A Webflow site can look finished and still be slow. I was asked to look at one like that: a B2B company site, built from a theme, that looked professional and took 7.58 seconds to load on average.
It didn’t need a redesign. Two weeks of clean-up took its worst page from 52% to 97%, and the visitors never saw a thing change.
What was underneath
7.58 s
average load time
21.3 MB
the team page alone
1,321
unused CSS classes
The average page weighed 4.73 MB. The project behind it had grown fast and nobody had tidied up: 19 unused animations, breakpoints nobody needed, hidden elements still full of lorem ipsum, and a broken heading structure on almost every page.
None of this shows in a quick look at the site. All of it costs something: in loading time, in how search engines read the pages, and in how hard the site is to change later.
Measure first
I didn’t start by fixing things. I audited 13 key pages with GTmetrix and PageSpeed, so every number had two sources, and crawled the site with Screaming Frog. Then I sorted what I found into performance, structure, SEO, accessibility and maintenance.
That made it clear the platform wasn’t the problem. Webflow can produce fast, well-structured sites. This one had collected weight over time.
| What I found | What it cost | What I did |
|---|---|---|
| 1,321 unused classes, 19 unused animations | A heavier stylesheet and a harder project to edit | Removed them |
| Hidden elements with template content | Weight nobody sees | Deleted them |
| Navigation and footer duplicated on pages | Every change made several times | Turned into components |
| Images at full size, without dimensions | Slow pages that jump while loading | Compressed, resized, dimensions set |
| Broken heading structure, missing metadata | Pages search engines read badly | Fixed on every page |
| Broken hreflang tags, inconsistent URLs | The wrong version in the wrong market | Corrected |
Removing what visitors never see
The first pass was the part nobody notices. I removed the unused classes, animations and breakpoints, deleted the hidden placeholder elements, and turned the duplicated navigation and footers into proper components.
The design didn’t change. The project just got a lot smaller.
Fixing what they do see
Then the pages themselves. Images were compressed, resized and given their dimensions, so the browser knows how much space to keep before they load. Alt text went in where it was missing.
Every page got a proper heading structure, a meta description and an Open Graph image. Inconsistent URLs were fixed, and so were the broken hreflang tags.
I worked page by page: audit, fix, test again.
01
Audit
Measure the page in two tools and list what weighs.
02
Fix
Remove, compress and restructure, without touching the design.
03
Test again
Measure the same page. Every change gets a number.
Next page: back to 01
Two weeks later
Before
- 7.58 s average load time
- 4.73 MB average page, 21.3 MB on the team page
- 1,321 unused classes, 19 unused animations
- Hidden template content, broken headings
After
- Worst page from 52% to 97%
- Two pages at 100%
- Structure scores up 5 to 10 points
- The same design, a much lighter project
The site looked exactly the same. It was lighter, cleaner and a lot easier to maintain.
What to check on your own site
You don’t need an audit to see most of this. A few things to look at in your own Webflow project:
- Unused classes. The Style Manager has a clean-up option that shows how many there are.
- Interactions nobody uses any more.
- Images on your heaviest page: their file size, and whether they’re much larger than they’re shown.
- Hidden elements, especially leftover template content.
- Headings: one H1 per page, then in order.
- More than the home page. Test the pages people actually land on.
If that list gets long, it’s worth having someone look at the whole site. That’s what the review is for.
Fix, improve or migrate
Slow, hard to edit, or on the wrong platform.