As expected, Webflow Conf 2024 delivered some exciting news on the features being released this year, with a few cutting-edge developments like the newly integrated Optimize feature.
However to the frustration of many attendees, the biggest new features like Optimize & Analyze aren't included in the base Webflow platform, even in a limited free-tier or trial-plan fashion. They are only available as paid add-ons.
Moreover, those prices are much higher that we're used to seeing in Webflow's self-serve sub-Enterprise plans, and that price must be paid before you can even examine the feature on your site.
Here's the pricing released in Oct 2024;
The subsequent sticker shock led to a number of frustrated posts following the conference on Reddit, Facebook, and in Webflow's forums, which can be summed up by this forum question;
"How do I justify this to a client, especially when we’re talking about small businesses?"
So before I get into what Optimize can do for your clients, let's talk about that elephant in the room... the pricing.
Here's my personal take on this.
Rethinking SaaS costs
Let's start here.
Many freelancers make the mistake of evaluating costs in a personal-finances context, e.g. "would I pay / could I afford $X". I know this, because I did it for at least a decade, even when evaluating solutions on behalf of highly successful business clients.
I saw it as part of my responsibility as a tech adviser to recommend services that I saw as low-cost or "affordable."
But successful businesses don't think that way.
Even to a small business, a $379/mo Optimize cost is a couple of product sales, or 15 mins of a doctor's work, or a single premium car wash, or one day of AirBnB rental.
Especially once a business has employees, they're paying $40k to $80k per average employee. The website is an employee too... and it has a very important job- sales and information.
If the website does its job very well, It's exceptionally worth it.
I made that classic error in judgement for too long, so if you're making it too, let's re-calibrate that thinking...
To a business, a cost is not a loss. A cost is an investment, and like any investment, it needs a return to justify it.
When you look at costs the way your clients do, the question "how much does Optimize cost" is meaningless until you also ask the question "how much revenue can Optimize generate?"
That Return on Investment ( ROI ) is the only thing that matters, and in fact it's the whole point of Webflow Optimize- to maximize the ROI of your Webflow site as sales and lead-generating machine.
In the end, the equation is simple.
If your website is generating enough business that a marginal increase in performance would easily cover the costs of Optimize, then it's worth it.
How to Evaluate This
This is the tricky bit.
By definition, that means your website has to be turning some pretty decent numbers. If you think you can get a 10% initial increase in conversions, then Optimize makes sense to explore as long as the fees for Optimize ( and hours spent using it ). are well under the profits generated by that 10% revenue growth.
Unfortunately, that's going to be different site by site, industry by industry, market by market. Someday, I hope to have tangible guidelines for how to determine when investing in Optimize ( or any A/B testing platform ) makes sense for a Webflow-hosted site.
Webflow's Optimize v. Industry Pricing
The optimization industry knows its value to its target clients, and you can learn a lot by price-checking other solutions.
Here are some examples.
Optimizely doesn't publish pricing anymore. They've replaced it with a "request pricing" button. Google and other sites indicate-
You read that right. For Optimizely, that $36k USD is the starting point. And suddenly, Webflow's Optimize pricing looks impressively reasonable.
There are many other A/B platform choices, and Webflow's blog has an article on this. In general, the pricing is similar to Webflow Optimize, though some like VWO and Sumo have a free plan to trial the product before you swipe that credit card.
Why I'm Excited About Optimize
If you've done much A/B testing, you'll know why Optimize is exciting.
For starters, Webflow Optimize promises-
- Full designer integration for the variant setup, which means easy, clean setup and maintenance of your experiments.
- Efficient, server-side variant delivery, which means no more "white screen delays" and Lighthouse alerts on first contentful paint ( FCP ), LCP, cumulative layout shifts ( CLS ), and TBT.
Straightaway, those are awesome. To have that fully integrated directly into the Webflow platform is just epic.
But wait...
- Parallel multivariate testing. Demonstrated in the keynote, the ability to efficiently run multiple experiments at the same time is very appealing.
Usually I've had to run A/B tests one at a time and carefully log the results and timeframes to make good business decisions later.
Collecting that data took many hours of work, and months of waiting. Aside from the time cost, that meant slow decision-making, and an inability to respond to rapid changes. Even seasonal changes were a challenge.
- Localization support. Whoa. This is a messy challenge with other A/B testing platforms I've used, because experiment targeting is difficult on a localized site, and many platforms don't have built-in content translation support.
But here's the icing on the Optimize cake...
- Automatic audience segmentation, so that Optimize can target those experiments effectively by device type, country, language, origin ( CPC v. organic ), behavior, and much more.
- Dynamic ongoing optimization based on user behavior, to keep your site at the top of its game
It used to be that we'd design sites in terms of content, goals, campaign landing pages, and device breakpoints. That represented the entire universe of what we knew about our visitors, and the tools we could use to maximize our conversion rates.
That world has just changed, in a big way.
Now, on top of those facets, we can think about;
- Whether newer iPhone users might pay more for premium medical services.
- What CTA button colors will best attract people in Spain, v. those in Germany.
- What hero artwork will best engage users on our article and product pages, and maximize visit time and scrolling distance.
- What messaging makes the most sense for people who are coming from my newsletter, v. various Google Ads, v. Facebook, v. Facebook Ads...
And just like that... the Experience Platform makes sense.
