From Webflow to Next.js, Sanity and Vercel: what we learned rebuilding our own site

We've used Webflow for years, and we've liked it. But when it was time to rebuild our own site, we landed somewhere completely different: Next.js, Sanity and Vercel. Not because Webflow suddenly got bad, but because we wanted to own the stack ourselves — and because it gives us something real to show clients who are wondering about the same move.

Why we even considered switching

Webflow is a solid tool, especially for getting something live fast. But the more we built, the more we felt the edges of the platform: pricing that scales oddly for an agency running many projects at once, a CMS layer that caps how complex your content structure can get, and a hosting/CDN layer we have zero control over. None of that is unique to Webflow — it's simply the cost of someone else owning the platform. For our own site, meant to last and act as a real showcase, we wanted to own the whole chain instead.

The technical side: Git, Sanity and Vercel in practice

The biggest everyday difference is version control. Webflow's Site History is fine for jumping back to an earlier save, but it doesn't tell you why something changed. With Git we get real commit history, branches, and a full log of what happened and why — the difference between "go back to yesterday" and "understand exactly what changed and for what reason".

Sanity Studio has surprised us the most. Content we edit there — text, images, entire pages — shows up on the live site within seconds, with no build or publish step in between. It feels almost like Webflow's own editor, just without being locked to Webflow's editor specifically.

Vercel handles the rest: every push to Git triggers a fresh build automatically, every branch gets its own preview URL we can test and share before anything goes live, and if something breaks we can roll back to a previous deploy in seconds. It's a fundamentally different kind of safety net than editing directly on a live site.

One thing Webflow never gave us: free-form content blocks

Along the way we built something our project pages never had before, not in Webflow and not in the first version of this new site either: free-form content blocks. Instead of fixed fields — one hero image, one description, one results paragraph, in whatever order the template dictates — each project page can now be assembled from a list of blocks: text, image, text and image side by side, an image gallery, or a big pull-quote callout. You add, remove, and drag them into exactly the order the project actually needs, a bit like building with Notion blocks. It's something neither Webflow's CMS fields nor our previous stack gave us out of the box.

We migrated all 55 of our projects — both languages, 110 documents — to the new system in a single afternoon, without losing a single image or paragraph along the way. And because it's additive rather than a rewrite, we could test it on one project first and roll the rest out once we trusted it.

The results, in numbers

We ran PageSpeed Insights against both versions of the site to see if it actually mattered, not just felt better. On mobile, performance went from 56 to 100. SEO went from 69 to 100. Accessibility was already decent on Webflow, but we kept pushing on contrast and structured data (schema.org/JSON-LD) on the new build too.

Much of the gain came from things we simply have more control over now: we converted our fonts to WOFF2 and shaved off more than 500 KB, images now get served in the right format and size automatically via next/image, and we added real security headers (Content-Security-Policy and friends) that Webflow's hosting never let us touch ourselves.

What does this mean if you're weighing the same move?

Webflow is still a solid choice for a lot of people — especially if the goal is getting live fast without developer resources. But if you want to own your code, have full control over performance and security, and not be tied to one platform's pricing and limits over time, the Next.js/Sanity/Vercel combination is worth a serious look. It asks more of you up front, but you get something that scales with you instead of against you.

Happy to help you figure out whether your own site (or a client's) is ready for the same jump — whether it ends with Webflow, this stack, or something else entirely.

And this isn't just a plan on paper anymore: right now, as you're reading this, sommersethdesign.no is actually running on this stack. DNS has switched over, Sanity is the live CMS, and Vercel builds and deploys every change we make — including this very article.