Why Pillar left Webflow
to run its site with Sherpa and ChatGPT
Pillar moved from Webflow to code it owns, giving Faisal and the team a faster way to build, update, and test their website.
Pillar's story
Coming soonPillar is like Shopify for creators. More than 270,000 creators sell through it, from MD Motivator and Ciel to Jason Derulo and the New England Patriots. Their link in bio stores get millions of visitors, and a lot of them end up on Pillar's own site.
Faisal, Pillar’s CEO, wants that site to move as fast as the company. Webflow was great at first, but “over time, it just was laborious.” Quick changes went through a Webflow developer, and Faisal spent months learning how to make the most of the platform himself, “when the whole point was we wanted to just ship quickly.”
So Pillar moved to Sherpa. The entire site was migrated on a Friday afternoon with full parity, including every page, animation, script and piece of SEO metadata. The site is now custom Astro code that Pillar owns. Sherpa hosts and maintains it, and gives the team all the tools they need to run it straight from Codex in the ChatGPT desktop app.
20 pages
What running a website with Codex looks like
When Faisal wants a new page on Pillar’s website, he doesn’t open a site builder or message a developer. “I just start a Codex chat and describe what I want,” he says. About 15 minutes later, it’s ready to go live.
Ahead of an upcoming conference, Faisal wanted to refresh Pillar’s entire Perfect For collection, which features different types of creators. Every page needed new assets. Before, that would have been a couple of weeks of design work, with each asset made by hand. Faisal did it in a couple of prompts. Codex made the assets using Pillar’s design system from Sherpa with imagen, and “we were able to change 20 pages in genuinely 10 minutes.”
As for quality, Faisal usually gives Codex a reference page from the site to start from, and says “every time you ship with Sherpa, you can expect the same level of asset quality that you have on your existing website.” He puts it on par with a junior-to-mid designer. “If you describe what you want vividly, you can even be beating the quality of graphics that you have in the status quo.”
Creator pages used to eat up a lot of the team’s time. “When we’re featuring a creator on our website, we need to acclimate towards their brand, their brand identity, their brand colors,” Faisal says, “but we can’t lose the design edge that we have with our existing design system.” That balance was hard to pull off page after page. Now he gives Codex the creator’s brand materials as a reference, Sherpa keeps Pillar’s own components in place, and it’s “just a prompt.”
Faisal isn’t doing this alone. Other people on the Pillar team, who never learned Webflow, now make changes just by asking for them. The team shares pages in Slack and leaves comments right on the page. When something needs more sophisticated design, Pillar’s designer still works in Figma. Faisal pastes the Figma link into Codex, and it brings the design onto the site via MCP.
Through all of it, Sherpa makes sure whatever the team asks for fits the way Pillar’s site is supposed to be built. New pages reuse the existing components and design system and follow best practices for accessibility, SEO and page speed, all on their own.
Testing and site performance
When Pillar left Webflow, its Lighthouse score went up 21 points. Pages got faster and SEO got a bump, without anyone working on it.
As for testing, A/B tests that “historically would have been quite laborious to set up” now launch with a prompt. When Faisal wanted to test a new hero, he rebuilt the whole layout around a new asset from the designer and restructured the social proof and calls to action, all in one afternoon on his own. In the first week, signups were up 129%.
The future of websites
Faisal was one of Webflow’s first users, back when site builders were still new. Now he thinks this is the next shift.
“It’s like texting on a BlackBerry versus texting on an iPhone,” he says. “In a year or two, no one’s really going to be editing directly from a CMS. Everyone’s going to be doing it agentically.” And it changes what a team will even try. In his words, Sherpa lets you “take way more ambitious swings as a team.”
