about your human resources, you must first understand what skills and expertise you can maximize. This involves assessing each team member’s skills, experience, and performance levels. Knowing who excels at specific tasks helps you better assign roles, improve productivity, and reduce learning curves and delays.

For example, if your team includes someone who excels in website development but is not as strong at creating graphic and visual assets, you can assign them website building tasks while delegating graphic design tasks to another member stronger in that area. This approach maximizes each person’s potential to ensure high-quality output from your team members.

2. Understand project requirements and address skill gaps

Successfully completing a project depends on meeting its skill requirements. Identifying these allows you to ensure your team has the necessary prowess. You’ll also know when to source additional expertise.

If a project calls for proficiency in data visualization tools like Google Analytics, for instance, you’ll verify whether any team member has prior experience and competence. If not, consider hiring freelancers or investing in upskilling current members through training programs.

3. Learn from past successes and failures

Examine previous projects to improve future forecasting. By identifying what worked and what didn’t, you can refine your approach to avoid past mistakes and repeat successful strategies.

For instance, if a previous marketing campaign experienced delays due to misjudged budgets, you can adjust forecasts to allocate more time and funds to future projects. A proactive adjustment helps you set realistic timelines without overburdening team members or facing resource shortages.

4. Directly communicate with stakeholders

Engage stakeholders regularly and update them on project progress, challenges, and requirements. Being transparent and aligning stakeholders allows you to promptly address issues and consider multiple perspectives for informed operational decisions.

If a project is falling behind schedule, for example, you can immediately alert stakeholders like executives and team members and discuss potential solutions, such as reallocating resources or adjusting the project scope. Open dialogue ensures all parties know the current situation and can contribute to resolving issues.

5. Plan effective resource allocation

Allocating assets effectively involves linking them to tasks based on availability and project priorities. This means the most critical tasks receive attention, and it helps prevent overallocation and burnout.

For example, in an enterprise-level website redesign, you might allocate back-end development resources to the most experienced developers to ensure site functionality. You can assign less urgent tasks, like content updates, to team members with less experience.

Proactively forecast and plan with Webflow

Resource forecasting is a key element under the umbrella of enterprise performance management. It helps your team weather the hurdles and maximize assets for successful project outcomes.

With Webflow Enterprise, you can elevate your business by accessing best-in-class design features, plus onboarding training and support to manage your project lifecycle from start to finish. You’ll improve cross-functional collaboration, manage site content, and streamline your business processes.

Take the next step toward project success with Webflow today.

Launching a brand campaign is an exciting moment for any leader. As someone who journeyed from marketer to product leader to CEO, I have always firmly believed the best products win, and when they do, everyone knows about them. What makes me especially excited about launching this campaign is while Webflow is already winning with modern marketers, I truly believe Webflow is the best kept secret in tech.  

Before becoming Webflow’s CEO earlier this summer, I worked alongside our founder and now Chief Innovation Officer, Vlad Magdalin, as COO & President for two years. When I first met Vlad, I had never heard of Webflow. We became fast friends over many coffees and we talked about Webflow and his vision of unlocking the opportunity to touch billions of people and democratize technology through an easy-to-use visual development interface. I was captivated — and over so many more conversations with Vlad where we geeked out about Webflow and its potential, I quickly understood why Webflow is so incredibly special: this platform brings development superpowers to everyone. 

I was stunned to discover CMOs, marketing teams, designers, and the agencies that support them are using Webflow to build and manage their most important websites in ways that were previously impossible. Some of the best companies in the world — from The New York Times to Dropbox, Away, Clear, Vice, TED, IDEO, and Orangetheory Fitness are powered by Webflow.

Webflow is unleashing the superpowers of modern marketing teams to visually create stunning web experiences and drive business results. This is a game changer for the modern CMO, who is expected to own the brand and the bottom line, because with Webflow, they can actually do it.

Together, designers and marketers, along with engineers, can build sites that typically take 6-9 months in a fraction of the time, sometimes just weeks. This saves precious time and allows marketing teams to focus on what generates revenue: optimizing, crafting, and launching more campaigns to drive the business forward.

Today over 300,000 of the best companies in the world have trusted Webflow to help tell their stories, and now, it’s time for Webflow to tell ours.

I am so proud of this team, and we are so grateful for our community. As we continue to tell our story, we will do it in the only way that feels true to who we are: by showcasing the stories of our community of companies, CMOs, and Webflow developers who are building and designing the future of the web. 

We’re just getting started. Come experience a better way to build for the web.

Your landing pages are often the first — and sometimes only — touchpoints a visitor has with your website and brand. A well-optimized landing page is your chance to make a lasting impression on potential customers, and can be the difference between a bounced visit or a new lead.

What is landing page optimization?

Landing Page Optimization (LPO) is the practice of improving landing page elements to enhance performance and increase conversions.

Landing pages are commonly dedicated web pages built outside of an organization’s core website architecture. Integrated campaigns, such as paid advertising and events, use these pages with the goal of an immediate conversion. Organizations typically create landing pages on an as-needed basis and for a specified time.

