Workflow & Automation

Multidepartmental enterprise organizations often struggle with information silos. Since each department might use specialized software, like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and other enterprise applications, they risk creating isolated information environments. This, in turn, can hinder information sharing and integration across the organization, leaving valuable cross-departmental data untapped.

But addressing data silos involves more than just merging databases across disparate systems and tools — it’s about establishing an integrated framework that facilitates collaboration and data exchange. By linking departmental data streams, you create a unified and comprehensive understanding of business operations and transform isolated data into valuable, actionable insights.

What is a data silo?

A data silo, or information silo, refers to data held by one department that’s inaccessible to others within the same organization. When teams independently store and manage their data, they create barriers to sharing information, making it “siloed.”

Data silos negatively affect organizational processes and efficiency. If departments silo customer data, for instance, it becomes a barrier to delivering personalized experiences. This lack of shared data leads to generic and less effective engagement strategies, undermining the potential for targeted marketing and customer relationship building.

Why data silos are problematic

Data silos do more than just prevent data accessibility — they hurt your entire organization in the following ways:

• Fragment data. Data silos isolate information within specific platforms, tools, and departments. This makes it challenging to develop holistic strategies that integrate insights from different departments, like customer profiles that include website behavior, purchasing history, and communication preferences.
• Form team barriers. Data silos create virtual barriers between teams that prevent effective collaboration. Exclusive information held by one team blocks information flow and contributes to organizational silos — departmental segregation that hampers overall operational strategy and company alignment.
• Increase costs. Maintaining and managing disparate systems often increases operating expenses because you have to invest resources to reconcile data from various sources.
• Create missed opportunities. Teams have a harder time creating cross-functional synergies and leveraging insights from one department to use for another, leading to overlooked opportunities for optimization, risk mitigation, and new ventures.

Common causes of data silos

With multiple departments and employees, it’s common to miss data silos until they start significantly impacting the company’s bottom line. Here are some reasons data silos form.

Legacy infrastructure

Outdated or aging information technology (IT) infrastructure, often called legacy systems, can struggle to align with modern workflows. These older systems may not support current data-sharing protocols and thus pose challenges in breaking down silos and extracting insights.

If your business relies on a decades-old CRM system that doesn’t integrate well with newer data visualization tools, your marketing team might experience slow and insufficient data integration issues. Relying on this outdated technology can lead to siloed data. To solve this issue, consider migrating your legacy system to more modern solutions.

Decentralized technology management

Decentralized technology management occurs when teams choose their tools and technologies independently. This approach offers flexibility but leads to inconsistency and inadvertently creates data silos because it drives teams to select solutions that fit their immediate needs but are unaligned with your broader organizational strategy.

For example, your marketing team might choose an advanced AI personalization tool that excels in customer engagement, while the customer service department uses a separate CRM focused on customer interaction history. Without a centralized approach to integrate these different systems, crucial data points remain isolated within each team’s chosen tool.

Mergers and acquisitions

Organizations often struggle to integrate diverse IT systems and data infrastructures during mergers and acquisitions. The key issue here is incompatible datasets, which, if not consolidated into a unified enterprise application, create data silos.

If a large enterprise acquires a small business, each organization typically brings its own data management tools. Without strategic planning for integration, the small business’s data becomes siloed, making it difficult to leverage this information across the larger, combined organization.

Rogue end users

Employees may independently adopt data tools without aligning with your organization’s broader integration strategy. Known as “rogue” users, these individuals inadvertently create silos by storing sensitive information in systems outside your organization’s primary data ecosystem.

Consider a customer service employee who is subscribed to a cloud-based chatbot tool for quick client interaction management but bypassed coordination with IT or data management teams. This action diverges from the standardized service protocol and makes customer information inaccessible to other departments — creating a silo.

How companies can identify data silos

Identifying silos within your organization is the first step to fostering a more integrated and collaborative working environment. Watch for these indicators:

Difficulty in accessing data

If teams regularly struggle to access information for projects and tasks immediately, it often means a specific group or individual is siloing data. For example, if your marketing team frequently delays obtaining sales data necessary for campaign planning, it implies that this information is siloed.

Inconsistent reporting

Varying figures and metrics from different departments for the same key performance indicators (KPIs) indicate siloed data. This inconsistency arises when departments like marketing and sales access and analyze data in isolation despite working on the same project. A discrepancy in which the marketing team reports a 25% increase in customer retention and the sales team reports 30% suggests that each team draws from separate, nonintegrated data sources.

Data negligence

Neglecting data quality, updates, and maintenance signals potential silos. This negligence presents as outdated information, dataset errors, and a general lack of up-to-date data handling, and reflects an absence of a comprehensive approach to data management. So if a team consistently uses outdated customer contact information and it leads to failed communication attempts, it suggests that other departments aren’t sharing, updating, or cross-verifying this data.

Lack of cross-departmental collaboration

Limited collaboration between teams using different technologies often leads to silos. This problem is especially evident when there are few shared projects or integrated workflows, suggesting that departments are confining information.

Redundant data storage

Multiple teams storing similar datasets indicate redundant and duplicate storage, a hallmark of silos. This redundancy creates waste as multiple teams invest resources to maintain similar information independently. It also elevates inconsistency error risks because each team may update its dataset at different times and in different ways. These inconsistencies can create errors or misleading conclusions when analyzing information because analysts might unknowingly use outdated or conflicting data versions.

4 steps to fix data silos

To dismantle silos and foster a cooperative work culture, follow these steps.

1. Identify the optimal customer experience path

Understanding how your target audience and customers interact with various touchpoints allows you to identify the main focus areas for data collection. Start by mapping the user journey from awareness to conversion. Then, conduct workshops with representatives from all departments, such as marketing, sales, and customer service.

During these workshops, work collaboratively to identify critical contact points in the customer journey and leverage this insight to build a centralized system for tracking all customer interactions. This unified approach ensures that no department deviates from the defined journey and everyone works toward a shared objective.

The goal is to effectively guide visitors through various calls to action (CTAs) that encourage them to take specific actions like purchasing a product or subscribing to a service. This strategy sets the foundation for streamlined data management and aligns departmental efforts toward enhancing the overall customer experience.

