How much data can the CMS handle? Examples for comparisons included

Hi there,

I’ve searched, and seen a few older posts regarding CMS limits and capacity - but I’d really like some clarity around a project we are looking into. One option, is to simply design in Webflow and export, we’ll take care of the data handling, backend etc. or, we host on Webflow to use the CMS.

The question, can CMS handle something like the data and directory structure of avvo.com or upcounsel.com ? Avvo literally has millions of profiles, that appear in search results.


Here is my public share link: LINK
(how to access public share link)

Hi,

The CMS may be able handle it, but expect some minor pain points. It is definitely worth a test for the potential ongoing design flexibility and low maintenance joy it will provide!

With reference to AVVO:

  • General structure and navigation . Yes
  • Practice area page with filters. This would require custom code (refer to posts regarding mixitup plugin). Simpler filter options might be achieved with tabs or even links to other pages instead of js filtering solutions.

This is a very good resource. Well it is the only one as webflow don’t seem to have a source of truth :face_with_raised_eyebrow:. ► [LIST] Feature Availability & Limits

A likely painful issue you may encounter: In your list of lawyers you may want to show the lawyer’s multiple practise areas. You can’t display a list in a list, only on the lawyer item page itself. There are some different approaches lurking around here somewhere…

You will want to test out site search to see how that works for you.Also test typical data entry, updates and search in the editor.

If you need ongoing sync of data from another source / app, bear in mind you will need to make the external app the place you maintain records as webflow does not have record create / update webhooks or zap triggers yet.

HammerOz, thank you for your detailed reply. It is really, really appreciated!

I’d say those limitations basically rule out the ability to use the CMS, unless I’m totally misunderstanding, for example, if there are 100 practice areas, these would be considered a ‘collection’ if we want pages for each one, then there is a limit of 40 on Business for example. So that just wouldn’t work for us, neither the limit on 100 items in a drop down. We don’t need to see all ‘100’ but certainly need to be able to choose (first 3 letters) from the 1000’s in the DB.

Displaying list of practice areas on the lawyer cards is something we’ll be doing - so again this is going to cause us some design limitations.

Syncing data to our source/app - that’s no problem, this is what we would be doing and using the CMS Api.

What a shame, it really looked like a brilliant way for our designers to speed up dev by building out the pages, but I’m surprised by some limitations here.

Do you have any visibility/experience running Webflow on a sub-directory or a hybrid model where we run our own custom search listings and then use Webflow only for more simplistic marketing pages?

So there should be no issue. Practise areas are collection items(not collections) of which you can have 2,000 on CMS or 10k on business.

You can get around the dropdown / list item limit with multiple collection lists showing limited items eg 1-100.101-200 etc.

No ideas on the subdirectory side of things.

Nested collection lists is in planning Nested Collection Lists | Webflow Wishlist