LPO is closely linked to conversion rate optimization (CRO) as both focus on optimizing content, layout, graphics, and other elements to create more conversions. The main difference is that conversion rate optimization focuses on a company’s entire website, whereas landing page optimization focuses on dedicated landing pages generally outside of the core website. 

Landing page optimization usually involves two main types of optimization: 

• A/B testing identifies the optimal landing page for the most conversions. 
• Rules-based personalization customizes a landing page for a specific audience or industry with the goal of increasing conversions.

Why is landing page optimization important?

A landing page might be the first web page visitors see when engaging with a brand. Visitors often follow a call-to-action (CTA) from a referral site or click on a digital or pay-per-click (PPC) ad that takes them directly to a dedicated landing page to perform a desired action. Landing pages actions can include a variety of responses, such as: 

• Requesting a demo
• Starting a free trial
• Signing up for a webinar
• Purchasing a product 

The goal of a landing page optimization strategy is to collect as many conversions as possible in order to help the overall business reach its revenue goals. 

Effective landing page optimization can lead to increased customer engagement and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC).

The difference between landing page optimization and website optimization

Landing page optimization and website optimization both have a goal of increasing conversions, but differ based on the page they’re applied to. 

Website optimization focuses on a brand’s entire website and individual web pages within the website’s architecture. Landing page optimization, on the other hand, optimizes a specific destination with the goal of converting from that page. Landing pages may be part of an organization’s greater web presence, but the focus of a landing page is to convert leads, while the greater website may have multiple goals and calls-to-action. 

An effective landing page optimization strategy has a direct effect on conversions, so linking these two metrics can be beneficial when analyzing the wider digital marketing strategy. Landing page optimization is a sub-strategy of CRO and can be helpful in identifying how many conversions come from a landing page as opposed to elsewhere on the website. 

Types of landing page optimization

There are three main types of landing page optimization: 

Associative content targeting

Marketers tailor landing page content based on parameters such as visitors’ locations, search keywords, industry, and other demographic information. This process helps marketers optimize a landing page based on a specific target audience with different consumer characteristics.

Predictive content targeting

A more active methodology involves adapting web page content based on known information about the visitor, including their purchase and browsing histories. This information predicts future consumer behavior and enables marketing teams to be more effective in retargeting and other marketing campaigns.

Consumer-directed targeting

The most transparent of the three types, this LPO method involves using publicly available information such as reviews and ratings, often referred to as social proof, to create page content that relates to a prospective customer’s sentiments.

Components of effective landing page optimization

An effective landing page optimization strategy should include the following key elements:  

Clean landing page design

Generally, a landing page uses simpler and more concise language than a standard website to streamline the user experience (UX). The goal is to set a clear call-to-action so visitors convert on that page visit. Don’t forget that quality landing page design includes optimizing for mobile devices.

A clear value proposition

Marketers should showcase how their solution solves problems for their target audience. Leveraging social proof, customer testimonials, and any relevant case studies are simple ways to ensure you’re building a high-converting landing page.

Effective calls to action

Your CTA should provide a clear (but short!) description of what the user will get if they click the button. Experiment with different messages and make sure the copy accurately describes what the user will receive if they take the action. Clear and optimized messaging will boost both click-through and lead capture rates on your landing page forms.

5 steps to get started with landing page optimization

Here are a few tips to get started with your landing page optimization strategy.

1. Research your target persona 

Before building a landing page, identify the target audience the page is meant for and adapt the content and page elements specifically for that target audience. Ask yourself: 

• Am I clearly communicating my value proposition in a way that resonates with this audience? 
• What questions do they have about my solution? 
• What solution is most interesting to them? 
• What would get them to sign up for my service or for more information? 

Knowing these answers will help you create an experience that keeps potential customers on the page and encourages them to take action.

2. Set clear measurement goals 

What metrics are you tracking to consider your optimization efforts successful? Outline conversion goals with your digital marketing team or other partners and ensure alignment on any industry standard conversion rate benchmarks you’re aiming to hit.

3. Keep the sales cycle in mind 

Consider where potential customers are in the overall sales cycle. The content and messaging you use on landing page forms should differ based on where someone is in their buying journey. Consider a progressive form if the visitors are already in your database to limit what types of contact information you collect upon lead capture.‍

4. Take stock of your competitors’ strategies 

What are your competitors doing to attract the same target audience? Not only will this data help you ensure you’re following industry standard landing page optimization best practices, it can also provide insight into how to differentiate your strategy from your competition. 

5. Adopt an always-on testing approach 

When launching landing pages, you should keep continuous optimization in mind. Optimization tools can be useful at this stage, where there’s no shortage of elements to test. Continually experimenting with elements such as landing page copy, contrasting colors, form fields and form placement, CTA button (size, shape, color, etc.) can all contribute to optimizing landing page performance.