2. Bridge customer data gaps across teams

Ensure customer and company data flows between departments to prevent silos from forming. One way to achieve this is by integrating a CRM that provides access to all relevant teams. Complement this system with robust data-sharing protocols, like regular synchronizations and weekly check-ins, to keep everyone on the same page. Establish clear permissions to maintain secure access and prevent rogue users from forming new silos — this ensures information access for everyone.

For example, a shared data system, like a website, makes data accessible to a company’s marketing and engineering teams, ensuring both have real-time records of the same information.

3. Establish a systematized approach to data organization

To guarantee consistency across departments, establish norms and practices for collecting and organizing data. This includes setting file naming conventions and establishing project-specific number codes for documents and assets. A standardized system prevents duplication by creating consistent storage and management methods, lowering redundant and conflicting data entry.

Conduct regular audits and data validation checks to ensure all departments adhere to these standards. If certain departments aren’t complying, provide workshops and training sessions to bring struggling parties on board while encouraging a more collaborative working environment.

4. Cultivate a collaborative culture

Create a company culture where employees feel comfortable exchanging ideas and information with each other. Highlight the existence of data silos and the importance of breaking them down to achieve common goals. A collaborative workflow and environment ensure data becomes a shared asset rather than a departmental property.

For example, you can recognize and reward team efforts contributing to data integration and project success after holding workshops. And consider investing in collaboration tools and shared communication platforms like Slack and Notion to encourage real-time cooperation and data sharing.

Break siloed systems with Webflow

Silos can quickly creep into your organizational structure and impede workflows — and breaking them down is a slow challenge. But platforms like Webflow allow you to build collaboratively in a central visual development platform that directly integrates multiple analytics and data tools into your website.

With Webflow’s visual-first approach, you can build a unified website that’s accessible, user-friendly, and scalable to suit all levels of your organization. Plus, you can monitor performance with powerful apps and optimize for your business needs.

From 2015 to 2016, our team launched Webflow’s REST API, which focused on web builders across the market verticals where Webflow was being widely adopted. 

Initially, the API allowed 3rd-party developers to query the Webflow CMS and respond to site events (e.g. form submissions). Over time, the surface area of the API continued to expand as we continued to add features to the platform, and more developers were integrating Webflow into their visual development practices. 

Within our engineering department, this meant that more feature teams were contributing to the codebase and associated APIs. However, as the API surface area continued to grow and more new customer requests kept coming in — the API started to fragment.

Webflow was growing fast, third-party developers wanted to integrate into our platform, and some were building their entire business by writing applications that connected to our APIs millions of times a day. But to achieve this level of success, developers had to wade through a confusing assortment of different error response formats, and webhook payloads.

As we planned how we could motivate more 3rd-party solutions to build on top of Webflow, we started by reflecting on what we should do differently.

We identified three main areas for improvement:

1. Consistency, using non-standard response codes, and brimming with surprising behaviors (eg. having to pass id: null for setting SKU properties).
2. Using a style and governance model. Even if we cleaned up the API in its current state, we didn’t have a mechanism to prevent further sprawl and fragmentation.
3. Granular permissions requiring users to grant wholesale authorization to their site. A dealbreaker for many of our Enterprise customers.

At the start of 2023, our Developer Platform team— the team that interfaces directly with our 3rd-party developers on a regular basis via Twitter, Slack, and other channels — dedicated a week to audit our existing API, recording, and grouping “API papercuts” to identify how we should redesign our developer foundations.

This is the first part of a multi-part blog series providing a behind-the-scenes look at our journey of designing, engineering, scaling, and launching a revamped API for all of Webflow’s 3rd-party developers (and there are a lot more now than there were in 2015!).

Conducting a papercuts exercise

The first step we took was to dive into the API papercuts. We allocated a week to identify the gaps/limitations in our then current APIs (v1) and find all of the annoying little things that  were pain points for our 3rd-party developers. Also, we defined a public API style guide that laid out our design principles and best practices to set ourselves up for success during the development of the next version of our APIs (v2).

We conducted an exercise where we prepared a list of issues (from both internal and 3rd-party developer feedback) associated with our API suite. We broadly categorized the gaps/limitations into the following themes: API Response Errors, Webflow Users/Membership API vertical, API Ergonomics, Nomenclature, and Webhooks.

The sequence of process oriented activities that we executed are as listed below:

Step 1

We funneled down the top developer asks, along with issues/tasks from our JIRA boards, to identify the popular topics within the aforementioned themes and prepared a sample space of themed items.

Step 2

We started holding discussions within our working group to prioritize the themed items into the following actionable steps:

• Requires more exploration (yes/no)
• Update public developer documentation (yes/no)
• Update style guide (yes/no)
• Additional developer feedback sough (yes/no/comments)
• More details/next steps

An example of how we tackle prioritization:

Step 3

We prepared a Public API style guide laying out our API design principles and best practices. The style guide was sectioned into the following topics:

• Naming conventions for our API endpoints, API scopes, and fields
• API response entities: data types (null values, objects, arrays, booleans, etc), HTTP status codes, and error standardization
• Structure fundamentals: endpoint structure and pagination conventions 
• Open API specification

Step 4

Start incorporating the style guide as well as prioritized actionable steps from the Papercuts Exercise into driving our cross-functional company wide initiative of revamping/launching our API suite. 

The power of auditing and improving development building blocks

Building a developer platform requires constant iteration and self reflection. As you add new functionality, it’s important to consider how a new endpoint fits into the existing patterns already established. Nonetheless, as any API matures, you’ll inevitably accrue some degree of quirks, inconsistencies, and designs stretched beyond their intended purpose. 

Launching a new API version offers a rare opportunity to reevaluate these past decisions and holistically redesign how your API’s building blocks fit together as a cohesive suite. It’s a major responsibility that requires deep collaboration with stakeholders, as well as a clear understanding of developer scenarios and where the organization is heading next. Taking a comprehensive audit of the existing APIs is a first and critical step in setting this course. 

Please stay tuned for part 2 of this series, where we’ll dive into our next set of efforts around versioning practices, rollout lifecycle, API scopes design, and customer comms.

A contact form is an excellent way to establish a communication channel between you and your customers. You can use it to request feedback, generate leads, and encourage engagement. 

To help you create your own for your website, we’ve gathered some helpful tips along with contact form examples and templates you can work from. Whether crafting a basic contact form or a complex, multi-step system, you’ll be set for success.

Why use a contact form?

