Hi Nadja, there are actually quite a few factors that will go into choosing your approach;
- How you want to represent them visually on the site ( e.g. as inline links, or as cards associated with other CMS articles )
- The filesize of your largest PDFs
- Ongoing admin requirements- will they be adding more?
- The UX you want, i.e. download PDF v. view PDF in-browser
Depending on those, you can either-
- Store the PDF’s in the CMS, in a File field
- Store the PDF’s in an external filestore, and then store the link in the CMS
For small sites with relatively low traffic and frequent update requirements, I’ll usually go with something easy like Google Drive as the storage, an automation to automatically create the new CMS record, and then from there the client can use the Editor to associate it with whatever content they want, or I can just have a “recent uploads” page. Here you can build the UX as view or download.
For sites where the PDFs are < 4MB max and you want the users to click-and-view rather than click-and-download them, you can store them directly in the CMS.
For high-traffic sites where the PDFs are large, I’d store them elsewhere like Netlify or S3, and then create CMS records to represent them so that the client can easily reference them and connect them with other documents.