Can I showcase a site without publishing it on Webflow? SEO concerns

As the title states “How do I showcase my project without hosting with Webflow?”

I’d love to showcase the sites I work on but none of them are hosted using webflow.

Kind Regards, Paul
www.webimo.com.au

Hi @Paulie

You don’t need to host a project to host it on your public Webflow profile. All you need to do is go to your Project settings and on the General Tab scroll down to Showcase and simply switch it on:
https://cl.ly/1R3X1o2q2Y2N/Screen%20Shot%202017-04-14%20at%2010.52.35%20AM.png

​Hope this is helpful.

Waiting to see your public portfolio. Do share your link here.

All the best,
Anna K

I’m afraid that doesn’t work either. It redirects to a form where you enter relevant details about the site and requires a project preview. But in order for the project preview to work, It requires me to host the website with webflow.

Hence, it doesn’t work. Any suggestions are appreciated though, so if you have any more, please share!

Kind Regards, Paul
www.webimo.com.au

Hi again @Paulie

You should be able to share your project without hosting it.
Can you please share a screenshot of the message you are getting so I can see where the issue is?

Us a FTP? Just download the HTML and CSS files and upload them. You can use your domain as a host.

www.yourdomain.com/showcasedproject

Oh yeah, I know I can do that, I was just trying to get onto the official webflow showcase page.

ahhhh… I see. I don’t think that can be done :slight_smile:

Thought so. That’s a shame.

Anyways, Thanks for your help @krubens :slight_smile:

Kind Regards, Paul
www.webimo.com.au

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Hey @paulie

Simply click on the publish button! It’s FREE staging dear. No need for hosting.

You haven’t published your project at all that’s why you are seeing that message. You need to publish it so others are able to see your project.

Hope this is helpful.

All the best,
Anna K

Anna, maybe his concern is having a duplicate of the site somewhere, which his clients could not like, and I think we can all be in his shoes.

There are actually several concerns:

  1. having a duplicate of the site on webflow.io is weird for clients
  2. having a duplicate of the site on webflow.io can be an SEO catastrophy

All of those concerns are absolutely legitimate. And for instance it’s most likely so weird for clients that I wouldn’t risk asking for the permission to do so: hard to explain.

Thankfully, there are solutions.

  1. to address concern 1, you can use a special showcase template. It’s like a project page as you would find on a Behance portfolio. It shows the site and its characteristics, and link to the one hosted elsewhere. You can make such a template with Webflow, or duplicate the one I made Webflow Project Showcase - Webflow and appropriate it. here is a live example of the template used for one site I’ve designed and that’s hosted outside of Webflow: http://wrps-1001pneus-com.webflow.io/
  2. to address the SEO concern: you can decide to showace the webflow.io version and make it invisible to Google. Go to the site’s settings and check the Disable Webflow Subdomain Indexing. Advice: you should check this option as soon as you start ANY site. This way there’s no risk for engines to index the site during development. It’s sometimes hard to make engines understand they have to leave your site alone.
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Hey @vincent! Just a couple of quick points:

A. The purpose of the Showcase is to display the sites that are created in Webflow, so that anyone browsing to the profile page can open the site in the designer or view the published site that is published on the webflow.io subdomain.

If the site should not be viewed by the world publicly, then it would be better to keep the site private, add password protection and share the published link with the client, and if needed the read-only link to the site design.

For Free Plan accounts, sites created in the showcase are always set to cloneable and read-only to the world when set as showcase sites. With paid subscriptions, it is possible to disable the cloning but the ability for people to open the site in the designer from read-only link is by design.

B. As you mentioned, disabling the sub-domain indexing will prevent duplicate content issues

C. For paid memberships, it is possible for Webflow to “hide” a members profile in discovery, however this will also hide all sites that are setup in Discover. To “hide” the profile, send an email to support@webflow.com.

I hope this helps!

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Thanks for the help everyone @Anna_Kelian, @vincent, @cyberdave,

Vincent addressed a lot of the questions that I had yet to put into words, mostly regarding SEO and duplicate sites, and therefore the reason I had avoided publishing another version of the site using Webflow.

For now, I’m just going to go without, as showcasing isn’t a necessity. Thanks again for the help everyone, I do appreciate it.

Kind Regards, Paul

Oh okay @Paulie

I didn’t know you were hosting the website elsewhere.

I think @cyberdave explained well how the Webflow Showcase works.

Glad everything is clear now

@Paulie @Anna_Kelian @krubens @zbrah

Vote for it :slight_smile:

https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-626

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@vincent

Done bro

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