Inviting customers to reach out to your company using pre-configured fields provides users a consistent communication structure. And on your end, it’s easy to respond and then pull and track data from correspondences.

Here are a few more benefits of including a contact form on your site.

Reduce spam emails

Spam accounts and bots can easily send emails in huge quantities, but they can’t complete contact forms at the same scale. It’s more challenging for these bots to find and fill contact fields, which often contain disruptive CAPTCHA tests. Using contact forms ensures that most communications your company receives are legitimate. 

Track inquiries

Contact forms use consistent fields that lend themselves to automation. Many task management tools, such as Jira and HubSpot, help you automatically create tasks based on contact form information. This feature makes tracking and managing these contacts significantly simpler.

For example, if your form includes fields for customer platform, related product, and issue description, your task management tool can extract these values, automatically place them into the relevant fields, and file a ticket. This process is much easier to automate than an email, which would lack these fields. Your automation would have to dump the whole message into a blank task, and you’d have to sort out the fields manually. 

Generate more leads

Forms involve less friction than email correspondences because they provide a clear structure, leading to a more seamless contact experience for users. This seamless experience encourages more customers to reach out, resulting in more high-quality leads.

How to create a contact form for a website

Contact forms have become a mainstay in website design, so it’s no surprise there are many ways to set them up. The following are the two most common methods.

Online tools

Web development platforms offer templates and form builders that let you set up contact forms and other interactions with little to no code. This method is the simplest, allowing you to leverage the creativity and experience of web designers who specialize in creating intelligent, flexible user experiences. You can check out Webflow’s contact form templates for some ideas.

Design your own

Designing a contact form from scratch is a more involved method, but doing so allows you to make one that suits your brand. However, you must take adequate measures to ensure the form stores and transmits information securely whenever a user completes it. Consider investing in a data governance tool like Informatica or Alation to help navigate data privacy regulations like GDPR.

You’ll also need a firm grasp of these coding languages:

• HTML — You’ll need to use the
  
  element along with all the and required for each section.
• CSS — You need CSS to style the various form elements, deciding their spacing, fonts, and colors.
• PHP — You can embed this scripting language in HTML to gather the inputted data and send it where it needs to go.

What should you include in a contact form design?

When designing your contact forms, you don’t need to get overly creative. Remember that your customers have probably filled out similar forms before, and they have expectations about how quick or simple they should be. Follow this familiar structure to ensure a smooth customer experience:

• Name field — A simple field for inputting the customer’s name
• Email address — A field where customers input their email addresses (validated to ensure accuracy)
• Subject — A character-limited field where customers enter a title for their message or select from a dropdown menu
• Message or comments — A text box where customers input comments, concerns, or intentions (with a limited character count to encourage concise responses)
• Security features — A CAPTCHA or other feature that blocks bots
• Confirmation message/page — A pop-up or separate page that gives the customer a chance to review their input before submitting
• Privacy and data usage information — A paragraph or two describing how you’ll protect the customer’s information and what you’ll use their data for

Contact form types and examples

Contact forms come in many shapes and sizes, and which type you select depends on your company’s needs. Are you trying to generate leads, reach out for feedback, or establish a platform for fielding concerns? As you read the following contact form options and examples, consider which ones suit your unique use case.

Pop-up form

A pop-up form is a simple message that pops up on a screen and encourages customers to fill out a few simple fields. Brands typically use them to ask visitors to sign up for their mailing list. They can also work to offer promotional discounts. Webflow offers pop-up form templates you can seamlessly integrate with your web design.

Vertical contact form

Vertical contact forms are the typical format for contact pages. They lay out every field vertically, usually featuring additional information or calls to action in the adjacent space. 

To improve your customers’ experience, include information about how soon they can expect a response and suggest actions they can take in the meantime, such as visiting a help center or watching informative videos. You can explore templates made in Webflow, like this vertical contact form template designed by Flagship Ads, which cover various use cases.

Multi-step form

A multi-step form takes the vertical contact form further. Businesses use these forms to ask questions in high volume, breaking various interactions up across multiple fields.

For example, this onboarding form template, designed by Flowbase, uses a clean, simplified UI that breaks questions into separate interactions. As the customer fills out each field, they click the button to move to the next. This results in a more interactive experience.

Footer form

A footer form serves a similar purpose to a pop-up but works in the opposite way. Rather than grabbing the customer’s attention, it lays unobtrusively at the bottom of each page. Customers will only notice this subtle form if they scroll down, but it’s an excellent way to provide a sign-up method for a mailing list or let users reach out with one interaction.

This footer component template, also designed by Flowbase, is an excellent example. It includes some simple navigation options, a header, and a single field and button customers can use to subscribe to emails.

3 tips for a perfect contact form design

Contact forms may seem simple, but a perfect structure goes a long way to increasing conversions and engagement. These three tips will help you craft an ideal form that engages customers and invites them to interact with your brand.

1. Anticipate user inquiries

Start with a clear expectation of what inquiries you’ll receive from the form. Then, choose fields that request information relevant to those inquiries. For example, if you’re looking for customer satisfaction feedback, ask which product the customer is referring to and their satisfaction level. Alternatively, if your form is for demo scheduling, include a field for selecting time slots and a dropdown for common use cases.

2. Keep forms short to boost conversion rates

The shorter your form is, the higher the chance customers will complete it. If possible, fit your entire form in one screen so it doesn’t require scrolling down. In a multi-step form, use a visual indicator that shows how many pages the form has and try to include the fewest possible fields on each page.

3. Dedicate a form for social media

Social media creates segmented communities, so it’s easy to reach out to specific target audiences through these channels. Tap into multiple social media avenues by creating dedicated forms that appeal to each platform’s users.

Enhance user interaction with Webflow

Contact forms are vital to the user experience, but your website’s overall design also requires thoughtful planning to promote seamless interactions. Webflow offers a suite of helpful templates to inspire and streamline your development process. You can also leverage tools like Quick Stack elements and reusable components to fine-tune designs for your unique brand. 

Next time you assemble a contact form, update your site layout, or add a new feature, start with a template and see where your creativity takes you.

The familiar saying likely resonates deeply with leaders who manage cross-functional teams. But turning dreams into reality requires a robust culture of mutual respect and goal-oriented teamwork. A cross-functional team combines multiple departments in a unified group, allowing members to share knowledge and collaborate on ideas.

