WordPress runs 39.5% of all websites and Webflow runs 0.8%, according to W3Techs on 28 October 2026, a ratio of roughly 49 to 1. Yet in Chrome's real-user data for September 2026, 71.3% of Webflow sites passed all three Core Web Vitals on mobile against 48.3% of WordPress sites. Those two numbers frame every comparison below: one platform has scale and choice, the other has fewer moving parts.
This page sets the two side by side on market share, speed, security incidents and cost, using W3Techs, the HTTP Archive, Patchstack, the US National Vulnerability Database, Webflow's own status log and published price lists. We build marketing sites in Webflow, so read the comparison knowing that bias; we have tried to let the primary data speak, including where it does not favour Webflow.
Market share: WordPress is the default, Webflow is overrepresented at the top
W3Techs detects the CMS on the top 10 million sites by traffic. WordPress dominates every tier, but its share is lower among busy sites than across the whole web, while Webflow's share more than doubles as you move up the rankings.
| Rank tier | WordPress | Webflow | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| All sites | 58.3% | 1.2% | About 49 to 1 |
| Top 1,000,000 | 48.1% | 1.5% | About 32 to 1 |
| Top 100,000 | 50.4% | 1.9% | About 27 to 1 |
| Top 10,000 | 50.6% | 2.3% | About 22 to 1 |
| Top 1,000 | 50.2% | 2.7% | About 19 to 1 |
Source: W3Techs, WordPress and Webflow breakdowns by ranking, 28 October 2026
The ratio column is the useful one for a buyer. Across the web, a Webflow site is a rarity. Among the thousand busiest sites, it is one Webflow site for every 19 on WordPress, which says the platform has found its place with funded companies and brands rather than with small blogs.
The long-run trend tells a second story. Both platforms grew for years and both have slipped in 2026.
| Date | WordPress | Webflow | No detectable CMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| January 2020 | 35.4% | 0.1% | 43.1% |
| January 2022 | 43.2% | 0.4% | 33.8% |
| January 2024 | 43.1% | 0.7% | 31.4% |
| January 2026 | 43.0% | 0.9% | 28.6% |
| 28 October 2026 | 39.5% | 0.8% | 32.1% |
Source: W3Techs, historical yearly trends in the usage of content management systems, 28 October 2026
The rise in "no detectable CMS" from 28.6% to 32.1% in ten months is larger than either platform's fall. Part of that is custom code and framework sites; part may be detection. Either way, WordPress losing 3.5 points of the whole web in one year is the largest move in the table. Within the narrower known-CMS measure, Webflow has held 1.2% all year. Our Webflow statistics page covers Webflow's own growth curve, funding and revenue estimates in more detail, and the CMS migration statistics page covers where WordPress sites are going.
Measured by real traffic. The HTTP Archive counts origins with enough Chrome visits to appear in the Chrome UX Report. In September 2026 it measured 2,714,694 WordPress origins and 60,687 Webflow origins on mobile, a ratio of about 45 to 1. A year earlier the counts were 3,163,026 and 64,890: a fall of 14.2% for WordPress and 6.5% for Webflow. Some of that is change in how many sites clear Chrome's traffic threshold, so treat it as direction, not a precise count of sites lost.
Speed: Webflow leads overall, the gap closes on busy sites
The Core Web Vitals Technology Report groups Chrome's field data by the technology each origin runs. An origin passes when at least 75% of its page loads are good on Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and Interaction to Next Paint.
| Metric | WordPress mobile | Webflow mobile | WordPress desktop | Webflow desktop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All three passed | 48.3% | 71.3% | 53.7% | 82.6% |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 55.4% | 78.6% | 69.3% | 94.2% |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | 87.3% | 93.6% | 74.7% | 87.5% |
| Interaction to Next Paint | 90.3% | 88.0% | 99.0% | 99.2% |
| Time to First Byte | 22.9% | 73.1% | 31.4% | 90.5% |
| Top 1M origins, all three passed | 50.1% | 49.8% | 55.8% | 72.3% |
Source: HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report, September 2026 dataset, read through the report API on 28 October 2026
Three readings matter. First, most of Webflow's lead comes from server response and loading: 73.1% of Webflow origins have a good Time to First Byte on mobile against 22.9% of WordPress origins, which is what a single managed hosting stack with a CDN produces compared with WordPress hosting of every quality. Second, WordPress is slightly ahead on interactivity, 90.3% against 88.0% on mobile. Third, among the top 1 million origins the mobile pass rates are level, and Webflow trails on interactivity at 68.5% against 79.4%. Busy Webflow sites tend to carry more scripts and animation, and that costs them.
Both platforms improved over the year. A year earlier, in September 2025, the mobile pass rates were 64.0% for Webflow and 45.0% for WordPress. The fuller platform ranking sits in our Core Web Vitals statistics post.
Lab scores and page weight. Lighthouse lab tests on the HTTP Archive crawl point the same way on performance and the other way on weight.
| Measure | WordPress | Webflow |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthouse performance score | 43 | 62.5 |
| Lighthouse SEO score | 92 | 96 |
| Lighthouse accessibility score | 88 | 90 |
| Lighthouse best practices score | 79 | 77 |
| Median total page weight | 2.72 MB | 3.48 MB |
| Median JavaScript | 0.68 MB | 0.93 MB |
| Median images | 1.04 MB | 0.81 MB |
Source: HTTP Archive Technology Report, Lighthouse and page weight series, September 2026 dataset, decimal megabytes
The median Webflow home page is heavier than the median WordPress home page, by about 0.76 MB, and carries about 0.25 MB more JavaScript. It still scores higher and passes more often in the field, which points again at hosting and caching rather than page size. For a team choosing a platform, the practical rule is that Webflow sites need a script budget, and WordPress sites need a hosting budget.