Optimize Features & Limitations
I had some limited access during the beta, and got to explore the A/B test setup which I find quite impressive. It's very well designed and highly versatile.
However, I did not have access to the reports generated by Optimize, and without the resulting experiment data it was very difficult to determine the overall value that Optimize can bring to a project.
In general, I have a positive impression of its capabilities at launch.
However, there are currently a number of critical limitations that are specific to how the feature is enabled and how Webflow's billing works,
Let's explore.
#1 - No free-tier, and no trial
My job is to identify and evaluate solutions for my clients. My clients need to see what they're getting, and I need to know if it meets their requirements.
Currently with Optimize and Analyze, I can't.
- Clients can't try the feature on their site to see if Optimize makes sense for them
- Freelancers & agencies can't explore and learn the capabilities of these new features, and therefore can't sell them
Generally people won't buy things sight-unseen, and I've so many questions from clients...
- What exactly do Optimize's reports include?
- How long do experiments run? When Mary visits, how long is she connected to her experiment group?
- Are experiments site-wide, or page-specific? If one experiment is to put a "Buy now" button in my nav, will that same experiment be consistent site-wide?
- How are users tracked? Are cookies required, or is a server-side fingerprinting mechanism used? How accurate is it at unique identification?
- How well does Optimize work on GDPR-affected sites?
I can't answer any of these, and that's a major roadblock to rolling these features out on any client projects.
#2 - Annual site plans must purchase Optimize annually
Add-ons are tightly bound to your site plan which means that if you are on an annual site plan, you are currently forced to purchase the add-ons annually as well. That's a big gamble on something you can't test.
#3 - ECom is not yet supported by Optimize
That's a bit surprising as ECom clients are likely to be the group who would benefit most from Optimize, since it can directly translate to on-site sales.
You can't get clearer ROI than that.
But the bigger concern for me is that ECom has another limitation which is that once enabled, it cannot be disabled. That means that if your site is based on a template that had ECom enabled, you're likely excluded from Optimize for now.
#4 - Lack of budgeting & cost controls
This part, I'm still trying to wrap my head around.
Most A/B platforms I've explored use a billing metric of "monthly tracked users" or MTUs. In most cases MTUs represents a "budget" that you want to impose on your A/B experiments, i.e. how many people per month you want to experiment with.
Optimize bills on a different metric, monthly page visits.
But what will that cost look like?
- Currently there is nowhere in Webflow that you can use to gauge monthly page visits. Webflow analyze show sessions and unique users, not page visits- and the dashboard site usage feature shows only bandwidth use.
- Site traffic fluctuates, sometimes significantly... what happens if you have a spike? Are you suddenly billed for an overage? This is a big issue for my clients who experience significant fluctuations when they run a webinar or a special offer- and other clients who have highly seasonal traffic in the tourism and events industries.
How this hurts Webflow
All of these points are challenging for us clients, freelancers, and agencies but I think it's just as important to consider the impact of these gaps on Webflow's success.
Freelancers and Agency partners can't sell what they can't see
This is where I feel Webflow sales could do a much better job of equipping and training freelancers and agencies in the Webflow platform. The big problem is that we can't sell what we can't see. Currently there's no way to learn Optimize, test it, see results, give a client a tour of an Optimize-enabled site...
Annual plans "break" the saleability of add-ons
Webflow's best hosting customers are on Annual plans and Webflow benefits from the "lock-in" of that level of commitment.
However the way add-ons are priced, those "best" customers are punished when they want to trial a new add-on feature like Optimize, because they're forced to play a very large up-front bill before they can use it, and to have a huge annual bill on renewal.
Customers are beginning to distrust the Webflow platform because of the lack of billing controls
The recent change to bandwidth limits is a good example.
Some small clients would rather their site be shut down temporarily if it hits its bandwidth limits, than to be forcibly upgraded to a more expensive plan or to get a much more massive bill- but there are zero safeguards.
Optimize Sounds Awesome, but What if my Clients Can't Afford It?
When clients balk at the price, your best bet is to look for other platforms that offer the feature / price balance they're looking for. There are a lot of them.
If you know how to code, the options grow dramatically because you can build your own solutions based on Zaraz or Posthog which are cheap but developer-oriented.
Who is Webflow's Target Customer?
Businesses that invest in A/B testing are generally already industry leaders, who want to maximize the performance of their existing site. They've done the basic work... design investment, product investment, messaging, SEO, CPC... and they've reached the endgame-
"How can we squeeze this juicy orange just a little bit more?"
This is known as Conversion Rate Optimization ( CRO ) and it's where A/B testing comes into play. You're now at the point where improvements mean professionally SCUBA-diving through your data, and running "experiments" to determine what can work better.
At this level, business are generally successful, and willing to pay for that added advantage.
Optimize for All? Someday, maybe...
My personal preference would be that Optimize was available and accessible to all Webflow hosting plans... and that it were one of the central value propositions of choosing Webflow as a platform.
It has that potential.
Instead of charging simply to access it, pricing tiers would be organized around;
- MTUs, as explained above
- Report information and details
- Number of concurrent experiments
- AI features
- Types of experiments you can run
Imagine a world in which every website built on Webflow were able to use and learn Optimize fully- but that they were limited to one experiment at a time, and maybe only certain types of experiments like a simple text change.
It's simple, but I think this would go a long way towards selling a great feature.