How AI can help with landing page optimization

Landing page optimization is an effective way to increase conversion rates across digital marketing campaigns. Coordinating efforts across SEO and ensuring the most important elements of your landing page serve the needs of your target audience, LPO ensures a more personalized and relevant experience to your website visitors.

If you’re stuck on how to get started with landing page optimization, AI can be a helpful part of your optimization tool arsenal.

Learn more about using AI to scale landing page optimization and your website personalization program by getting in touch with our team today.

Breakpoints are predefined points in a website’s code where the design and layout change to accommodate different screen sizes and orientations.

Use breakpoints to create responsive designs, so that your website looks consistent and functions evenly across devices, from small smartphone screens to big desktop monitors. Strategically setting breakpoints ensures your site is both accessible and visually appealing while allowing people with any device to enjoy the intended user experience.

In web design, you can manage breakpoints through CSS and media queries. CSS breakpoints use CSS properties to define how a layout should adjust to specific screen widths. For instance, you can specify that a two-column layout should switch to a single-column layout at a width of 768 pixels.

Media query breakpoints are even more specific, allowing you to apply CSS rules based on the conditions set within a query, like the screen’s width, height, resolution, and orientation, for more granular control. For example, a website’s standard breakpoint value might be 1024 pixels. When a device’s screen width is less than 1024 pixels, the website automatically shifts from a three-column layout to a two-column one to maintain readability. 

You can use media queries to apply CSS rules conditionally and define this transition, ensuring the content adapts fluidly to various screen sizes and orientations for highly responsive designs.

Common responsive breakpoints

Understanding the most common breakpoints lets you create responsive designs that meet any use case. Here are the most-used breakpoints across today’s devices and screen sizes.

Extra-small breakpoints

• 320 pixels. A 320-pixel density is typically used for smaller mobile device screens like older smartphones. This breakpoint ensures that content remains accessible and legible, even on the smallest screens. Key adjustments include adding breakpoints that enlarge buttons and load content vertically to improve usability.
• 480 pixels. At this breakpoint, the design adjusts to suit slightly larger mobile screens. Font sizes, images, padding, and margins increase to take advantage of the available space for better readability.

Small breakpoints

• 768 pixels. This is typically used for large smartphones and tablets. Layout changes include switching from a single-column layout to a two-column layout to use the additional screen space without compromising readability and navigation.
• 1024 pixels. At 1024 pixels, this breakpoint bridges the gap between handheld devices and smaller desktop screens. The design maximizes the increased real estate, often transitioning to a multicolumn layout that spreads content horizontally across the screen.

Medium breakpoints

• 1280 pixels. This breakpoint is on the most common laptop and desktop screen sizes. A 1280-pixel design can include a more complex layout, like multiple columns, sidebars, and navigation bars. These larger screens provide content-rich, feature-packed user experiences and make full use of every pixel.
• 1440 pixels. This is optimal for large desktop monitors and high-resolution displays. Because it’s increasingly roomy, you can include more white space on the page and add elements like extra sidebars, larger images, and more detailed navigation.

Large breakpoints

• 1920 pixels and above. Breakpoints of 1920 pixels and higher are for wide screens and state-of-the-art setups with ultra-high-definition resolutions. Designs have highly detailed, expansive layouts that provide a visually stunning and immersive browsing experience. You can include extensive grids, full-size images, and multiple content sections side by side.

How to choose the right breakpoints

There are two types of breakpoints to consider when creating websites: device-based and content-based. Depending on your content and audience, combining both might yield the best results.

Device-based breakpoints

Device-based breakpoints adapt to the screen sizes of common devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers. This approach optimizes your website for the most widely used devices to provide a consistent experience for most people.

A common device-based breakpoint might be 768, 1024, and 1280 pixels to accommodate large smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops, respectively. For example, a smartphone’s 768-pixel layout can switch from a single panel to a two-column format to maximize the available screen space on tablets. You need to customize breakpoints for different devices.

When to use: Opt for device-based breakpoints to ensure compatibility and a consistent viewing experience across multiple devices, especially if your site has a large audience using a specific range of phone or computer dimensions.

Content-based breakpoints

Instead of focusing on specific device sizes, content-based breakpoints consider your website’s layout and content requirements. These breakpoints are set where the content or visual structure naturally requires adjustment to maintain usability and aesthetics based on the space available.

Suppose your website has a multicolumn layout that appears cramped in certain areas on a desktop monitor. A content-based breakpoint at 1024 pixels allows the site to transition smoothly from three to two columns, ensuring text and images remain clear and visually appealing.

When to use: Choose content-based breakpoints to maintain your content’s readability and appearance, regardless of device. This approach is ideal for content-heavy websites with custom brand elements where preserving the user experience is essential.

5 best practices for responsive breakpoints

Implementing responsive breakpoints improves website performance across devices. Follow these best practices to ease the implementation process.