In web design departments, developers, marketers, and QA professionals work together to collaborate cross-functionally. This model lays a solid foundation for innovation and strong communication. Learn the strategies, practices, and tools you’ll need for successful multi-group work that delivers. 

What’s a cross-functional team?

Cross-functional teams comprise a mix of colleagues from different disciplines, such as design, development, and marketing. Combining various departments helps colleagues learn from each other, which fosters widespread knowledge sharing and innovative collaboration. 

Most web development teams work this way since developing sites and products requires disparate yet interconnected expertise. For example, here’s how a cross-functional team of designers, marketers, and developers might collaborate on site design:

• Designers gain valuable design input from the marketing team’s market research.
• Developers validate and approve bold ideas before designers commit to them.
• Marketers keep a steady pulse on the whole team’s progress to plan their marketing campaigns accordingly.

This contrasts the traditional “department” team model, where each discipline is siloed. That approach has worked for so long because it lets each department keep a laser focus on its responsibilities. But in a new age of sophisticated technology, it’s easier to collaborate cross-departmentally due to abundant technology advancements and new collaboration tools. Multi-team participation encourages innovation and bypasses tedious chains of discussion in favor of real-time communication. 

Benefits of working cross-functionally

When you bring people with diverse perspectives together, you use a wider lens that can let you create a better product. Every team member provides valuable insights that might be novel to their colleagues.

Here are just a few benefits of implementing a cross-functional team structure.

Real-time communication 

A cross-functional team can detect and resolve flaws in project ideas in real time. Their meetings might take longer since there are likely more competing viewpoints, but collaboration occurs in one place, rather than across many separate meetings, messages, or emails.

Increased innovation 

Different departments may approach a project or challenge with different viewpoints. Working together — as opposed to in isolation — means teams face conflicts head-on, together. This can lead to improved creative problem-solving and generate fresh ideas. For example, a developer might tell a designer that a feature isn’t feasible, but as their teams combine their expertise to work out an alternative, they could discover an even more effective solution. 

Knowledge sharing

Fostering a culture of sharing expertise and experience can lead to valuable learning moments. As designers work with developers, they’ll learn the steps and nuances of the development process, and they can use that information when evaluating their designs. Likewise, when marketers learn how designers test and iterate, they can translate those techniques to their campaign testing process. All this knowledge sharing encourages every team member to better understand the project, product, or company as a whole.

Streamlined workflows

Relying on siloed teams to meet separately, arrive at conclusions, and then share with other departments can take up valuable time and lead to delays. Late in the process, other departments might find flaws in the isolated team’s conclusion. Then, the siloed team must meet again, account for the flaw, and arrive at a resolution — only to repeat the same workflow with other teams. 

Cross-functional teams bring these departments together to cut through wasteful processes and establish collaborative workflows. For example, if a siloed website content team discovers a malfunction in a design feature that impacts text readability, they would then need to meet or correspond with the design team to sort out the issue. This might involve extensive back-and-forth exchanges. But, if they made decisions together early and continuously while developing the feature, they could more easily fix or avoid such issues in real time.

Common challenges of cross-functional collaboration

When bringing together an interdisciplinary team, conflicts might arise while collaborating, often stemming from competing viewpoints. Here are the common hurdles your team may face, plus tips for overcoming them.

Conflicting goals

Marketers want to drive sales, designers want to build engagement, and developers want a stable product launch. This intersection is a tremendous strength for cross-functional teams. But it can also be a source of conflict. On one hand, differing goals encourage teams to collaborate on solutions that meet all key criteria. On the other, these varying viewpoints may create turmoil as competing goals clash.

The trick is to nurture a respectful, collaborative environment where everyone feels empowered to offer and object to ideas. That delicate balance is difficult to achieve, but it’s worth the effort. As a starting point, consider hosting engaging team-building exercises when you bring departments together to set a positive tone from the outset. 

Lack of trust

It takes time for any group to trust and rely on one another, especially when everyone’s viewpoint stems from entirely different disciplines. But wise leaders know to start small and build trust piece-by-piece with attainable goals and short-term gains. A few easy wins at the start will prime your cross-functional team to handle the larger challenges together down the road.

Misunderstandings

As team members share knowledge, it’s only natural for misunderstandings to occur. It takes patience and experience for everyone to completely comprehend each other’s roles. For example, a designer might not immediately grasp how marketing concepts impact their own work — this takes time and repetition. 

To push through misunderstandings, encourage a growth mindset in the team. When someone misinterprets a concept or strategy, the feedback they receive should build them up, not tear them down. Candid but respectful communication must remain a central team practice, to keep everyone accountable and empowered.

5 essentials for building a cross-functional team

To build a strong cross-functional team that’s ready to do great things and navigate inevitable challenges, you’ll need robust processes, competent leadership, and a flexible structure. These elements knit your team together into a cohesive unit that’s ready to take on all kinds of tasks.

Here are five critical elements for assembling and managing a successful cross-functional team.

1. Leadership

A capable leader can make or break a cross-functional team’s success by determining and guiding strategies and workflows. In a cross-functional team, the leader will likely be making decisions that sometimes fall outside their core competencies, so they must openly rely on all team members’ input and expertise.

2. Robust processes

Everyone on the team will have different proficiencies, so it’s important to outline how each member should start tasks, review progress, and report results. Incorporate templates, milestones, and peer review steps to surface problems early and often. 

Task management software and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are great tools that optimize the team’s workflow for transparent, organized collaboration.

3. Flexible roles

Encourage everyone to use the knowledge they’ve gained from working on your cross-functional team and explore each other’s roles. If you have a strong team of developers, let them dabble in UI/UX design while the designers try their hand at development. This reinforces cross-roll learning, encourages professional growth and creativity, and lets everyone contribute meaningfully to the project. 

4. Transparent communication

Every process and communication method should remain open and available, so all team members have access to the same crucial information. Keep SOPs in a shared folder for all to see, and include all team members, regardless of their involvement, in group chat channels. This full transparency ensures fair treatment for everyone and helps to prevent cliques or siloes from forming on your team.

5. Recognizing accomplishments

Remember to spotlight accomplishments, both as a team and individually. Set aside time during meetings to acknowledge notable progress or recognize someone who went above and beyond to deliver a goal. It’s vital that everyone feels encouraged to think past their job title, and rewarding them for that is an excellent way to encourage that mindset.

