Figma to Webflow Mistakes to Avoid for Flawless Conversion
Figma is the best-in-class cloud-based design and prototyping tool that has become popular recently and helps users bring beautiful designs to life.
You have to build designs and spend hours perfecting them. But, it’s a static design and not functional. To make it functional for users, development is important,
That’s when Webflow comes to the rescue. It is a web design and development platform that helps users design, build, and launch professional, personalized websites without having to write code.
Yes, you heard it right. All of it seems like a fairytale. But, converting Figma designs to functional websites with Webflow is not that easy. And, throughout the Figma to Webflow conversion, there are some common mistakes that designers and developers face.
So, take this blog as your guide in which we will be addressing the common mistakes during conversion and how to overcome them. Let’s get started.
Figma to Webflow Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
1. Neglecting Proper Layer Organization
Many designers or developers get started with the Figma to web flow without properly layering or organizing the Figma designs. Disorganized layers make it difficult to navigate the design, leading to misplaced elements, inconsistent layouts, confusing Webflow implementation, and a longer development process.
Solution: To curate structured layer organization of Figma files, here are some tips:
- Use Descriptive Naming Conventions with clear label frames, sections, and components.
- Keep related elements together in groups or frames to maintain structure and ease of access.
- Arrange layers in Figma based on how they will be structured in Webflow.
- Avoid deeply nested groups, as they can complicate the conversion.
2. Overlooking Responsive Design Principle
Responsive designs are the new normal yet many designers overlook the responsive design principles. Most of the time, designers create static layouts that look perfect on desktops but on other devices such as mobile, tablets, watches, etc. This results in broken layouts, misaligned elements, and overall poor user experience.
Solution: Make sure to ensure responsiveness with the following tips:
- Set up flexible layouts with padding, margins, and alignment rules for seamless adaptability with different devices.
- Create different variations for mobile phones, desktops, tablets, etc to visualize responsiveness before moving to Webflow.
- Utilize relative units in web flow such as percentages, viewport width/height, and em instead of fixed pixels to create scalable elements.
- Use Webflow’s responsive preview to fine-tune layouts across different screen sizes.
3. Ignoring Web Flow’s Structural Elements
Webflow provides essential structural elements like Sections, Containers, Div Blocks, and Grid that help users create clean, responsive, and scalable designs. But, still, many designers overlook these structural webflow elements and instead rely on unnecessary Div Blocks, excessive manual styling, or fixed positioning to arrange content which leads to inefficient, unscalable, and hard-to-maintain designs.
Solution: Here’s how designers can make the most out of Webflow’s structural elements:
- Use sections for large page divisions (e.g., hero, about, footer).
- Utilize containers to control the content width, ensuring consistency across screen sizes.
- Use Div blocks to group and align elements inside sections with end-to-end customization.
- Optimize with Grid and Flexbox for dynamic alignment to improve responsiveness.
4. Failing to Optimize Assets
Many designers fail to optimize the images and assets while converting static Figma designs to fully functional web flow websites. This usually includes large image files, incorrect formats, and improper scaling, which can slow down page load times while negatively impacting performance, customer experience, and SEO of your website.
Solution: Here are some tips to optimize your Figma assets:
- Use proper image formats to ensure better quality images and faster loading times.
- Compress images using tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh to reduce file sizes without losing quality.
- Set correct dimensions instead of uploading oversized files and scaling them in Webflow.
- Enable Lazy Loading in webflow to improve page speed and performance.
5. Mismanaging Typography and Styles
Another common mistake that designers make while designing which impacts the end webflow website and hinders the customer experience is mismanaging the typography and styles. If fonts, colors, and text sizes are not properly managed in Figma, it can lead to a disorganized Webflow project with redundant styles and inconsistent branding.
Solution: Curate a visual hierarchy right from the start for your brand and follow it throughout. Keep reading to know how you can follow the same:
- Set up consistent font sizes, line heights, and color styles for headings, body text, and buttons.
- Set Typography, Colors, and Button Styles at the project level to maintain consistency across all pages.
- Avoid excessive font weights and styles to improve page load speed and maintain a clean design.
- Instead of fixed pixel sizes, use scalable units like REM or EM for better responsiveness.
6. Overcomplicating Interactions and Animations
No matter how much the digital world is evolving, functionality > aesthetics. So, while chasing visual appeal, designers tend to overcomplicate the design with interactions and animations. These can lead to slow loading speed, poor performance, lesser functionality, make debugging difficult and impact the overall customer experience.
Solutions: Read on to learn about curating a highly functional web flow website with fewer interactions and animations while still keeping up with the visual appeal:
- Utilize simple transitions such as fade-ins, hover effects, smooth scroll animations, etc.
- Avoid animations on large elements that could affect page speed.
- Test across different devices to ensure animations work smoothly on all the devices and user experience remains intact.
- Use animations to enhance, not distract—like guiding user attention or improving navigation clarity.
7. Not Utilizing Web Flow’s CMS Features
Webflow is a popular website builder with a range of features, yet many designers and companies fail to leverage Webflow’s CMS (Content Management System). Businesses manually create and update content instead of leveraging Webflow’s dynamic CMS features – which can result in a static and inefficient website that is difficult to update and scale.
Solution: To make the most out of web flow’s best-in-class CMS features, here are some tips that you should follow:
- Set up collections for blogs, case studies, products, or any content that needs regular updating.
- Use collection lists to dynamically display content across different pages without manual recreation.
- Utilize collection pages to design a single template that automatically populates with dynamic content for each CMS entry.
- Simplify client updates in Webflow’s Editor without touching the design or structure.
8. Skipping Prototype Testing
Prototyping is something that many designers and businesses tend to ignore which is among the biggest mistakes when converting Figma designs to Webflow. Designers often assume that if the design looks good in Figma, it will function perfectly in Webflow. But, that is not true. And, without proper testing, issues like broken layouts, poor navigation, and unresponsive elements can go unnoticed, leading to costly revisions later.
Solution: So, make sure to test the prototypes before development, and here are some of the tips to do it:
- Use Figma’s interactive prototyping to test hover states, button clicks, and navigation flow to ensure a smooth user experience.
- Share the prototype with stakeholders, clients, or testers to gather feedback and catch usability issues to fix them before it becomes a big issue.
- Test designs on different screen sizes in Figma to test responsiveness before Figma to Webflow conversion.
- Walk through the prototype as a user to ensure intuitive interactions and logical content flow.
To Wrap Up!
Well, here’s the wrap on the common figma to Webflow mistakes to avoid
for seamless conversion and ensure a feature-rich, performance-optimized, functional, and visually appealing website.
So, make sure to make the most of Figma and Webflow features and by paying attention to these details and implementing the right conversion strategies, you can ensure a smooth Figma to Webflow conversion that not only looks great but also performs efficiently across all devices.
If you are looking for a professional company that can help you with seamless figma to webflow without any mistakes – then Pixel Perfect HTML has got you covered. We have a team of professional designers and developers who can help you convert your Figma designs to a fully functional webflow website.
Let’s get started. Contact us today.