How Webflow Hosting Works: Site Plans vs Workspace Plans

Webflow hosting is bundled into every Site plan rather than sold separately, and even the free Starter plan includes SSL, a global CDN, and a working webflow.io address before you connect a domain or pay anything. What changes as you move up the Site plans is bandwidth and a handful of gated features like custom code and password protection; what changes on a paid Workspace plan is staging capacity, collaboration tools, and — if you want it — the ability to export your code and host it somewhere else entirely. Here's how the pieces fit together, sourced from Webflow's own help center and pricing page, checked September 2026.

What does Webflow's hosting actually include?

Webflow's help center describes it as a managed service: "Webflow provides a completely managed solution for site hosting, so you don't have to worry about scalability, site downtime, or applying security patches" (Webflow Help Center, "Webflow hosting overview", checked September 2026). Two things come with every Site plan, including the free one:

• A CDN. The same page states plainly: "Webflow sites are securely stored and delivered by Cloudflare." Webflow's separate hosting feature page adds that the network aims to "reach 95% of the world in less than 50 milliseconds" — a marketing claim from webflow.com/feature/hosting, not a guarantee for any specific site.
• SSL/TLS. "Webflow hosting includes SSL certificate provisioning. SSL provides end-to-end security and encryption between Webflow servers, your sites, and your site visitors" (Webflow hosting overview, same source). Webflow's dedicated SSL hosting article lists "Instant-on with no setup required" among its stated benefits, and adds: "You don't need to generate a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) — Webflow handles this for you." Certificates auto-renew as long as your DNS keeps pointing at Webflow; Webflow notes it "doesn't support named certificates," and only Enterprise customers can upload a certificate purchased from another provider.

Webflow's feature page for hosting also states that "Global DDoS & Bot protection comes free," attributing this to its CDN provider, and that automatic form spam filtering and image format conversion (to WebP and AVIF) are included on every plan (Webflow, "Website Hosting", checked September 2026). Bandwidth is the one hosting-adjacent number that's gated by Site plan: Webflow's pricing page lists 1 GB on Starter, 10 GB on Basic, and a selectable range from 50 GB up to 2.5 TB on Premium (Webflow Pricing, checked September 2026).

What's the difference between a Site plan and a Workspace plan?

This is the split that trips people up, because both have "plan" in the name and both cost money separately. Webflow's own help center lists these as two separate facts: "A paid Site plan applies to an individual website, unlocking the ability to publish to a custom domain. It also unlocks basic site capabilities like additional pages, advanced SEO controls, additional CMS items, custom code, etc." A Workspace plan does a different job — upgrading it is what gives you access to enhanced staging capabilities and advanced collaboration features, rather than anything that changes what a single published site can do (Webflow Help Center, "Webflow Workspace and Site plans overview", checked September 2026).

The same article's FAQ restates it just as plainly: "Site plans, on the other hand, work at the individual site level. Site plans allow you to publish your site to a custom domain and unlock additional site-specific features." A Workspace plan is the account-level layer — staging, seats, collaboration; a Site plan is what a single published website is allowed to do. Our Webflow pricing guide breaks out both ladders, plus the separate Ecommerce plans, in full.

You can mix these freely. Webflow's help center is explicit that you don't need to upgrade Workspace just to host on a domain: "If you intend to publish all your sites to a custom domain (e.g., yourdomain.com), you will need to purchase Site plans for those sites" — a free Starter Workspace is enough for that. You only need a paid Workspace plan if you want more than two free webflow.io sites, want team collaboration and enhanced staging, or want to export code (covered below).

What happens on the free Starter hosting, before I connect a domain?