Driving growth through cross-functional collaboration

Effective cross-functional management calls for many essential ingredients — including your team’s collaboration platform. Selecting the right platform will lead to smoother operations, increased transparency, and seamless communication.

With Webflow Enterprise you can unite your team in real time in the Webflow Designer. In this fully collaborative space, each team member can leave feedback, edit content, and build website layouts with an seamless, built-in handover process.

“Timeless” might sound lofty, but it’s actually quite attainable. Moreover, evergreen content is an excellent way to boost your SEO. Google ranks compelling and useful content highly in search results. And, according to BrightEdge, 53% of trackable web traffic comes from organic searches — so evergreen material supported by strategic SEO practices has great potential to boost your visibility. 

But how do you write evergreen posts, and what’s a strong evergreen topic? Creating lasting material for your website all comes down to a long-term, evergreen content strategy. Leverage creative ideas that will remain relevant and useful for years. Learn about what is or isn’t a good candidate for evergreen content and how to create it.

Getting started with evergreen content

Evergreen content stays relevant and “fresh” for a long time. It avoids time-sensitive information and instead leans into anything likely to remain static. 

Producing evergreen content drives more traffic to your site than topical, short-lived information because it covers topics and keywords that stay relevant over time.

Here are typical evergreen content examples:

• How-tos — Instructional content like how to export a PDF or update Windows remains applicable as long as products or services don’t change drastically.
• Product reviews — Most products stay in the primary or secondary market years after launch, so those products’ reviews tend to remain relevant.
• Tips and best practices — General guidance, such as “Tips for organizing your cloud storage” and “Team leadership best practices,” remains relevant even as industry dynamics change. 
• Glossaries — Short, descriptive articles that define terms such as “cache” or “proxy server” remain helpful if the terms stay relevant.
• Informational content — Articles such as this one provide general information that isn’t likely to change over time.

What’s not considered evergreen?

Even the content types listed above could lose the “evergreen” label if they cover seasonal or otherwise time-sensitive topics. Generally, any content about an issue likely to lose relevance within a few weeks isn’t evergreen. 

Here are a few examples of non-evergreen content:

• News articles — Current events might drive incredible website traffic for a short time, but content that covers them quickly drops off the radar when the news cycle moves on.
• Trending topics — Chasing trends and pop culture news might tick up your traffic for a short while, but these topics become irrelevant within a few days — or weeks if you’re lucky.
• Seasonal topics — Covering holidays and seasonal content could offer recurring traffic, but there’s no telling if this year’s “Fall travel ideas” or “Best Christmas gifts” will remain relevant the following year.
• Market and tech trends — Businesses and technology can change rapidly, so any content you produce about them may soon be too outdated to deliver steady, reliable website traffic.

The benefits of producing evergreen content

Evergreen content creation is a long-term marketing investment that should be part of every enterprise content strategy. It’s a reliable method for meeting web traffic goals because it doesn’t suffer from the hit-or-miss challenges of topical material. 

Expect the following benefits when sharing timeless content. 

Higher ROI

Creating an evergreen article or video is typically as efficient as developing non-evergreen content. Both require authoritative information, sources, and good writing. Since you’re spending time and effort during creation anyway, why not cover a topic that’ll offer returns on that investment for years to come?

Steady flow of traffic

Unlike topical articles or current events media, evergreen content appears steadily in search results. It might see peaks and valleys in popularity, but it stays relevant year after year. “How to fix your A/C,” for example, is an evergreen topic because it generates traffic year-round. When it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, someone in the southern hemisphere is desperately trying to fix their A/C unit to keep up with the summer heat.

Timeless topics are also great candidates for cornerstone content — or content that fits under your strategy’s essential pillars, such as how-to guides or step-by-step instructionals. Articles within these pillars will often become your most-visited pages, providing reliable, robust traffic for many years.

More backlinks

Evergreen content is more attractive to other site creators looking for external links on their own websites — especially if your evergreen work is authoritative, permanent, and well-sourced. Develop as a trustworthy source of truth, and you’ll soon find that other outlets backlink to your content more often, which results in better site search engine optimization (SEO).

More shares than trending topics

Trending content might get shared frequently soon after publication, but evergreen content can surpass trendy media over time. For example, a trending article about a vehicle recall might gain views suddenly and widely, but an article about what to do when your vehicle gets recalled will ultimately be shared more — audiences need that information every time a recall happens.

5 steps for writing evergreen content

An evergreen content marketing strategy looks very similar to one for current events, but the topics you’re working from couldn’t be more different. 

Here’s a tried-and-true strategy you can follow for effective evergreen content.

1. Find a category

Before identifying content ideas, brainstorm categories that could include many topics. For example, if you’re writing for a company like Figma (a UX design platform), select general categories users might care about, such as prototyping and user research.

2. Identify topics

With some high-level categories in mind, visit Google Trends and research each category. Expand the timeframe to the past 12 months to see more results. Record how many searches a term receives on average.

Then, check the “Related queries” section and change the drop-down to top results. That’s where you’ll find individual topics and keywords you can write about. For example, if you search for “user research,” you’ll see that people also search for “user experience” and “market research.”

After you’ve recorded data about each category, see which has the most activity. Then, select a handful of popular topics from those categories.

3. Determine keywords

Take all the topics you identified and perform keyword research for each. You can use Google Trends again, but there are also tools like Semrush and Moz that specialize in keyword research. Organize the keywords for each topic according to their relevance.

4. Select a format

Some topics are best to address in a video, while others require a step-by-step article or podcast. Identify which format best suits each topic and then group them according to these formats. If you’re unsure, perform a Google search to learn what formats are popular for these topics. Ultimately, you should have a list that details categories, topics, and the best format for each.

5. Create and publish content

Select a topic group that uses the same format and begin scaling that content type. Staying in the same format at first gives you a strong starting point and teaches you lessons you’ll apply to other formats. You can then circle back to update your content as you learn more from other formats.

For example, if your team creates blog posts, build a content library that can link video posts. Through this process, your writers will learn essential writing skills applicable to creating the scripts for videos. Then, after producing some videos, direct team members to the blog posts and apply the lessons they learned for more engaging material. 

