CMS collection item link adding "en" in the URL

[Harshit_Sinha]

My CMS editor has made a link to the collection page, which I am using to link collection item, it is working well in preview

Within the collection settings the link is also correctly defined.
*************.webflow.io/work/tenetur

However when I’m publishing the site and trying to use the link, an “en” prefix to the URL before the actual page gets added
*************.webflow.io/en/work/tenetur

This results in a page not found error. Manually removing the “en” from the URL seems to work just fine.

How do I rectify this, where am I going wrong?

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Hi Harshit,

It appears to be a designer bug, related to the migration to localization support.
Webflow support suggested a workaround which is to replace your linked item with an HTML embed, and then use the Add Field to manually create the URL with your slug.

Other options;

• Wait. They’ll have to fix this soon.
• Use script to fix your URLs and remove the /en

[mieras (Maarten Mieras)]

So they increase the price by 40% and we get critical bugs with sloppy workarounds. Amazing.

When is this bug fixed?

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Not a clue. I’m using a hack to dodge the bug, which will hopefully prevent major SEO damage.

Dynamic collection adding "/en" in the URL automatically

It’s a new bug connected to the migration to localization, I’m floored that such a major bug isn’t fixed after more than a week. This has the potential to do some serious SEO damage as well. As a temporary fix, use this code, in the before-/body custom code area. I’d probably put it site-wide so that it’s easy to add now, and then remove later once localization is fixed. Note that when localization is fixed, your site will work fine even with this fix-code. However if you actually use localiz…

[Harshit_Sinha]

Thanks Michael.

I’m using a work-around by including a Page URL field for each item in the CMS, and copy pasting the URL without en within it. And when specifying the link settings, instead of collection page, i just use URL and reference it to the field within my CMS collection

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Hi @Harshit_Sinha, yes that works great if your item count is low enough to keep the administration comfortable.

I lean towards the redirect and script approaches because they are quick to implement and simple to undo once the bug is fixed.

Do you mind sharing your published site link? I’m very curious to see whether this also impacts the sitemap.xml, and at present none of my sites seem to be showing this problem.

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

Yeejz. Why is the 404 page in the sitemap?

On your actual site, wildcard redirect your /en/'s.
It’s terrible but if you don’t you’ll crush your SEO, Google will just get 404s trying to reach those pages.

Use my script to fix-up the links in your pages, but also check your canonical URLs in case Webflow has /en/ there as well.

[AdvocateSiteMaker (ASM)]

So—are we to assume that it’s still not safe to update any site with CMS links because it will break the site and damage its SEO? Any ETA on this bug finally being fixed so we can update our CMS sites @Emily_Lonetto ?!

[memetican (Michael Wells)]

I don’t recall even seeing a formal acknowledgement of this by the team, other than support replies. Basically be careful about publishing. If this bug makes an appearance on your site, triage it with the redirects and the script, and double-check your canonicals in case the script needs to be extended for that.

[AdvocateSiteMaker (ASM)]

Thanks, Michael. So much for Webflow being a “no code” solution! I appreciate you trying to help us, unlike, apparently, Webflow itself.

I’m still afraid to publish any update, lest I send myself down a frustrating rabbit hole trying to deal with the damage. It’s been almost half a month now. It’s ludicrous!

[Julian_Galluzzo]

I had this issue, I reached out to Webflow support and they solved it for me by adding me to the localization beta - lucky for me, this didnt happen on a production site!