Add a Changelog and product updates newsletter to your Webflow site

The Problem

Every Saas startup or open-source project typically needs a way to publish release notes and feature updates to a changelog.

Most solve this at first by bolting on free tools like Notion sites, Github, etc. or paid tools like Beamer, Headway, Announcekit, etc.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to these options:

• Bad for SEO. 3rd party options usually require a subdomain on your site (like changelog.website.com). Per SEMrush: "content earning backlinks will almost always contribute to better SEO when hosted on a subdirectory [not a subdomain]." This is controversial in the SEO community but the data speaks for itself. A url like website.com/changelog is better.
• Its hard to maintain and a poor UX. Writing content across different platforms quickly becomes nightmarish. Also, it's not a great user experience to push users to different platforms to read your changelog, help docs, blog, etc.
• There's no email list functionality. Even your most loyal users aren't going to religiously check a changelog for updates. It's much better if you can send an email newsletter when there's something new to check out.

Ultimately, the best option is hosting your changelog right on your main Website, with a sign up f Here's how:

What You'll Need

• A Webflow site with a CMS plan (needed to create collections)
• A free Audienceful account
• That's it!

1. Create a new Webflow collection

First, you'll need to head to Webflow to create a new collection for your changelog. The process will be very similar to setting up a blog. Here's a nice video guide (just replace the word 'blog' with 'changelog'):

If you need inspiration for the design of your changelog, here's a few examples of ones we like: Linear.app/changelog, raycast.com/changelog

Once everything is set up on the Webflow side, it's time to...

2. Set up your Audienceful account

If you don't already have an Audienceful account, create one here (it's free).

Audienceful is a Notion-style editor with email newsletter abilities and Webflow publishing integration. It allows you to collect email signups, send email newsletters, and publish webflow site content from a single hub.

Once you have your account setup you'll need to connect to the Webflow collection we just created. See this guide: connect a webflow collection.

Try publishing content to your collection to test it works.

3. Add signup forms to your changelog

Once you have publishing from Audienceful to Webflow working, now all you need to do is follow this guide to add signup forms to your Webflow site.

Now users will be able to subscribe to your email list for updates right on your Changelog. You can even tag new signups and create a custom audience only for Changelog subscribers.

This way you segment signups based on what they're interested in recieving. For example, if a visitor signs up from your blog, they could get a more general newsletter. If a visitor signs up on your changelog, they get the full changelog emails.

That's it!

We recommend putting together a consistent publishing schedule (The Google crawler loves consistency) and sticking to it. If you need any help, feel free to reach out and we can share how we set up our changelog.