All formats involve skills that apply to other formats, so all that matters is growth and improvement. Have your team repeat this process until they’ve built up a diverse content offering, and implement routine web traffic analytics evaluations to identify trends and strategize accordingly.

Create timeless content to elevate your SEO strategy

Evergreen content should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. Maintaining and refreshing content requires a reliable platform that scales as your site grows. With Webflow, content teams can create and publish content quickly — without relying on developers — that drives marketing results.

Site performance plays a critical role in your website’s conversion success for two key reasons: First, optimizing your site usability by creating a flawless user experience (UX) increases organic engagement. Second, maximizing your search engine optimization (SEO) will influence how search algorithms assess, rank, and display your website in search result pages. This boosts your visibility and helps users find your website.

SEO and online presence are deeply interconnected, so improving site performance is a bit of a circular challenge. More engagement leads to better SEO and a higher search engine results page (SERP) placement, but higher SEO leads to more visibility and higher user interaction.

If you’re unsure where to focus your efforts, a website audit is a great place to start. Keep reading to learn why audits are beneficial and how best to conduct them.

What’s a website audit?

A website audit is a thorough inspection to identify issues affecting your site performance, crawlability, and user experience, like broken links or confusing site navigation. It also detects problems behind the scenes, like inefficient caching that negatively affects page load times or missing canonical tags that impact your SEO.

Some factors to consider in a website audit include:

• Site traffic: The volume of visitors engaging with your site within a specific time period
• Site performance: The speed in which your webpages are downloaded and viewed by visitors, as well as how visitors engage with your content
• Content quality: The accuracy, comprehensiveness, and relevance of your content within the context of your industry target audience’s needs
• Keyword targeting: Your content’s inclusion of highly searched terms and phrases relevant to your target viewers
• Metadata: The use of metadata, like title tags, descriptions, and canonical tags, that helps search engines categorize and rank your content
• User feedback: Input generated by visitors through engagement such as surveys, customer service interactions, and iterative testing
• Backlink quality: The value and relevance of content and sources linking to your website from other online locations

Examining these elements lets you assess your website presence and determine improvement areas. By uncovering and addressing weaknesses, a website audit provides actionable direction for streamlining your web initiatives and growing your bottom line.

Types of website audits

A comprehensive site review pulls together various auditing processes to appraise all aspects of your platform that impact performance. Here are a few standard website audits.

SEO audit

SEO is crucial to any marketing strategy because it generates organic traffic, which comes from visitors who land on your page from unpaid search results. High visibility and search rankings promote business, cultivate customer connections, and establish your site’s authority in your industry.

An SEO audit evaluates your website to identify and integrate improvements that increase its rankings in the SERPs. An SEO audit involves these key tasks:

• On-page SEO audit. Conduct keyword research for your market and competitors using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Then determine how well you’ve optimized your webpages for relevant keywords that align with user search terms. This boosts your chances of ranking higher in search results.
• Off-page SEO audit. Assess the quality and relevance of your link-building strategies and the backlinks pointing to your site using SEO tools like Ahrefs or Moz. High-quality backlinks from reputable sources boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings.
• 404 errors. Resolve broken links or page errors so your users don’t land on a 404 error page. This provides a better browsing experience and maintains user engagement.
• Crawlability and indexability. Crawlability is how well a search engine can discover your website using web crawlers. Web crawlers review your pages to determine your site’s indexability — the ability to add your site to a search engine’s index of possible search results. A search engine needs to be able to crawl your site to index it and rank it in the SERPs. To help web crawlers index your site, you can optimize your sitemap with logical hierarchies, page breadcrumbs, and well-categorized content.

Content audit

A content audit evaluates the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your website content. Content audits typically assess:

• Content freshness. Regularly refresh content on high-traffic pages with current trends and keywords to ensure that the content stays relevant and engaging. Consider implementing an ongoing refresh schedule to review and update content so you can enhance the user experience and your site’s SEO performance.
• Keyword optimization. Just as with an on-page SEO audit, assess keyword usage for SEO and visitor search intent. If you identify gaps or discover new search-term trends, update your content accordingly to boost relevancy and visibility.
• Engagement metrics. Analyze user engagement with your content by assessing visitors’ time spent on each page and clicks to other pages on the site (page depth). Use these analytics to determine which types of content perform well and which pieces don’t resonate with your audience, and then adapt or redevelop your pages accordingly.
• Content gaps. Identify areas where your content lacks coverage, relevance, or value compared to your competitors. Then create a content strategy to fill these gaps.
• Duplicate content. Duplicate and overly similar pages negatively affect your SEO because search engines can’t comprehend how to rank URLs that contain the same content. Review your site for repetition and remove duplicate content to improve your search rankings.

Technical audit

A technical audit scrutinizes the behind-the-scenes elements of your website, including technical infrastructure, server performance, and security measures. Checks may include:

• Server response times. Evaluate the time it takes for your server to respond to user requests. A well-optimized server ensures your site operates smoothly and responds promptly to user requests. This reduces page load times and boosts user experience.
• SSL certificate validity. Ensure your SSL certificates are up to date to secure data transmission.
• Broken links. Identify and rectify broken links on your website. These disrupt users’ navigation and weaken your site’s reliability and credibility.
• Mobile responsiveness. Check how well your website performs on mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile to make your site available and functional for users on their mobile devices reduces user friction and boosts engagement metrics.
• Page speeds. Assess whether your site suffers from slow page load speeds and optimize technical aspects like caching to boost content delivery times. This includes considering image and video sizes since large media files slow down your website and frustrate users.

Usability and user experience audit

A usability and UX audit centers on how visitors interact with your website. The goal of this audit is to enhance your site’s user experience by making it as intuitive and pleasant as possible for your audience. Checks to reduce user friction may include:

• Responsive design. As you would in a technical audit, ensure your website adapts well to various devices and screen sizes. Most designers begin with developing sites for desktop users, but it’s also important to optimize for mobile use.
• Page load speeds. Assess the time it takes for webpages to load for users. If there are significant delays, visitors may grow frustrated and navigate away to another site.
• Navigation effort. Evaluate the user-friendliness of your website’s menu structure and overall navigation to ensure visitors have an intuitive experience.
• User feedback analysis. Generate user input through surveys, polls, and customer service interactions to identify improvement areas. Implementing suggestions and refinements into your website design and content shows you value your customers’ opinions and needs, and it improves site performance and engagement.‍
• Customer journey analysis. Monitor your customer’s path as they navigate your site to determine pain points. Then devise a strategy to reduce user friction.

