PDF File Link URL

Is there a way to change the pdf file link that appears in the browser

From:
https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/FILE-NAME.pdf

To:
https://MY-WEBSITE.com/FILE-NAME.pdf

In other words, removing the Webflow reference…

Hi @craigb welcome to the community :grin::+1:

At this time you cannot change the URL for file names since they are uploaded to a CDN for fast loading speeds.

Not exactly ‘whitelabel.’

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

3 Likes

Hey @craigb @PixelGeek , actually you could with 301 redirect i think ?

But it will only make https://MY-WEBSITE.com/FILE-NAME.pdf redirect to https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/FILE-NAME.pdf2 but not rewriting it.
I guess that works if your use case is writing the link on a flyer or something.
301 redirects are in Hosting tab in settings.

In this case, your old path is https://MY-WEBSITE.com/FILE-NAME.pdf and the new one https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/FILE-NAME.pdf2
Hope this helps,

Hi @zbrah - thanks for the response.

This could possibly work, but is not really what we are looking for - for privacy reasons we need to remove the Webflow reference from the URL.

Also - This particular site will contain 500+ links, so adding a redirect for each file is not really practical.

I understand :frowning: @craigb
In case you finally do this option, i have a keyboard maestro macro to copy paste in the 301 redirect panel.
(I’ve done it for + 1500 redirect, worked well). Just ask if you need it.
Have a great day,

Will let you know if we need it. Thanks for the generous offer @zbrah, much appreciated!

1 Like

I tried your suggestion as I’m trying to direct a PDF file link to a new webpage - is this something that is possible? Our restaurant created & printed static QR codes with a link specific to the PDF doc and now of course there have been some menu changes so I’m trying to redirect the document URL to a new page I’ve created that has the menus so they can be updated as needed without having to reprint all of our QR code stickers…

This is the link I need to have redirected but it won’t let me put the entirety of the filepath in the 301 redirect text box:

@ngross - You can’t implement redirects on file assets since they are hosted on a separate domain. You can have redirects on objects or paths relative to your site domain.

Example;
/menu.pdf redirects to https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/5f16042780b03fa85c225f0d/5f5fe77d63a4bed4a03485ab_Cafe%20Whitney%20Menus%20PDF.pdf

That way when the menu is updated you update the redirect too. Of course anyone going to an old direct link will not get a new file. The better choice would be to host the asset yourself (third party) and replace as needed which is what I recommend when dealing with assets that get frequent updates.

If you do not wish to use the redirected link ‘uploads-ssl…’ option, you can always create a new page with your desired link slug e.g. website.com/filename and in there, use an iframe tag with the correspondent ‘upload-ssl’ link (link in the code below), make the iframe full height and width and remove the borders. What will happen is that you will basically be looking at an embed of the actual page holding your pdf doc but because it occupies the full width and height it gives the impression to belong to that new page that you created.

<iframe style="height: 100vh !important; width: 100vw !important; border: none !important;" src="https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/..." allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

Hi Craig,

We are in the same boat we are migrating from Drupal to WebFlow and all of our pdfs urls point to https://www.cas.org/sites/default/files/documents/

We have thousands of pdfs from over 10 years. We are in need a better solution thats more automated.

Easiest way is probably to keep Drupal running just for the PDFs, and change the domain to e.g. files.cas.org. Then in your new Webflow-hosted www.cas.org it’s just a single wildcard redirect and the path and filename are unchanged.

Especially useful if you’ve linked to those PDFs from within blog content that you’ll be importing into the CMS.

Alternatively, if the PDFs never change and you won’t be adding any, you could move the whole set over to a service like Netlify to retain the same /path/filename.pdf.

I suggest that you give the Wishlist Item a vote: - It has a lot of support already so hopefully will be actioned by Webflow in near future.

Thanks for the reply but we have no plans to keep paying for Drupal. Aquia charges us 36k a year for hosting. I appreciate your thought process.

@Drew_Norman1 - You could move your file assets to a CDN, and set up a reverse proxy to pull those paths into a Webflow site. If you have assets that require access control (member access) this would require more work and additional tools. As for the cost, that could be calculated if you have stats on how much bandwidth assets are consuming today. With any of the large CDN providers you would probably see a reduced cost. I have done enterprise deployments and setups where huge numbers of assets need to be served both with and without access control. Feel free to ping me.

1 Like

Yow, ditch that straightaway.

Use a reverse proxy instead- I see Jeff just replied with the same thinking.
If your PDFs are all arranged neatly into the folder structure you want, you can easily host them somewhere like Netlify or an S3 bucket, and reverse proxy your site to map that path.

You can probably get some other cool advantages with that setup too, like the ability to thumbnail the PDFs however I haven’t built that.

1 Like

We purchased a webflow enterprise plan so I am hoping we can keep the pdfs on weblow and use 301 redirects to point old pdf urls to new ones.