Ever wanted quick, app-like access to a Webflow website from your desktop, without hunting through browser tabs to find it? Here are two ways to do it: the simple, actively-supported method most people should use today, and the older third-party tool this post used to recommend.
The simple way: install your website as an app from your browser
Chrome and Edge can turn any website, including a Webflow site, into a desktop app in a few clicks, with no installs or terminal commands. Open the site in Chrome, click the three-dot menu, choose "Cast, save, and share," then "Install page as app." This adds a real desktop icon that opens the site in its own window, and because it runs through your browser, it gets the same automatic security updates as the rest of Chrome.
For most people who just want quick access to a website without a browser tab, installing it as an app through Chrome or Edge is the officially recommended approach, including from the team behind the tool below.
The older way: Nativefier (now unmaintained)
This post originally walked through Nativefier, a popular open-source tool for wrapping a website in its own desktop app. As of late 2023, Nativefier has been archived by its maintainers, who now recommend the browser-based method above for most use cases, or building directly with Electron if you need a fully custom, distributable app. The steps below still work today, but the project is no longer receiving updates or security fixes, so use it with that in mind.
The process below can be done in under 5 minutes, and also works for a bubble.io website or any other no-code site.
Here's what the end product looks like using the dawn-dashboard.webflow.io Webflow website. Not too shabby at all.
Since there is only a couple of small steps we need to do, let's jump right in.
1. Install Node.js
Firstly, if you don't already have Node.js installed, you will want to do that first.
You can find a download at https://nodejs.org/en/. Download using the left button, "Recommended for most users".
Once it's downloaded, quickly go through the installation process and it will be up and running! It won't be a physical app, so don't worry when you can find it anywhere.
2. Install Nativefier
With Node installed, we're now going to install the converter that we will use to convert our website into an app.
To do this we're going to use Nativefier, and you can find all the Nativefier documentation on their Github: https://github.com/nativefier/nativefier. We won't need to use this link for now as we will be installing Nativefier through our computer terminal.
Open up any terminal app (I'm using Hyper), and use this command to install Nativefier.
npm install -g nativefier
It will then work through the installation process.
If you run into any errors or permission issues, feel free to quickly Google the issue and you will likely find what's going wrong. If it's a permission issue, you can type "sudo !!" to change your permission to be universal and re-run the command.
Now that we have Nativefier installed, all we have left to do is convert our website.