Website audit tools for better SEO

You’ll need a few essential tools to perform a thorough website audit. Fortunately, many of these tools are readily available and free to use. Here are features and pricing information on some of the most valuable resources available.

Site audit tools

SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl), Screaming Frog, and Moz Pro use crawlers to scan your website and check its general health and performance. They look for factors that might harm your website’s organic performance, like slow page loads and duplicate content, and offer resources like link-building tools, keyword research tools, and more.

Pricing:

• Ahrefs: Starts at $99 per month with free limited access to Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
• Semrush: Free with paid enhanced versions available
• Moz Pro: Starts at $99 per month with a free 30-day trial available
• Screaming Frog: Free with paid enhanced versions available
• Lumar: Pricing is available upon request

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that checks your site’s indexing status and how it appears on SERPs. It offers performance reports, your site’s indexing status, and insights into core web vitals like interactivity and loading performance. Use Google Search Console to perform an SEO audit and determine if you’re hitting target keywords. Remember to use structured data, which maintains a standardized format, to help Google crawl your site.

Pricing: Free

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a digital marketing tool that gathers website information and provides insights on performance, SEO, visitor retention, and more. This tool translates complex datasets into clear metrics, letting you gauge user interactions and understand traffic patterns.

Google Analytics provides essential data for an SEO audit, like:

• Organic traffic: The total number of visitors from organic searches
• Bounce rates: The percentage of visitors who only view one page before clicking away
• Average session duration: The average amount of time visitors spend on the site
• Percentage of new sessions: The percentage of visits from first-time visitors

Pricing: Free

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that works in tandem with the Chrome User Experience Report. It checks your website’s loading time for desktop and mobile devices and generates real-time reports on overall page speed. These evaluations help identify problems that slow down a site’s performance so you can adjust content, layout, or other hidden hindrances accordingly and improve page load times.

Pricing: Free

How to conduct a website audit: 10 elements to review

Once you have the right tools, it’s time to conduct a website audit. Here’s a 10-step checklist of things to look at during your audit.

1. Manual actions

A manual action is when someone at Google manually checks your website to determine if it meets the required guidelines. If your site doesn’t meet these criteria, it won’t be eligible for search engine rankings.

Visit the Manual Actions report in Google Search Console to examine manual activity.

2. Indexation

Google’s search engine indexes billions of webpages a day. If Google doesn’t crawl and index your pages, the site won’t just rank poorly — it’ll be absent from search results entirely. For searchers to find your website, it must stand out among the masses in this index.

Look for “no index page” warnings in your site auditing tool, which prohibit Google from indexing pages. These can result from issues like duplicate content, slow load speeds, and security risks. If you find a warning on a page you want to rank, modify your meta description or other relevant metadata.

Next, study the SEO report’s total indexable URLs. If this is unusually high, your website may have duplicate or similar pages. Duplicate content harms your SEO because Google can’t determine which page should rank higher in search results. If you have a blog with 300 articles but see 1,000 indexable URLs, Google may have indexed multiple article versions.

To fix this, determine the canonical page and implement 301 redirects. These are HTTP status codes used to correct indexed duplicate content. They alert search engines when a page moves to a new location, merging multiple page rankings into one and prompting search engines to remove duplicate URLs from their indices. This process focuses search engine authority on one version of content and clarifies which page should rank higher in search results.

3. Indexed URLs

Google may index your site under various URLs, such as:

• http://www.yourwebsitename.com
• http://yourwebsitename.com
• https://www.yourwebsitename.com
• https://yourwebsitename.com

These variations mean little to website visitors. However, they appear as different iterations of the same website to a search engine’s algorithm. It’s crucial to ensure Google indexes only one version of your website so site performance metrics are accurate and comprehensive.

To achieve this, enter “site:search” on Google and examine the number of indexed URLs. If you see duplicates, add 301 redirects and use Google Search Console’s Removals tool to remove certain websites from results pages.

4. Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to interactions with users who land on your site through unpaid search engine results (as opposed to sponsored content). High organic traffic indicates you’re bringing in and engaging users with targeted interests, which grows your site’s credibility. Google often modifies its search algorithm through routine updates, which usually focus on limiting spam, vetting content quality, and addressing other SEO concerns.

Due to the algorithm’s ever-changing nature, spotting dips in organic traffic performance is essential to maintaining and growing visibility. To evaluate traffic, Google Search Console offers a free analysis tool. Navigate to the Search Results Report and select a period from the dropdown menu.

5. Site speed

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool includes a page experience factor that considers both page load speeds and UX. If your site has long loading times, visitors may become frustrated and navigate away from your page to seek a better experience from competitors.

Go to the Google PageSpeed Insights Site Audit dashboard. There, you’ll find the Site Performance Report. This report will highlight existing issues and offer advice for improving your website’s performance, such as compressing design elements or optimizing images to boost loading speeds.

6. Mobile optimization

In 2023, mobile devices generated over half of all global website traffic. Google incorporated mobile indexing in 2019, and it’s been a crucial ranking criterion for content ever since. Because so many users are searching from phones or other mobile devices, considering and optimizing mobile UX supports your site’s overall performance.

To check your website’s mobile friendliness, use Google Lighthouse to run an audit for performance, accessibility, SEO, and progressive web apps (PWA). After the audit, Lighthouse will generate a report and notify you of URL issues compromising your site’s usability on mobile devices. Creating responsive designs ensures that users on any device have a cohesive viewing experience.

7. Broken links

Broken links disrupt the user experience because they don’t redirect to other pages, so it’s important to find, report, and repair them using your preferred site audit tool.

Google Search Console has an indexing option in its navigation menu. There, you’ll see a list of 404 error pages that indicate broken links. Rectify any errors by removing the links or setting up appropriate 301 redirects, then request confirmation from Google to validate and implement the solutions.

8. On-page elements

Your website’s indexed pages must include an H1 (header) tag, a title tag, and a meta description. These fundamental on-page metadata elements help Google grasp a page’s content to match it to search queries and increase clicks and traffic to your website.

Write compelling title tags and meta descriptions containing relevant keywords for each webpage. Google often displays these in the SERP, so ensure they stand out with high-quality, effective writing.