Every new site starts on a webflow.io staging subdomain. Webflow's help center describes its purpose directly: "There are 2 types of domains you can publish your whole site to: your Webflow staging subdomain (e.g., yoursite.webflow.io) and custom domains (e.g., yourdomain.com). The Webflow staging subdomain is useful to test custom code and get approval on your site's design before pushing your site live to your custom domain" (Webflow Help Center, "Webflow staging subdomain", checked September 2026). You control it under Site settings > Publishing tab > Staging, and you can publish to it alone by unchecking your custom domain in the Publish panel — useful for reviewing a change before it goes live to visitors. You can also disable search-engine indexing of the staging subdomain if you don't want it to show up in results while you're using it as a working preview.

The free Starter Site plan itself is genuinely usable, not a locked trial — our guide to Webflow's free plan covers its exact page, bandwidth, and CMS limits, and what carries a "Made in Webflow" badge until you upgrade. Custom staging domains and private staging (requiring authentication to view work-in-progress) are Enterprise-only features, per the same staging-subdomain article.

Can I host a Webflow site somewhere else?

Yes, but only in a specific, code-only sense, and only on a paid Workspace plan. Webflow's pricing-page FAQ answers this directly: "You can export your site and host it anywhere you like with any of our paid Workspace plans, no attribution required. Note: Dynamic content must be exported on a collection-by-collection basis and forms will stop working" (Webflow Pricing FAQ, checked September 2026).

Its dedicated export article spells out what that leaves behind: "CMS, User Accounts, Ecommerce content (databases), code components and functionality, and localized pages, elements, and content aren't included in exported code." The same article adds two more exclusions separately: "Any password protected pages on your site will no longer be protected after code export," and "site search and forms (including file upload and reCAPTCHA) will not work on exported sites in order to comply with GDPR" (Webflow Help Center, "How do I export my Webflow site code?", checked September 2026). CMS Collections, Ecommerce Collections, and User Accounts can be pulled out separately as CSV, but that's data, not a working system — you'd rebuild the CMS-driven pages, forms, and any password gate against a different host. Our Webflow code export guide walks through the full export-and-rehost process step by step, including what to do about each excluded piece.

The practical read: Webflow's own hosting (the CDN, SSL, and managed infrastructure covered above) never travels with an export. What travels is static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is only "Webflow hosting" in the sense that Webflow generated the files — the hosting itself is whatever server you put them on afterward.

What should I check before committing to Webflow's hosting?

• Bandwidth on your actual plan. 1 GB on Starter is tight for anything beyond a small image set; Basic's 10 GB and Premium's selectable tiers up to 2.5 TB are the real headroom.
• Whether you need a custom domain now or later. A domain requires a paid Site plan; the webflow.io staging address works without one.
• Whether "hosting elsewhere" actually fits your site. If your site relies on the CMS, forms, site search, or password protection, code export won't carry those over — you'd be rebuilding those parts against a new backend, not just moving files.
• Whether you need Workspace-level staging or Site-level hosting, since it's easy to buy the wrong one — a Site plan doesn't get you more staging sites, and a Workspace plan alone doesn't publish anything to a custom domain.

Where does Figment fit in?

Not directly — Figment's hosting model is simpler by design, because it isn't managing a CMS, forms backend, or Ecommerce database in the first place. Figment publishes a website from a Figma design through its Figma plugin, with free sites living on figment.so and a badge, and Pro adding custom domains along with HTML/CSS export to hand off or self-host (figment.so/pricing, checked September 2026). That export is a closer comparison to Webflow's own code export than to Webflow's managed hosting itself — if what you actually need is Webflow's CMS, staging workflow, or ecommerce plans, that's a reason to stay on Webflow rather than move a design-only site.

Bottom line: Webflow hosting isn't a separate purchase — it's bundled into every Site plan, including the free one, and includes SSL and a Cloudflare CDN by default. A Site plan controls what one published site can do (pages, bandwidth, custom domain); a Workspace plan controls staging and collaboration across your account, and is also the one that unlocks code export if you ever want to host the static files elsewhere. Check Webflow's pricing page for the current bandwidth and plan numbers before you commit either purchase.