1. Set your breakpoints

Use data visualization tools to identify the most common screen sizes accessing your site. You can also track activity with heatmaps to gauge your audience’s engagement levels and specific behavior patterns on each page. Then, tailor breakpoints to these quantifiable metrics and optimize your site for the devices your audience uses most.

For example, if the analytics reveal that a large percentage of your audience uses devices with screen widths between 768 and 1024 pixels, set breakpoints at these widths to ensure optimal functionality for this segment.

2. Create mobile-first designs

Start by designing breakpoints for the smallest screen size and work your way up. This means creating layouts for mobile phones first. By prioritizing essential features for smaller screens, you’ll create a strong foundation for the content and find the transition to larger screens smoother without sacrificing performance.

For instance, you might design a single-column layout for smartphone screens. Progress to a two-column layout for tablets and add more content with extra features like sidebars and navigation menus as the screen size increases and more space becomes available.

3. Optimize layouts to reduce friction

A streamlined design includes fast loading times, smooth interactions, and quick responses to user input. Faster pages lead to better PageSpeed Insights speed scores and search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, which drive traffic to your website.

Use fewer large images, complex animations, and other heavy content that can slow down your site. When optimizing images, convert them into a WebP format to maintain high resolutions with smaller file sizes. You can also implement lazy loading for multimedia below the fold to reduce initial load times, meaning visuals only appear once visitors scroll to them.

4. Use responsive typography

Responsive typography ensures your website’s text appears legible and aesthetically pleasing across devices. It also involves leaving ample white space so the layout looks spacious. Use web design-friendly fonts that adjust the size based on screen width and balance readability with visual impact.

5. Test across real devices

Test your breakpoint-enabled designs on real devices rather than solely relying on browser resizing tools. This way, you can identify and address issues that might not be evident in a simulated environment. It also ensures your site performs well in the real-world scenarios your target audience experiences daily.

Check breakpoint functionality on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and different desktop monitors. This hands-on approach can reveal response issues on touch-enabled devices, text readability problems, and transition smoothness.

Build responsive designs with Webflow

By understanding what breakpoints are and best practices for implementing them, you can provide a cohesive user experience for your site across all devices.

With Webflow, you don’t need to rely on web development languages like HTML and CSS to code breakpoints into your design. Instead, Webflow’s visual design environment allows you to customize your site for different screen sizes using built-in responsive breakpoints. Deliver a consistent browsing experience, regardless of content or device, and boost your reach today.

In an age of high bandwidth connections, low latency, and lightning-quick response times, users have come to expect responsive experiences on all their devices. According to a 2023 Statista survey, 26% of website visitors will leave a site if it takes more than five seconds to load. To gain and retain consumers, you must meet or exceed their expectations.

Even if your users aren’t picky about page speeds, quicker load time gives you an edge over your competition. That’s because website load times affect your user experience and engagement, conversion rates, bounce rates, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine rankings.

To get ahead of your competition, you’ll need to learn average website load times so you have a benchmark to start with. Then, you can use website testing tools and essential optimization strategies to improve your page speeds.

What’s a fast website load time?

Website load time is the time it takes for a web page to fully load. It’s measured in seconds or milliseconds. Several factors contribute to website load time, including server response, page size, and resource optimization.

There’s no one measurement that defines a fast load time — evaluating and optimizing your site’s speed involves various metrics. It isn’t just about how quickly the whole page appears. Even if the entire page hasn’t loaded yet, users can often peruse its content to find what they want.

The following are the most common metrics for testing page load times. This list is organized by how far into the load time they measure. The averages listed are for desktops, and you can double them for mobile.

• Time to first byte (TTFB): How quickly the web server responds to your request
  • Good: 0–800 milliseconds
  • Okay: 800 milliseconds to 1.8 seconds‍
  • Poor:>1.8 seconds

• First contentful paint (FCP): How long it takes for the first text or image to appear on the pages
  • Good: 0–1.8 seconds
  • Okay: 1.8–3 seconds
  • Poor: >3 seconds

• Largest contentful paint (LCP): How soon the largest element of the page loads, such as a video or hero image
  • Good: 0–2.5 seconds
  • Okay: 2.5–4 seconds
  • Poor: >4 seconds

• Visually complete: When the page design has fully loaded and appears complete
  • Good: 0–5 seconds
  • Okay: 5–7 seconds
  • Poor: >7 seconds

• Interaction to next paint (INP): How long user interface (UI) elements take to respond to user interaction
  • Good: 0–200 milliseconds
  • Okay: 200–500 milliseconds
  • Poor: 500 milliseconds

Checking your page load time

Here are a few tools that you can use to discover your website speed times:

• Google PageSpeed Insights is a free online tool that measures all the metrics listed above for any URL you input.
• YSlow is an open-source tool that uses a browser plugin to test website performance for free.
• Pingdom provides free website speed tests, plus premium tiers that come at a fair price.
• WebPageTest is a premium product from Catchpoint, a website performance analysis tool. Although WebPageTest does offer free vitals, you’ll need to subscribe to access all of its features.
• GTmetrix is another premium tool that grants free core web vitals tests as well as website monitoring and an application programming interface (API) integration if you sign up.