9. Content value

Your site’s content should be comprehensive, answer users’ specific questions, and meet SEO standards. If a webpage has a content gap, like missing crucial information, it delivers less value and is unlikely to rank higher than more thorough competitors. These gaps might include:

• Keywords
• Instructions
• Images

For example, a page providing instructions for how to tie a friendship bracelet that’s missing instructional images and essential keywords will rank poorly.

If your content doesn’t fulfill its purpose, searchers will likely click away from the page and seek information elsewhere. When checking for gaps, examine SERP rankings, traffic, and click-through rates. Low rankings, traffic, and visitor retention suggest that people aren’t getting what they want from your content.

Your site audit tool should contain a content gap report or equivalent that indicates the webpages outranking yours with similar content. Here you can find primary and secondary keywords that affect ranking and incorporate them into your content to drive the webpage higher on the SERP.

A website audit tool may also check your page authority, which is a score that predicts how well a page will rank on SERPs. To improve your score, seek external links from high-authority pages that outrank yours. Google recognizes the value of these pages, so the links lend credibility to your content quality.

10. Outdated content

Google’s search engine algorithm constantly receives updates, but it’s not the only dynamic factor influencing SEO. Pages with high rankings on Google three years ago may not have the same performance now because the content is outdated.

When content quality declines, page rankings drop off. Resolve this by frequently updating content to keep it high-quality, relevant, and up to date. But be sure to update publishing dates on new content and confirm that it’s crawled — otherwise, search engines won’t be aware of your refreshed content, rendering this work ineffective. You can ask Google to recrawl your page using the URL Inspection Tool.

Optimize your site with Webflow

Maintaining a successful website is a constant process, and website audits aren’t a one-time task. To maintain your site performance and match the latest user needs and SEO trends, make site audits a part of your regular workflow.

Learn more about SEO best practices to stand out from your competition and stay on top of your game. See how Webflow helps you complete your audit and optimize your website to increase your bottom line.

In January, we followed that up with the successful launch of new appearance settings in the Designer that allow users to choose between a default, darker, or brighter theme.

You might be asking; how did we facilitate such large-scale design updates and manage to keep the UI visually consistent? The answer: by using design tokens and CSS variables.

In this blog, we’ll explore the ins and outs of the behind-the-scenes magic that makes these large UI changes possible.

How we utilize design tokens and CSS variables

Like many companies, Webflow uses Figma to create mockups of new features. Our designers leverage design tokens – key-value pairs that use Figma’s Variables API – within their mockups.

At Webflow, we have over one hundred design tokens in Figma that cover nearly every aspect of CSS styling: colors, backgrounds, font sizes, borders, border radii, sizing, spacing, and more. We’ve carefully curated this robust collection of tokens over time through close collaboration between our Design System team and the rest of the design organization.

For example, we might have a design token for our default text color that looks like this: Text/Default: #C4C4C4. We might also have a design token that can be used as a margin or padding value that looks like this: Space/space-1: 4px. We even have some tokens that point to other tokens as their value.

We use these design tokens to create CSS variables in our code. For instance, the design token for our default text color that we saw earlier becomes var(–colors-text-default), which we can then use as the value for the CSS color property for some HTML element like this:

color: var(--colors-text-default)

That variable references an underlying color token:

–colors-text-default: var(–core-colors-gray-400);

And these color variables are then tied to our base hex values:

–core-colors-gray-400: #C4C4C4;

Usage in our code

Given that Webflow is a mature codebase that has seen several iterations of both JS-based and CSS-based styling solutions over its lifetime, implementing design tokens was not a trivial task. To further complicate matters, the codebase had numerous occurrences of hard-coded style values, which led to inconsistent styles and bespoke component designs.

We first took the time to unify our systems so that they could all use the same set of CSS variables. Then we replaced any hard-coded values to instead use those variables. The unification process took a couple months to complete. This initial work was well worth the effort though, as we now have a single source of truth for our design tokens and styles.

Our CSS-based style system using .less files defines all of our design tokens as Less variables that can be used in other .less files. Our JS-based style system defines all of our design tokens inside what essentially boils down to an object of key-value pairs.

This allows us to style our elements using CSS/LESS like this:

.button {
  color: @d2–textDefault;
}

Or to style our elements using our internal JS-based style system like this:

const HelpText = emotionStyled(‘div’)({
  color: tokens.colors.textDefault,
});

The important thing to note here is that everything is using these tokens and variables. We don’t have any instances of hard-coded base style values anywhere anymore.

We even have tooling in place to proactively catch instances where developers have tried to add hard-coded style values in pull requests in GitHub! This tooling traverses the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the code and reports any style values it encounters that don’t use our design tokens. This way we can keep our codebase clean and prevent future regressions of non-ideal style usage.

Making style updates

Having this setup in place enables us to make large-scale UI changes fairly easily.

If we want to update our default text color to be something else, we update the design token value in one place in Figma and in one place in our code. Then, the rest just works. Because all of our frontend code is using these tokens, when a token’s color value is changed, the color gets updated everywhere all throughout our app.

That’s the dream, right? To update once and see the effects everywhere. No more hunting down hundreds or thousands of instances where a color was used and replacing them, hoping you caught them all.

This system also makes theming much easier. We mentioned earlier that the Designer allows you to choose between a default, darker, or brighter theme. To support these three themes, we have three theme config files that contain all of the design token values for each theme. The variable names are the same for each theme (and enforced by TypeScript!), but the values are different. And since our components reference the variable names in their styles, switching between each theme just works for every component. All we have to do is swap out the set of tokens and values used in our app based on the currently selected theme, and the styles get applied everywhere.

const lightThemeColors: ThemeTokens = {
  textDefault: coreColorTokens.gray[800],
  /* more tokens here */
};

const darkThemeColors: ThemeTokens = {
  textDefault: coreColorTokens.gray[400],
  /* more tokens here */
};

Moving forward

With our current system in place, we can respond to customer feedback and deliver value to the business much more quickly. We’ve enabled ourselves to wrangle a complex, sprawling codebase and make UI style updates with ease.

So, what’s next? We’re now in a place where we can continue to refine the look and feel of our app without requiring a significant time investment. Could that mean light mode in Designer? Dark mode in Dashboard? Even further theme customization? No promises, but the possibilities are endless!