Finding opportunities in the Webflow Template Marketplace
Finding opportunities in the Webflow Template Marketplace
A data-driven approach to finding the right Webflow template to build.
👋 Hi, Ondrej here. Every week, I write about growing my Webflow freelance business, sharing freelance tips, Webflow skills, and learnings from the community.
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I plan to build and submit a template to Webflow’s marketplace to diversify my income streams. But with so many templates already on the market, what are the best opportunities for someone just getting started?
To answer this, I scraped Webflow’s template marketplace to identify tags with a low template count and high search volume.
Here’s what I found.
The data
I collected the data on September 4, 2024. Although Webflow offers two methods for categorizing templates (Tags and Categories), this report uses Tags.
Tags are shown under each template, and as best I can tell, there seems to be a primary tag assigned to each template.
Tags are also closer to what a person would be searching for - you’re more likely to search for real estate templates vs business templates.
You can get the raw data behind this report here.
General Stats
The Webflow marketplace contains 4,226 templates across 100 tags.
Tags with the most templates are:
Agency (500 templates)
Portfolio (500 templates)
SaaS (500 templates)
Seven tags have over 100 templates each:
App (146)
Real Estate (146)
Photography (134)
Architecture (132)
Consulting (122)
Finance (106)
Blog (103)
Tags with the least templates include:
Newspaper, Film, Donation, College, Band (1 template each)
Movie, Homeware, Admin (2 templates each)
Prices
The marketplace has 12 price points, ranging from Free to $149. The two most common price points are $49 (1517) and $79 (1707), with $129 (393) in a distant third place.
Identifying opportunities
Now, onto opportunities.
I looked at search volume data for every tag to identify the most promising tags. The searched term was “Webflow [TAG] template.” I used data from Keywords Everywhere (which uses Google Search Volume). While not perfect, it’s a good proxy for identifying demand.
Once I had all this data in a spreadsheet, I calculated a score for every tag using the following formula: Score = (Search Volume / Templates) * 100.
Here are the top 10 tags based on my scoring:
Newspaper - 1 template, 50 monthly searches, score: 5000
Marketplace - 4 templates, 110 monthly searches, score: 2750
Dashboard - 14 templates, 140 monthly searches, score: 1000
Landing page - 45 templates, 390 monthly searches, score: 866.67
Newsletter - 6 templates, 50 monthly searches, score: 833.33
Blog - 103 templates, 720 monthly searches, score: 699.03
Coming Soon - 10 templates, 50 monthly searches, score: 500
Help center - 4 templates, 20 monthly searches, score: 500
Admin - 2 templates, 10 monthly searches, score: 500
Resume - 9 templates, 40 monthly searches, score: 444.44
Newspaper is the apparent winner. The only template under this tag doesn’t fit the description very well—it’s more of a membership template. On the other hand, a few Newspaper templates are tagged under Blog (like this one and this one), and there’s a sister tag, News, with 19 templates and 50 monthly searches. Still, creating a dedicated Newspaper template and tagging it as such is an opportunity.
Blog has the highest monthly search volume by far and the number of templates is still relatively low. Let’s compare that to the most popular tags by template count. SaaS only has 480 monthly searches but boasts 500 templates. Similarly, Agency, with only 590 monthly searches, has 500 templates. This signals that there's still room for more templates in the Blog category.
The next opportunity is the Landing page tag. Here, the monthly search volume is 390, with only 45 templates. Looking at templates under this tag, I see some crypto/NFT stuff and many general-purpose landing page templates with many page variations (webinars, eBooks, waitlists, etc.).
Marketplace and Dashboard tags have a good search volume and a low template count, especially Marketplace templates. The challenge here will be identifying what kind of marketplace to build - one-sided, two-sided, universal design, or focused on a niche. These are all questions I need to answer.
Even tags with lower scores may offer opportunities for niche designs that address specific user needs not met by existing templates.
What to build?
While it may be tempting to build a Newspaper template just because it got the highest score, I think it’s worth considering a few things.
First, search traffic matters - 390 monthly searches are more than 50.
Second, complexity matters - this will be my first template. Building a marketplace is more challenging than building a Newsletter template.
Third, ideas matter - what can I offer that differs from the existing stuff? What experience do I have that might make the template stand out from the competition?
So, what am I going to build?
I’m split between building a landing page template or a blog template.
A landing page template is a good compromise between search volume and complexity, and I’ve also got some experience building conversion-focused pages. I still have to figure out my edge here; I’d like to focus on a specific niche. I like what Anastasiia did with her landOS template, which is focused on digital courses.
Blog’s search volume is super attractive, and the complexity of building a blog isn’t very high. Again, I’ll need to consider an edge to stand out.
What would you build if you were me? Let me know in the comments.
Follow along
If you want to follow my journey of building and submitting this template, subscribe below. I’ll be posting updates here.
I’ll also publish a template marketplace report regularly, so you’ll see how template counts for each tag change over time and the newest template opportunities.