How did WebflowConf feel this year?
It felt like a really big house party where the vibe has fun, but the best time was had in that one person's bedroom with a bluetooth speaker playing some weird funky stuff that you try to Shazam for your own music library.
Okay, not the greatest analogy – but my point is that this conference was made great for me by the sum of its smaller, more intimate parts. The parts that spoke to its core users, which, in my eyes, is still the agencies, developers, and the designers who have also been roped into managing the site by their bosses. More on this in a moment.
A recap of the big announcements (that I liked)
You can read this on Webflow's site instead, but if you can't be bothered to click on the link I so lovelingly provided, then here goes nothing, hotdawg:
- Source (the big one): I call it "Cursor for Marketers". An app that let's marketing teams work with their site's codebase in a way that's actually aligned with their work. This is where Webflow thinks the future is headed, and I'm strongly inclined to agree. No pricing yet.
- Campaigns: Giving performance marketers a streamlined version of the Webflow platform geared specifically to shipping as fast as humanly (or agentically) possible.
- Releases: Enterprise-only feature that let's you branch the whole site, so you coordinate publishing the various bits and bobs of your marketing collateral in one elegant fell swoop. I can image this being very VERY useful when orchestrating a rebrand. Bye bye site freeze.
- MCP 2.1: Ask your agent to build an interaction using Interactions with GSAP. Need to play around with this but I like the idea of using this for the initial set-up of simple interactions or hooking elements to existing sequences you've built yourself.
A recap of the smaller announcements (that I loved)
You can also read these on Webflow's site but please indulge me as I nerd out about these thank u x
- Visual editing for AI code components: We all know Webflow AI credits currently trade on the Forex for a bajillion dollars per token, so its very important that we can now tweak and refine these components by hand, ourselves.
- Components in the CMS: Big small big. We can now add Components inline with Rich Text fields in CMS Collections. The immediate use-cases that spring to mind are in-line CTAs, Buttons, Modals, but I mentioned on the Restock podcast that I'm excited to really go full ham on this by using dedicated Rich Text fields to add Components to other parts of a CMS Template Page, not just long-form content blocks.
- Breakpoint canvas: Actually really nice. I am still flicking between Figma and Webflow, much to the chagrin of the "[insert product here] is dead" crowd, so being able to see a birds-eye view of a page across breakpoints during initial build, in the same way a designer's Figma file would be, is a really nice touch.
- Popovers: You can only get SO excited about a popover, but what came with this announcment was the exciting promise that all of Webflow's native interactive elements like navbars, tabs and the slider will be updated to adopt more modern and accessible web standards. Fare the well JQuery, I hardly new thee.
- Default components for slots: I love components. I don't love clients ignoring all the documentation I spent ages making on how to use them properly. This (along with Slot restrictions) is a welcome addition to help teach clients (and their agents) on how to use them, as they are using them.
Special Announcement:
Timothy Ricks is in the house
The one person knows Webflow better than Webflow is now at Webflow. This is net win for everyone, specifically:
- Timothy Ricks
- Webflow
- You
- Me
- Our clients
Mr Ricks has deep understanding of how the product works, but more importantly, how that actually translates into being helpful for freelancers and agencies who actually build sites for our clients. This is why I'm hopeful about the future of the current platform, and for Source.
I was lucky enough to chat with Timothy in person at length about this which is why I'm bullish about the future.
So where does that leave us right now? Hopeful
With a promising glimpse of the future and a bunch of decent quality-of-life updates for the builders, in my opinion.
I think I speak for many when I say this year has made folks nervous about the future, specifically with Webflow. Their biggest announcement, Source, was heavily focused on the marketer, so its understandable that their core community of designers and developers felt a bit unseen.
The thing is, I believe Webflow's focus on marketers is absolutely neccessary for them to survive in today's landscape. There is no point in trying to make the best agentic development tool thanks to Cursor, Claude Code, Codex.
That being said, what calmed my nerves was having the chance to speak to folks on the engineering and product teams, who reassured me that they know visual development is still absolutely essential in our workflows as designers and developers. With that in mind, I am hopeful building in Source is going to feel very fimiliar to me as a long-time Webflow developer.
I also appreciate Webflow's efforts to corral good will with its core community (the Papercuts room was a stroke of genius, keep doing things like that Webflow) by addressing long-standing pain points on the existing platform, whilst also showing Source as their way of saying "hey folks, we know we need a fundamental change because AI... and this is how we're meeting the moment".
In the meantime, I will be:
- Building most new sites for clients on Webflow
- Baking in new features to existing client Webflow projects (Slot restrictions and defaults, baby!)
- Continuing down the Astro rabbit hole for side projects
- Looking after my tortoise
- Questioning my long-term purpose and contemplating whether I pivot hard and become a storm chaser
Bonus feature: #whaleflow
I couldn't be at the Partner Summit the day before Conf, so I decided to head out to the high seas with a few brave folks for some whale watching. Honestly, this was one of the biggest highlights of the trip. It reminded me that this community is full of incredibly kind humans.