Improving your website load time: 6 tips and strategies

Shaving even a single second off your page speed can significantly improve your site’s user experience, resulting in better retention and more traffic. It can also significantly impact your SEO score because page speed is a primary factor that Google uses to determine your site’s search ranking.

Here are six strategies for improving your website load time.

1. Optimize code

If your page speeds are slow, start by examining your code to find unnecessary complexity that’s holding up page loads. Here are a few typical code issues to watch for:

• elements

  are typical for styling components, but using too many can cause a drop in page speed. Instead, use CSS to create all the styling classes you need.

• Embedded content is a popular way to add interactive elements like maps, but adding more than a couple to a page can significantly delay the page speed.
• Bulky code happens when your code contains too much white space, comments, and other nonessential elements. Minify your code to reduce these instances.
• Unused fonts and scripts can add to your load times — even if they aren’t used on a page. When you stop using a font, script, or plugin, take it out of the code, too.

2. Upgrade hosting

The web server’s quality and proximity determine the page load speeds more than any other factor. If you’re confident your code is optimized but are still experiencing slow load times, examine your web hosting platform to determine if it’s the culprit. Ensure you’re signed up for a tier offering enough bandwidth and traffic. Some services provide automatic traffic scaling but only at certain subscription levels.

While you’re at it, look for the option to use a content delivery network (CDN), which distributes servers around the globe to ensure your content can reach a broad audience quickly.

3. Optimize files and media

Whenever you use an HTML element with a src attribute, you send another request to the web server. Loading a single page with no media is quick, but loading that page and then calling other directories to find and serve other files takes time. If possible, remove any unnecessary file references on the page or break it into smaller pages that link to one another.

Also, compress images and videos to reduce their file sizes. For logos, use the SVG format because it scales well and produces a small file. For other images, use WebP format whenever possible because they offer the best quality and the smallest file sizes. In Webflow, you can use the built-in WebP conversion tool to compress existing image assets. For video, MP4 is standard due to its small size and high resolution as well as codec flexibility.

4. Implement caching

Caching enables web browsers to store common assets like icons, text, and images and reuse them when you load a new page. This significantly improves page speed, but you must set it up first.

If you’re using Webflow, you can enable caching in your settings. But if you’re writing and hosting the site yourself, you need to set up caching manually. You can optimize your settings for efficiency by establishing expiration times and tailoring cache headers to reduce redundant data retrieval.

5. Reduce redirects

When one page redirects to another, the browser must load at least some of the first page before discovering the need to redirect to the next. That requires sending an extra request to the web server that isn’t necessary. Treat redirects as temporary solutions. Audit your site regularly to update old links and remove the need for redirects.

6. Leverage lazy loading

Lazy loading means images only load once users scroll to them. Don’t enable this for images at the top of the page, since you want these to load immediately. But enable it for images further down to decrease your site’s loading time.

Some web design platforms, like Webflow, enable you to mark images for lazy loading. To mark an image to lazy load yourself, add “loading=lazy” to your image tags.

Maximize site speed with Webflow

While most page speed optimizations occur at the server level, you can perform some by refining your code. But if you want to avoid digging into code, Webflow can help.

With Webflow’s visual-first web design platform, you have creative control and flexibility with your page designs — while Webflow generates clean, semantic code for you in the background. Learn more about how to optimize your pages on Webflow University’s detailed website performance guide.

Take advantage of Webflow’s intuitive interface, built-in performance optimization features, and responsive design capabilities. Create optimized, high-quality websites with Webflow today.

Webflow is in a unique position as a website experience platform, because we have a two-fold responsibility in terms of accessibility. We need to make our platform itself accessible, and we also need to help ensure that our hosted sites are accessible to their millions of daily visitors.

In this blog post, we’ll share an inside view of our accessibility processes and practices at Webflow.

We’ll begin with some of the benefits of accessibility. We’ll then explore how we’ve created a strong accessibility foundation in our internal design system and how that boosts productivity throughout the engineering organization. Next we’ll describe some of our strategies for knowledge sharing and leveling up our collective accessibility know-how. Finally, we’ll examine the impact that this has on our website experience platform and users and close with some advice on how you too can scale accessibility efforts in your company.

Benefits of accessibility

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 16% of the world population lives with some form of disability. That’s one in six people, a far larger proportion than most people expect. These disabilities may take the form of visual disabilities, auditory disabilities, motor disabilities, cognitive disabilities, and more.

It’s also important to remember that accessibility benefits everyone. Even if you don’t think that your user base has very many disabled users (you’d likely be mistaken!), consider the following examples:

Supporting keyboard navigation helps keyboard-only users and also those who consider themselves “power users” and prefer to use the keyboard for faster navigation. Surely you or someone you know prefers to use the Tab key to move from one field to the next when filling out a form rather than clicking on each input with the mouse.

