10 Pain Points with Webflow Publishing and How to Solve Them

We talked to 121 companies with sites on Webflow, and they were losing 1.5 hours per post on marketing ops related to publishing. For a company publishing over ten times a month, that's half a week of wasted effort. In fact, many companies hire contractors or dedicated headcount for marketing ops just to upload Google Docs to their sites.

That's time you could spend on more strategic or creative work, like interviewing customers or working on product positioning in your content. We'll show you how you can claw back time on Webflow with Letterdrop so that you never have to spend another minute messing around with code again.

Webflow is a Great Site Builder, But Your Content Marketers Probably Need a CMS Built For Writing

Webflow is growing crazy fast. We use Webflow here at Letterdrop and we love it. Its popularity is a no-brainer — you can create beautiful and responsive websites without knowing how to code.

This doesn't mean you can't occasionally run into technical barriers with Webflow, especially as a content marketer. Often, these barriers are related to publishing. Companies like Goldcast sometimes struggle with exactly that.

‎Most writers and marketers usually have limited technical expertise and didn't expect to have to get in so deep with code and configurations in their day-to-day. So they find themselves stuck when doing anything semi-sophisticated in Webflow. They're now pinging web developers for assistance, whose time isn't free, and publishing slows to a crawl.

Your marketing budget spent on content to drive traffic isn't achieving the results you want because it's blocked on publishing velocity. But that doesn't mean you have to give up on Webflow — not at all.

There's a way to ensure that Webflow meets all the features your writers need to streamline the content publishing process. Our software integrates deeply into Webflow, can connect to multiple CMS collections and supports any type of custom field — it's the intermediary between the Webflow CMS and your site.

To illustrate what we mean, here are some features your writers need, how Webflow occasionally struggles to meet those needs, and how to make sure it does.

1. Your Writers Need A Way To Add Embeds, Risk-Free

Problem: Most modern business blogs have a lot of different rich content types like tables, CTAs, dynamic charts, and embedded demos. You have to use code embeds to achieve this. Issues:

1. Most marketing teams store the code for these elements in a Google Doc or Notion and ask their writers (who are non-technical and don't usually deal with code) to copy and paste the code from there. It's easy to break pages when copying code.
2. Back-and-forth for writers to get access to these Google Docs.
3. The complicated Webflow UX to embed code doesn't help your frustrated writers. It looks like a code editor.

Cost: Technical elements like embed blocks mean publishing to Webflow can take anywhere from 30-60 minutes or longer. It could also lead to broken pages published to your site. Web developers need to intervene to fix things. We've seen this across our customers like Scribe and Census.

Solution: No-Code Embed Form Templates

You can save and load embeds with templates in Letterdrop. Enter the HTML once with variables that can be dynamically replaced. Letterdrop turns that into a form that writers can insert without touching code.

‎‎When you save an embed as a user-friendly form, writers can fill in labeled input boxes instead of manually entering text between HTML tags, making the process easier.

‎The form inputs are dynamically inserted into the right places in the code embeds.

2. If You Write For Developer Sites, You Need Easy Access to Code

Problem: If you're writing for a developer product or an engineering blog, you'll likely need to insert code snippets. But on Webflow there's no native support for Markdown, languages, or syntax highlighting.

Cost: Spend days hacking together custom solutions and workarounds for code snippets in Webflow, as well as requiring marketers and writers to deal with these homegrown solutions. We made a guide to syntax highlighting in Webflow to show you how this works.

Solution: Native Markdown Support and Syntax Highlighting

Letterdrop natively supports Markdown in its editor along with syntax highlighting. Just type in triple backticks and choose your language.

‎Allie Beazell, who runs marketing at Census, says, "Letterdrop pays for itself for the hourly cost of a Content Marketer to just spend time formatting and mess with JavaScript."

3. Adding Anchor Links Should Be A Little Easier For Writers

Problem: You often want to directly link to a section in your page instead of dropping a user on your page without context. You can achieve this with anchor links. However, adding anchor links on Webflow requires code embeds and many opportunities to break things.

Cost: Our writer, Keelyn, spent 26 minutes adding anchor links manually in Webflow for a blog post, copy-pasting code that she didn't understand. She also ended up with a broken link and found the entire experience frustrating.

Solution: Built-in Anchors in Letterdrop CMS

You can add anchors in three clicks. Just highlight the text you want to link to and click on a button.

Anchor links function similarly to a bookmark, allowing quick and easy navigation directly to a section of your page.

Your writers can breathe easier. It's code-free.

4. Your Writers Want To See Their Page Before They Publish It

Many elements, like code snippets, quotes, and embeds, can only be previewed on a live site. That means you have to publish the whole website to preview your blog post.

Cost: You don't want pages that aren't ready to be published live, especially time-sensitive feature announcements and company updates. If the staging and live domains are not in sync and you attempt to publish a post, you can accidentally remove previous blog posts.

Solution: Risk-Free Previews and Staging with Letterdrop

With Letterdrop, your writers don't need Designer or guest access to preview their posts. They can preview even if other team members use Webflow Designer simultaneously.

Letterdrop creates a temporary preview by publishing to the staging site on webflow.io.

Letterdrop automatically deletes any previews after a few minutes, reducing the risk of publishing a post that's not ready.

