I’m working on a Webflow project where I need to manage a large number of images within the CMS. The website will feature past company events, each with a short description and a gallery of around 1,000 images per event. These events happen monthly, meaning the site will handle approximately 12,000 images per year. Events will be stored for one year, after which they will be removed.
My main concerns:
Is Webflow CMS capable of handling this amount of images efficiently without significantly impacting performance?
Would it be better to host the images externally (e.g., Google Photos, AWS, or another service) and embed them instead?
Are there any best practices for optimizing image-heavy CMS collections to ensure smooth performance?
Has anyone tackled a similar challenge, and what solutions worked best for you?
The client strongly prefers having all images displayed directly on the site rather than linking to an external gallery. However, I want to ensure the site remains fast and functional. Any advice, experiences, or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!
The question here is why does your client need to host 1000 images, unless each image is a potential sale, and even then hosting them all in one place doesn’t make much sense. I mean doing it in Webflow might be possible but for a hefty price, both in fees and in site performance. Webflow has a 10K items limit on all their no Enterprise plans, so you will have to upgrade and then also pay for the Bandwidth associated with the quality of images being hosted. Logistically just doesn’t make sense. There is a reason why services like Flickr exist. My advice would be to just host 100 items per event (which is also the limit per page without pagination) and for the remaining images use some other external gallery dedicated to just hosting images in bulk. I hope this helps.
Webflow business plan does allow for 10k CMS items, and up to 20k with add-ons.
Storing the images themselves in Webflow could work, I’d optimize them fully as AVIF’s first. However you run a risk of bandwidth overages if your site does a lot of traffic. In general you’re probably safe if the images are well optimized and especially if you also thumbnail them to reduce the bandwidth of your gallery-view pages, but that adds to admin processes.
The main risk I think would be if something like Claudebot wanders in and downloads everything, as its known to do.
Overall you might be better off storing the image files elsewhere like S3, bunny .net, Cloudflare R2, and then storing just the URLs and image details in the CMS.
Most of the design decisions you make will start with your admin process here, since everything practical hinges on who, when, and how the images are loaded.