Using good color contrast helps users who may be colorblind or have low vision and also makes the platform easier to use in various lighting conditions or with different monitor displays. Plus, no one likes squinting to read white text on a yellow background.

Providing adequately sized buttons and click targets makes it easier for users with motor disabilities to interact with elements on the page. It’s also easier for everyone in general. Anyone who’s experienced the frustration of accidentally closing a menu because their cursor moved off of a narrow menu item as they moved their mouse can attest to this poor user experience.

Remember that disabilities can be permanent, temporary, or situational. Someone who normally doesn’t consider themselves disabled but who has suffered an injury to their wrist, fingers, eyes, or ears will greatly appreciate accessible technologies while they heal.

Accessibility has a large overlap with usability and good design practices. When we talk about making an app accessible, we’re often talking about following well-researched user experience best practices.

Now that we’ve established the importance of accessibility, let’s look at how we implement these best practices in our engineering organization.

Accessible foundations

At Webflow, we’ve invested a lot of time and energy in our internal design system. For those unfamiliar with design systems, you can think of a design system as a component library of reusable building blocks to build an app. That’s an oversimplification, because a design system is so much more than that, but we won’t get into that for now.

The main point is that a design system provides designers and engineers with everything they need to design and build their app.

Our design system contains many different components, such as:

• Form controls: Autocomplete, Button, Checkbox, FormLabel, Radio, Select, Switch, TextInput, TextArea
• Typography: Link, Text
• Popup-like content: Menu, Modal, Popover, Toast, Tooltip
• Presentational content: Accordion, Avatar, Badge, Banner, Note, RowItem, Table

This is a non-exhaustive list of components, but hopefully you can see the breadth of needs that our design system covers.

For each of these components, we take time to ensure that they’re accessible right out of the box. The benefit of this is that each engineer using our design system doesn’t need to know anything about how the internals of the components work.

For instance, consider everything that goes into making a modal dialog accessible:

• Keyboard focus should be sent into the dialog when the dialog opens
• Keyboard focus should be trapped within the dialog while the dialog is opened
• Screen readers should only be able to access content within the dialog while the dialog is opened
• Mouse users should only be able to access content within the dialog while the dialog is opened
• The Escape key should close the dialog
• Keyboard focus should be sent back to the trigger button that opened the dialog when the dialog closes
• Dialogs should use appropriate ARIA attributes and roles, such as role=”dialog”, aria-modal=”true”, and either aria-label or aria-labelledby to reference the dialog’s title

(There is a lot of nuance to some of the items above. The WAI ARIA Authoring Practices Guide is an excellent resource to consult when considering best practices for any sort of UI component.)

We’ve taken the time to ensure that our modal dialog accounts for all of these accessibility considerations. That means that when an engineer needs to use a dialog for the feature they’re building, they can just use the Modal component and not have to worry about managing where the focus goes when the dialog opens or closes or trapping the focus within the dialog or adding the correct ARIA markup. All of that is handled for them, so they can just concentrate on the work for the feature.

We can’t overstate the benefits of a design system enough here.

First, our design system boosts the productivity of our entire engineering organization. If we can build a component once and then reuse it 50 times in our app, we’ll save ourselves the trouble of reinventing the wheel and building the component from scratch each time. This becomes particularly important for more complex components that take longer to build correctly.

Second, our design system allows us to achieve consistency in our UI and UX. If everyone is using the same set of components, the components will look the same and behave the same everywhere.

Third, our design system enables us to make improvements and enhancements efficiently. Let’s assume we have 50 instances of some component in our app. If all 50 instances of that component use the component from our design system, we can fix the component in one place in our design system and have that fix be applied to all 50 instances throughout our app. This is crucial for changes of all types: bug fixes, new features, and accessibility improvements.

Continuous education

Our design system provides an excellent technical foundation to build upon, but it’s not enough on its own. We can’t have only a handful of designers and engineers who know about accessibility. We need everyone in the engineering, product, and design organization to understand the fundamentals of accessibility and be able to apply it in their work.

One of the most effective tools for continuous upskilling has been our #accessibility Slack channel. In this channel, people can ask questions, learn together, and share accessibility wins.

Every work day we post an “Accessibility Tip of the Day”, and it’s something we’ve been doing for over a year now. We’ve posted over 200 tips and are still going strong. These tips are generally more engineering focused and have covered topics like alt text, color contrast, focus indicators, keyboard navigation, screen reader navigation, component design, ARIA attributes and roles, semantic HTML, design patterns, automated tooling, and more.

What’s been fun about the tips is not just the breadth of topics we’ve been able to cover, but that it helps keep accessibility top of mind in a way that yearly training sessions don’t.

Baked into our process

We’ve covered our design system and our continuous education efforts so far. What about how we approach accessibility throughout the software development lifecycle?

Accessibility is baked into our process every step of the way.

When new features are being designed, the proposed designs go through a design review in which gaps can be identified, including potential accessibility issues. We also have a separate design system office hours to help untangle particularly gnarly questions.