5. You Need More Granular Permissions

Yup — there are no granular permissions or approvals on a per-post basis on Webflow. If you give someone Content Editor access in Webflow, they can touch ANY post on your site. This means that you have to limit it to one trusted party.

Cost: You need a single trusted person dedicated to marketing ops for site publishing. This just adds overhead and slows down your publishing cadence. If you choose to get loose with who you give access to your site, you run the risk of breaking it. Big yikes.

Solution: Set up Gated Permissions and Approvals

Worried about unauthorized collaborators breaking your page? Letterdrop gives you the roles and permissions to safely manage your entire marketing team, other employees, freelancers, and agencies.

‎You can have approvers for different stages in your content workflow and generally customize your process to work exactly the way you want, safely. No unauthorized publishes. No broken sites.

Letterdrop is also set to alert relevant contributors via Slack and Email that it's their turn to contribute, so tracing responsibility is easy.

6. It's Important For Your Writers to Collaborate On-Page

As of right now, Webflow doesn't offer any collaborative features — there are no live cursors and no way to comment on one another's work in the CMS.

Cost: You'll need multiple copies of a post across Google Docs, Webflow, email, and Slack for communication. That's time wasted with confusion and delays.

Solution: Letterdrop Brings the Collaboration of Google Docs to Webflow

You can collaborate in Letterdrop as you can in Google Docs — live cursors, comments (with support for embedded Loom videos), and chat. There are also approvals and project management baked in. Also, it's synced with your Webflow site.

7. Webflow Can Help With SEO Basics, But Your Writers Need More

You hired an agency and built a beautiful site on Webflow. But what's the point if you don't drive traffic to it? You need to create pages to bring in visitors via Google. Webflow is fast, allows you to edit on-page SEO elements, supports 301 redirects and more, but doesn't have purpose-built SEO tooling. WordPress at least has plugins to support SEO in some way, but both require companion SEO tools if you're hoping to cover all your SEO bases.

Cost: SEO is a great long-term channel to drive website traffic and bring in leads. Unfortunately, it's complicated, and Webflow has no built-in tooling to make it easier. You'll need to piece together a bunch of third-party solutions and copy/paste between them. What's more is that many of the solutions on the market promote black hat practices that will hurt your site in the long run, so you don't know who to trust.

Solution: Letterdrop Takes Care of Content SEO

Letterdrop's SEO tooling has all the capabilities you need for Content SEO. This includes:

• Structural optimization of your drafts: it checks if you break any of the 65 different best practices
• Topical optimization of your drafts: it compares your page to the top pages ranking on Google, lets you auto-add sections that have been covered, and shows you opportunities to add net new information for information gain
• EEAT: it uses AI to determine if you're following Search Rater Guidelines
• Automatic internal link building
• Ongoing alerts for pages that need to be refreshed
• Keyword research to lookup search volume and keyword difficulty

8. Your Writers Could Use Some AI Assistance to Speed Things Up

Problem: AI-assisted writing has become the norm. If you want technologies like ChatGPT to help speed up your writing process in Webflow, you'll have to copy-paste from elsewhere.

Cost: Buying yet another tool for your content marketing stack.

Solution: Letterdrop has Integrated AI to Speed Things Up

Letterdrop has pre-trained prompts integrated into its CMS. AI can help you edit, autocomplete, generate outlines and sections in record time while following the best B2B writing practices. Take a look:

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9. Your Writers Could Use A Revision History Feature

Problem: Unforunately, Webflow has no real-time revision history. You need to save versions to third-party apps like Google Docs manually. Sometimes you lose access to those since a freelancer or agency owned them.

If you want to go to an old version of a post, you need to essentially clone the entire site and revert to a backup.

Cost: Restoring an old version of a post changes the ID of every CMS item, which can potentially break your site and take up to an hour to do.

Solution: Effortlessly Edit History and Save Versions in Letterdrop

It's often necessary to revert to previous versions of a content piece to stay on track or see who made edits. As you type, your work is automatically saved, and you can access any previous version of your draft using a timestamp.

‎This feature makes it easy to save versions and compare the differences between edits.

10. Your Writers Need a Way to Publish to Socials Directly From Webflow

Problem: You can schedule posts in Webflow, but what about your associated socials? Nope.

Cost: Once you've published, you need to ask your social media team to send out associated social media posts. This adds time to your already slowed production process. Posts often never get distributed as a result.

Solution: Letterdrop Automates Your Distribution

Letterdrop let you schedule socials at the same time that you're prepping your blog for publication. It also offers a helpful content calendar to plan out your posts and see when you have content gaps on your social media channels.

‎Letterdrop: Bringing Webflow Publishing To Parity With WordPress And Beyond

Despite its great web-building features, publishing on Webflow is not great. Your writers may spend ages on all the steps and delay your production process. Frustration aside, there's plenty of room to make mistakes on your website.

Letterdrop streamlines the process of Webflow blog publishing. Even writers with no technical knowledge can easily publish error-free content directly to your site. Letterdrop's intuitive interface ensures that your writers can focus on creating great content without worrying about the technical stuff. Check out the Letterdrop Webflow integration or visit the Webflow Marketplace to get started.