Feedback and testing

Comments

Webflow's comments feature enables seamless collaboration across your entire website experience team, allowing team members to provide feedback directly on page designs and content. Benefits of using comments include:

• ‍Improved collaboration: Keep all discussion and feedback within Webflow, reducing reliance on external communication tools.‍
• Contextual clarity: Place comments directly on specific elements and breakpoints to ensure feedback is clear and actionable. Review the automatically captured snapshot to see what reviewers saw in their own device or browser.
• ‍Efficient and actionable feedback cycles: Streamline the review process by addressing and resolving feedback in a timely manner.

Webflow Enterprise customers can leverage design approvals to reduce the risk of unapproved changes going live to the site by ensuring all changes merged into the site from a page branch have been approved by the right stakeholders. 

Junior designers can build independently on page branches, then request design approval from key stakeholders before merging their branch — allowing for more independent design time and more regulated main site edits.

The value of design approvals

• Enhanced quality control: Prevents unapproved changes from being published without review and approval, maintaining site integrity.​
• Empowered team collaboration: Allows junior designers to work independently while ensuring oversight of their proposed changes.
• Structured review process: Facilitates a clear approval workflow, building confidence in the published changes.

When to use design approvals

• High-stakes updates: Highly risk-averse teams would benefit from enforcing approval of design changes.  
• Highly collaborative teams: When multiple team members simultaneously contribute to the website, design approvals can help track updates and reduce the risk of publishing accidental or unapproved changes.
• Training new contributors: Design approvals can be a valuable training tool to oversee and guide less experienced designers’ contributions.

How to use design approvals effectively

Here are the eight best ways to make the most of design approvals.

1. Assigning appropriate roles

‍Although design approvals can be used by anyone making changes on a page branch, to enforce that certain designers’ changes must be approved before going live you’ll need to create and assign a custom role that does not have the permission “Make changes without approval.” Users who are assigned to such roles, will be unable to make any changes outside of a page branch and are blocked from merging changes until the branch is approved by all required reviewers.

2. Proposing changes in a page branch

Create a page branch to initiate changes without affecting the main site.

3. Request design approval

After completing edits in a branch, request a review from key stakeholders.

4. Identify who should be invited to review.

‍Required reviewers: If design approval is enforced through custom roles, a branch will not be able to be merged unless all required reviewers invited approve the branch changes. Required reviewers could include:

• Key stakeholders
• Design leads
• Team members with subject matter expertise for content review (e.g., Legal or compliance reviews).

Anyone listed as a required reviewer should be able to respond with a review status in a timely manner to unblock progress. 

Optional reviewers: Optional reviewers are notified of the proposed changes and are given the opportunity to approve or request changes, but their status or lack of status provided will not block the branch from being merged.

Optional reviewers could include:

• Peers who should have visibility into progress being made across other parts of the site.
• Any stakeholder who could contribute feedback but will not block progress if the feedback is not provided.

5. Monitoring review status

‍The branch is auto-published to branch staging upon requesting approval and all requested reviewers are notified of the request via email. The email will include a link to review the branch in Webflow, as well as a link to branch staging to enable testing the changes across the entire site.‍

6. Making changes after requesting a review

‍Post-request, further edits can be made and reviewers will see all changes made after the request is sent. However, making edits after requesting a review is discouraged unless integrating feedback since, ideally, all reviewers should review the same branch state to avoid miscommunication and unapproved changes. If significant changes are necessary (not explicitly requested by a reviewer), it’s best to cancel the review request, make the edits and re-request the review when the branch is ready. 

If any required reviewer has requested changes, their approval is necessary before merging. Once edits are integrated, you can re-request approval to notify them that the branch is updated and ready to be reviewed again.

7. Merging an approved branch

Once all required reviewers have approved, proceed to merge the branch into the main site. 

Webflow’s staging environment provides a safe place to preview, test, and refine site changes before publishing to production. Benefits of using staging include:

• Risk-free testing: Test your design, functionality, and custom code in a production-like environment without impacting the live site.
• Performance validation: Evaluate site performance, responsiveness, and interactions before launch.
• Client and team collaboration: Share a staging URL with stakeholders for feedback before publishing to production.

When to use staging

Reviewing site-wide changes before publishing to a live domain; testing any form submissions with data or certain unique cases of custom code not currently supported in preview and comment modes (e.g., certain libraries or custom code scripts with security controls); and validating performance.

Branch staging

Branch staging enables Webflow Enterprise customers to publish a specific page branch to its own staging environment, enabling your team to test and review the changes on a published site before merging the changes into the main site.

Custom staging domains

If you’re a Webflow Enterprise customer or Enterprise partner, you can add a custom staging domain to your site for more granular control and consistency for staging across your team’s tech stack. 

We recommend you use the www version of your custom staging domain. Using the root domain may not be supported by your DNS provider and requires manual setup.

Private staging

For projects requiring confidentiality, Webflow Enterprise offers private staging, ensuring only authorized users can access staging.

Use private staging to:

• Prevent premature public access: Keep work-in-progress designs and content confidential.
• Keep reviews secure: Share a link requiring authentication (SSO or username/password) for stakeholder feedback.
• Protect unreleased features: Keep sensitive updates confidential until they are ready to go live.