When new features are being built, every code change goes through our automated CI pipeline. We use linters such as the eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y package and run accessibility unit tests with the jest-axe package. These automated static analysis checkers are helpful, but it’s important to keep in mind that they can only catch a small percentage of accessibility issues, usually estimated at around 30%. We need to rely on human intervention too.

During code reviews and bug bashes, we’ll also review how accessible the features we’re building are. It’s at this time that we’ll do some manual testing with a keyboard and screen reader to ensure that the features can be used by an actual human being.

Outside of the typical software development lifecycle, we also do audits of our app from time to time, focusing on different areas of the app, different workflows, and different accessibility topics. Any issues found are then logged as Jira tickets so we can address them. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the current universally recognized standard for web accessibility, and Webflow strives to conform to WCAG 2.2 AA.

We also have another internal Slack channel called #ux-paper-cuts for reporting small UX issues that can be easily fixed and picked up by engineers who have moments between sprints or are waiting for code reviews. Not all the issues reported are accessibility issues, but as we’ve discussed before, there’s significant overlap between accessibility and usability. The best thing about this channel is that the reported issues are small, so they’re easy to fix quickly once they’ve been identified.

Finally, let’s not forget about all our wonderful customers and partners. We have mechanisms in place for users to send feedback, whether that be issues they are encountering or feature requests they have. Our alpha testing program was particularly impactful during our UI refresh that we released almost a year ago during Webflow Conf 2023. In the time leading up to the refresh and in the months after, we listened to our customers to address several accessibility concerns with color contrast, font size, and hit target size. This feedback led to significant improvements in the initial release of the UI refresh as well as the idea for the Appearance Settings feature in Designer.

Effect on our product

As discussed, most notably we launched our UI refresh in October 2023. We followed that up with Appearance Settings in January 2024. Shortly after that we improved the keyboard navigation of our left sidebar panel system in February 2024. And that’s not all.

As our design system adoption increases, so does the accessibility of our product, particularly in the Designer. We’ve focused heavily during the last few months to increase the keyboard accessibility of the Designer, and we’ll continue to iterate on that. Improved keyboard accessibility lays the foundation for screen reader accessibility as well.

Tools to help Webflow creators

Webflow has also developed several tools to help our users create more accessible sites.

We have the Audit Panel, which can check your site for things like missing alt text on images, non-descriptive link content, skipped heading levels, or duplicate IDs on the page.

We have a vision preview, which allows you to emulate how your site looks to users with various types of colorblindness or blurred vision.

We also have a color contrast ratio checker to help you choose foreground and background colors that have adequate contrast.

In addition to the in-app tools we’ve built, we’ve also put together an Accessibility Checklist you can follow to help your content stay conformant to the WCAG 2.2 AA standards.

Tips for scaling accessibility at your company

We’ve covered a lot today! If you too are an accessibility advocate, you may be asking yourself, “This all sounds great, but how can I implement these things at my company?”

Your specific situation, company needs, and company size may be different from ours, but we’ll leave you with three tips:

First, focus on your design system, the building blocks for your app. If you have a design system, take the time to make your components accessible. If you use a third-party design system, make sure your system of choice prioritizes accessibility. The engineers consuming your design system are trying to accomplish their own goals as they build their features, so make the easy choice the right choice.

Second, bake accessibility into every aspect of your software development lifecycle. Shift left as much as you can. Focus on prevention, not just remediation. It’s far easier to prevent accessibility issues from entering your app in the first place compared to fixing them later down the road.

‍Third, accessibility allies are everywhere. If you feel like you are struggling to gain support for your accessibility efforts, start with those who are excited about accessibility. Don’t worry about the naysayers who may resist including accessibility work in their sprints for now. Create small wins, share them with those around you, and let the enthusiasm spread throughout your organization. 

Finally, thank you for reading, and thank you for being an accessibility ally!

Search engines like Google and Bing use web crawlers — or spiders — to discover and index web pages on the internet. Ensuring your content is accessible and crawlable helps improve your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

The higher your site ranks, the more visible it becomes, leading to increased traffic and more conversions. Read on to discover how to strategically optimize your content for crawlers. 

What’s website crawling?

A web crawler is an automated program that browses, or crawls, the web, recording all the URLs it finds and downloading site content — including images, text, and videos. This process involves loading web pages, finding links on these pages, and following them. It continues this process until it can’t find any new links.

Search engines like Google use these crawlers to retrieve information. After retrieval comes indexing. Crawlers place all the content in the search engine’s content database, known as an index. It categorizes each page by things like the language of the page, content topics, and format. 

When a user performs a search, the search engine returns the most relevant pages from its index to match the query. It uses complex algorithms to rank these pages based on factors like content quality and relevancy. 

There are two types of crawls: 

• Site crawls occur when a crawling bot searches your site for URLs. This type typically occurs when you send a sitemap to a search engine provider to request a crawl.
• Page crawls occur when a crawler is directed to open just one web page. This crawl updates the index for that page.

