We have a live Webflow site which is using Webflow’s native localisation features to have sites in the UK, US, France and Germany.
We’ve translated content for all locales, including slugs. However, after translating a slug, the original slug still seems accessible, along with the new translated slug.
The image below shows the page settings for the French locale, with the translated slug:
This seems like behavior by-design. Localization works on top of Webflow, and as far as I can see it’s constructed in a few layers.
Layer 1 is basic localization- all the “alt locales” plus all of the mechanics around hreflang links and the sitemap changes.
Layer 2 is built on top of that, and adds translated slugs, and auto-detect/redirect.
I probably would have engineered it similarly, and it explains why un-translated slugs also work. As to redirect v. non-redirect, yeah, I would have thought a 301 makes more sense but since the canonicals and alt hreflangs are correct, and the sitemap is correct, it’s already fine.
As a “this is good engineering” bonus, you can see that if you upgrade from Essentials to Pro, and localize your slugs, all of your existing SEO is preserved without having to add a zillion redirects manually.
The choice to rewrite rather than redirect is interesting- you could ask WF support about that if you wanted to. However there are other places WF does this, e.g. try taking any URL in your Webflow hosted site, and turn a single / in the path into multiple ////// you’ll see similar behavior. The URL is resolved to the correct page, and WF doesn’t bother to redirect on these rare edge-cases.
