Ever since we’ve been notified about the changes to the bandwidth pricing for Webflow, we’ve seen surges of traffic from bots in non-Canadian regions (primarily Brazil and US). Attached is a screenshot from our GA4, which shows almost 400k “users” from Brazil vs 16k from Canada. Sure, you can make up an excuse that perhaps Brazilians want to visit our site, but our website is literally the pre-owned Genesis vehicle inventory for Canada, so there’s no reason why there should be that much of a gap between a different market and our actual market. There is growing suspicion online that Webflow is creating (or at least doing nothing to prevent) this traffic since it pushes users to your enterprise plans by soaking up bandwidth. We have over 30 websites that are approaching this precipice and there is no way our clients can afford enterprise nor justify it considering the cost for us to just switch platforms or build out our own CMS. We implore you to look into this and provide a solution as it makes it very hard to back Webflow if this kind of shady behaviour isn’t addressed. Considering we aren’t allowed to add our own protection without running a reverse proxy, etc. is just ridiculous. A quick Google search shows this sentiment is shared online.
I’ve been recommending Webflow to clients for years. I was about to recommend it to a new client who operates three large charities, but the bandwidth reduction of last year combined with these bot issues means I don’t think I can do that for fear of being responsible for recommending a service that could backfire financially, leaving them in the situation your clients are now in.
Let’s see if there is an offical response to your post…
If you both get stuck, feel free to reach out for options that remove these limitations. I tailor solutions to meet requirements and have decades of experience doing so and +6.5 years on Webflow. Just finished some large projects and have some gaps in my schedule I would like to fill.
No update yet, but even today… it says 20GB of bandwidth has been consumed but when I export the csv containing the bandwidth stats for today, it only shows ~10GB.
THE MOST RIDICULOUS PART is that yesterday we somehow had 19k unique users from Brazil on our site, whereas today there’s only been 4. Riddle me that. In fact, yesterday it says we consumed 20.1 GB and we had about ~20k unique users, but today we’ve used 20.5 GB from only ~250 users. So somehow we used MORE bandwidth even though we’ve had 98% less traffic. It seems like Webflow’s bandwidth tracking is pulling numbers out of nowhere and sending fake traffic. Like what the heck is going on?
… and so there is silence from Webflow…
@jakemorrisonkanvas this sounds like a nightmare that makes no sense at all. Did you get any private response from Webflow?
Hey Jake, I’ve been keeping an eye on your message to see how Webflow responds- but I’ve just noticed this part, which looks like you’re trying to catch Webflow’s attention here in the community forum? That’s very unlikely.
The way to reach Webflow is by opening a support ticket, have you done that yet? They may have more visibility into your Brazil traffic.
What I’m seeing across all sites ( not just WF sites ) is an increase in volatility on content- rich sites, often caused by search engines in different countries, or by AI bots like Claude that download everything for their model.
As you observed in your GA4 report, that can lead to weird countries appearing- but that also frequently happens due to mis-classified cell towers as new ones come online. I see a lot of traffic from the US for AU/NZ-only sites that is actually local mobile traffic.
From your comments it looks like that is not correlating with your bandwidth, which is normal in these cases.
- Webflow’s bandwidth reports do not show traffic, and do not care about HTML downloads, only assets / js / css
- GA4’s cannot measure bandwidth or assets, only HTML page hits.
They’re reporting apples and oranges.
But if the traffic were normal users, following normal SEO and ad clicks and navigating the site normally, it’s reasonable to expect some loose correlation between user count and bandwidth.
In general I don’t have any issues with bandwidth including some large sites- but there are a lot of practices I follow;
- Optimize all images
- Off-host all vids, never use WF’s background vid
- Minimize the use of custom uploaded fonts
- Minimize SVG and Rive use, or off-host them
Webflow’s report is very good at tell you where the hit is, and what needs your attention.
Thanks for the detailed response Michael!
I started by creating a support ticket, I just copied and pasted my message from my ticket into this forum for more exposure and to hopefully increase the urgency.
Unfortunately the nature of our website is that 30+ dealerships feed their vehicles via a dealer management system which doesn’t compress their vehicle images before they reach our CMS, I do compress them to AVIF once they reach our CMS but they are still relatively large images.. and a lot of them. An individual listing will have up to 30 images.
I’d compress them at the middle tier, before they reach the CMS. Also constrain them to a maximum size like 1600 x 1600, larger than that is probably useless and means a lot of wasted bytes.
You could also just store these images elsewhere like Amazon S3 or Cloudflare R2, or Bunny.net, and store the URL in the CMS. That keeps them off WF hosting entirely.
If you resize & compress them well, you’re probably good with multi-image fields.
If you’re hosting the images externally, you’ll need URLs which can be stored a number of ways.
- If your listing data is < 30 fields, you could use 30 individual links
- Or if you need better field economy, I’d probably stick them all in a plain text field as a JSON chunk, and pull that with script. That keeps each listing as 1 record, however feasibility depends on admin processes.
- You could use a separate collection for the images with 30 more records, which is easier for metdata and in-designer admin. But likely you’d need good housekeeping to remove old listing data to stay under the 10k limit.
That’s actually really helpful — thanks so much Michael! I might try the approach of hosting elsewhere. But would that still use similar bandwidth since I have to load them each time the user visits the page? Like I don’t think I’m concerned with the way they’re stored as much as the hit on the server for when they’re loaded, but I’m a newb with this stuff so feel free to put me in my place haha!
It wouldn’t involve Webflow’s bandwidth limits, which designers with media-heavy traffic-heavy sites sometimes.
Some services ( S3, bunny ) do have costs but they are generally quite cheap in comparison. Look at Cloudinary as well since you’re focused on images- it allows some nice features like watermarking images, auto resizing them, that kind of thing. Could be perfect for this.