Be it a site or page crawl, the entire process follows these steps:

1. Crawl request — Typically, crawlers crawl a site for a routine check-up or because the site’s owner submitted or updated their sitemap.
2. Discovery — The crawler gets to work, opening pages, discovering links, and adding them to the queue.
3. Add to index — As the crawler exhausts each link, it determines which pages it should add to the search engine’s index. Then, it downloads those pages and adds them.
4. Indexing — Search engines scan each page and notes essential details, such as keywords, synonyms, and important phrases.
5. Ranking — Search engines then uses a proprietary algorithm to determine each page’s quality and authority. When a searcher enters a query, the engine delivers the most relevant search results for this keyword. 

Web crawling vs. web scraping

Web crawlers move through your website to discover new URLs and download content, and web scrapers comb through a list of URLs to extract specific information.

The main differentiator between the two processes is intention. Web crawlers don’t know what they’ll find when they visit your site — they simply crawl through it and send information to indexing. But web scrapers extract data from your site based on predetermined fields such as “Publish-date,” “Product-name,” or “Price.” 

Typically, if someone scrapes a website, it’s to pull information they already know exists. For example, you might scrape your site for mentions of a specific feature. If the feature changes, you can use this information to determine which pages to update.

Why should you optimize your content for web crawlers?

Accurate crawling and indexing provide search engine users with a better browsing experience. Effective crawling also offers your team the following benefits.

Better visibility

According to 2019 BrightEdge research, search engines drive 53.3% of all website traffic. Web crawlers give search engines the information they need to drive a significant segment of your audience to your site. Offering clear sitemaps and including high-quality, relevant content helps you persuade crawlers and index algorithms to rank your content higher in SERPs.

A reward for freshness

Web crawlers detect how often you update your site to determine when to return to scan again. As you add fresh content, try different content types and formats to see which rank better. You can monitor this ranking progress with Google Search Console.

How to improve crawling and indexing: 5 tips

Here are five tips for effectively optimizing your site to improve crawling and indexing.

1. Optimize your page loading speed

Since bots rapidly churn through all the content on your site, they require more of your web server’s processing power while active. Optimizing loading speed decreases the time it takes to crawl through your site, reducing server load.

Streamlining your code, limiting embedded content, and reducing third-party scripts and image sizes are all great ways to improve loading times.

2. Use a sitemap

A sitemap showcases all pages and media on your site, making it easier for bots to discover everything present. This file lives in your site’s root directory, can be written in XML, RSS, or plain text, and must follow the universal sitemap protocol. Web developers and designers can create this themselves or use a platform like Webflow, which autogenerates sitemaps.

3. Optimize your internal link structure

Organize your site into a logical structure that cascades outward from your home page. That means your home page should link to primary topics that link to individual pages. Those pages should also link to each other when appropriate. These links make your site more accessible for users and bots to navigate, both critical factors in determining your search ranking.

Also check that none of your pages include dead or broken links, as 404 errors dock your ranking. To prevent these errors, perform comprehensive tests before you launch your site and throughout its lifecycle.

4. Use correct canonical tags

Canonicalization is the process search engines use to determine which page is the primary (or “canonical”) authority. For example, you may have different versions of a page to target various geo-locations — each with a separate URL. Bots need to know which page is the central source for the content so they don’t duplicate search results. To accomplish this, they analyze each page version to determine the duplicates. 

To help search engines determine which canonical page ranks, only place the canonical page in your sitemap and use elements in duplicate pages referencing the canonical page with a rel= “canonical” attribute. 

5. Ensure all pages are crawlable

You can use Google Search Console to determine how much of your site crawlers have indexed — and how accurately. You have room to grow if they indexed anything less than 85% of your site. 

There are some impressive SEO tools on the market that can audit your site for you, like Screaming Frog and Semrush. They’ll also offer tips for improving your sitemap, content, and SEO. 

How to manage your crawl budget

A crawl budget measures how much time and resources search engines commit to crawling your site. Crawling millions of websites costs search engines processing capacity and storage, and the crawl budget determines how much of these resources to dedicate to a given website.

You want search engines to crawl your site often to pick up new pages as you publish them, but you don’t want them to slow down your site. To balance these conflicting goals, optimize your site to earn a high crawl demand while keeping your crawl rate limit feasible:

• Crawl demand — This demand determines how often search engines should crawl your site. If your content is popular and you regularly update it, you’ll earn a high crawl demand.
• Crawl rate limit — Crawlers measure how long it takes to load and download pages so search engines can calculate the cost of each crawl. The faster your site responds, the more generous your rate limit is.

Enjoy crawler-friendly features from Webflow

Web crawler optimization is key to ensuring your site reaches its full organic traffic potential, and that takes clean, semantic code and a clear site and link structure. Webflow’s visual development platform takes care of that, while giving you the tools to fine-tune your SEO and create content that ranks.

Try Webflow’s visual-first development environment today.