Security incidents: two different kinds of risk
WordPress and Webflow fail in different ways. WordPress risk sits in the plugins and themes a site owner installs and must update. Webflow risk sits with one vendor running every site on shared infrastructure.
| Measure | WordPress | Webflow |
|---|---|---|
| New vulnerabilities published in 2025 | 11,334, up 42% on 2024 | No CVE against the hosted platform in the NVD |
| Where they sit | 91% plugins, 9% themes, 6 in core | Not applicable, no plugin layer |
| High-severity share | 1,966, or 17% | Not published |
| No fix available at disclosure | 46% | Not published |
| Status incidents logged, October 2025 to September 2026 | No central status page | 39, of which 14 named hosted sites |
| Certifications listed by the vendor | Depends on host | SOC 2, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, PCI-DSS |
Sources: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026; NVD keyword search, 28 October 2026; Webflow status page incident feed and security page, 28 October 2026
WordPress. Patchstack, which sells WordPress security tooling, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the ecosystem in 2025. Core produced 6, all low priority. Plugins produced 91%. For 46% of them, the developer had not shipped a fix when the vulnerability became public. Search Engine Journal's report on the study adds that the weighted median time to first exploitation of heavily targeted flaws was five hours, and that in a large-scale test of popular hosting companies reported in the study, only 26% of attacks were blocked at the host. A WordPress site is as safe as its least maintained plugin.
Webflow. A keyword search of the US National Vulnerability Database for "Webflow" returns five records on 28 October 2026. None is a flaw in Webflow's hosted platform: one is a WordPress plugin called Webflow Pages, the others belong to unrelated products that share the name or integrate with Webflow. That is not proof of no flaws. Hosted software is patched on the server and often never receives a CVE, so the honest reading is that a Webflow customer has nothing to patch, not that nothing is ever wrong.
The risk Webflow customers do carry is shared outage. We counted Webflow's public status feed: 39 incidents posted between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026, rated 24 minor, 6 major, 3 critical and 6 with no impact rating. Fourteen named hosted sites or downtime, four of them major. The longest, on 14 April 2026, ran from 14:15 UTC to 06:08 UTC the next day for "intermittent 5xx errors on some hosted sites". Seven incidents touched forms, and four of those were about form notification emails not arriving, including two of the three rated critical. When a WordPress host goes down, its own customers go down; when Webflow has a bad hour, every affected Webflow site has it together.
Cost: one price list against an itemised stack
Webflow publishes its prices. WordPress software is free, and the cost moves to hosting, premium plugins and maintenance, each from a different vendor.
| Line item | WordPress example | Webflow |
|---|---|---|
| Software | Free, open source | Included in site plan |
| Hosting, CMS site | Kinsta Single 35k: $30 a month billed yearly, $35 monthly | Premium site plan: $25 a month billed yearly |
| Hosting, no CMS | Same as above | Basic: $15 a month billed yearly |
| Custom fields for structured content | ACF PRO Personal: $49 a year, 1 site | Included in Premium |
| Team or build seats | Usually none | Workspace Core $19, Growth $49 a month billed yearly |
| Maintenance and updates | WP Buffs care plans: $89 to $359 a month | Platform updates included |
| Large teams | Host enterprise plans, Kinsta from $500 a month | Team plan: $2,500 a month, annual contract |
Sources: Kinsta, Webflow, Advanced Custom Fields and WP Buffs pricing pages, read 28 October 2026
Put the cheapest rows together and the platforms look close: Kinsta plus ACF PRO is about $410 a year, and Webflow Premium plus a Core Workspace is about $530. The difference appears in the maintenance line. A WordPress site needs someone to update plugins and respond when a vulnerability lands, either in-house or on a care plan; at WP Buffs' lowest tier that is $1,068 a year. Webflow's equivalent work is absorbed by the vendor. Webflow costs more when a team needs governance features: the Team plan's $2,500 a month is a different budget altogether, and WordPress has no single equivalent price.
Ecosystem size. The other side of the cost line is choice. The WordPress.org directory API listed 73,027 free plugins and 8,792 free themes on 28 October 2026, and W3Techs detects Elementor on 31.5% of WordPress sites. No hosted builder comes close to that breadth. Our WordPress vs Webflow comparison for B2B marketing sites works through which of those extensions a marketing site actually needs.
What this means for choosing or switching platforms
The numbers support a narrow conclusion. If your site is a marketing site edited by a marketing team, Webflow's defaults give you better odds on speed and remove the patching work that produces most WordPress incidents, at a price close to managed WordPress hosting. If you need deep integrations, self-hosting, membership or commerce logic, or an editorial operation at large scale, WordPress's ecosystem and share are hard to argue with, provided someone owns maintenance. Among the busiest sites, speed is a draw, so the deciding factors there are the team and the content model. We build marketing sites in Webflow and applications in Next.js, and we would rather tell a client to stay on a well-run WordPress site than migrate for a two-point gain. If you are moving, our WordPress to Webflow migration checklist lists what to carry over. Our marketing websites service page explains how we scope a build or migration.
