Need help: when saving the slug a dot is being transformed in a minus sign

We have 700k products that are included with a QR-code that is referring to a hidden page on our website. We have first generated a QR-code and are now creating the page in Webflow. When creating the slug of the page, the dot in the url is transformed into a minus sign.

Example:
Pagehttp://www.wearaware.co/PU037428-T9400.012
www.wearaware.co/pu037428-t9400-012

The QR-code is a static code, and we can not change it (already printed), does somebody know how we can keep the dot in the URL?

Before I suggest a solution, I’ll just point out that 700,000 products is going to have some serious issues on Webflow’s hosting.

Let’s do the math. First, a site is limited to 100 static pages, which means your planned URL format e.g. http://www.wearaware.co/PU037428-T9400.012 runs out at 100 items even if you sacrifice a homepage.

You’d also have to manually create those pages, since you can’t create those pages through the API. If you could create one page a minute, 24 hours a day, nonstop, it would still take 1.3 years… and while that’s far less than the heat death of the universe, I’m pretty sure that dude would want to die.

Even if you break your URL format [yes, you can] and go the CMS route, you’re limited to 10,000 items on the business plan, so you’re going to need to solve that problem first.

But let’s set those practical considerations aside, and pretend you have < 10,000 products, and talk about the URLs.

There are two good approaches here;

CMS ITEMS + 301 REDIRECTS

  • Load your items into the CMS, with the modified slug URL
  • Create a CSV of all of those URLs including the slug change, and load them into Webflow’s redirects table using Finsweet’s CSV importer.

Your CSV would show e.g. ( including the - hypen transform )
/PU037428-T9400.012/product/PU037428-T9400-012

And your QR’s would work fine.

SEPARATE REDIRECT SITE FOR QR’S

A better way is…

  • Create your product site under a different domain, like shop.wearaware.co
  • Setup www.wearaware.co and wearaware.co to point to a different server that does nothing but redirect requests it receives. Requests that match the pattern of your product ID’s get redirected to your new store pages, transforming .'s to -'s. All other requests including / simply get redirected unchanged to the shop site.

In that second approach you have to setup a second server, yes, but it will be a cheap linux instance, and you can likely do your redirects with a regex pattern rather than creating 700,000 .htaccess rules.