Redirect domain to folder

Community resources General
1

Hello!

I added multiple domains to my project and would like to redirect them to their corresponding folders.

For example, my three domains are domain.it, domain.es, and domain.fr. These domains are live on my dashboard. I removed the Make Default option.

Currently, if you enter the domain.it or domain.fr, they land on the global home page, but I would like to redirect them to their homepage in their corresponding folder. I tried 301 redirects, but I can’t get it to work.

Does anyone have a solution to redirect domains to their corresponding folders?

domain.it → /ca/home
domain.es -->/es/home
domain.fr -->/fr/home

Thank you for your time and have a great day.

2

@pochat - Since Webflow does not support mapping domain names to pages or slugs you either need to use JavaScript to do it or move off Webflow hosting. A reverse proxy could be used but that has its own issues with Webflow.

1 Like
3

Hi Mario, as Jeff said, Webflow doesn’t support redirecting domains.

But there are more problems too;

  • Your sitemap.xml will indicate an hreflang of x-default for everything.
  • The domain name in your sitemap.xml will be random, since you do not have a default domain set.
  • All pages will indicate the same <html lang>.
  • There is no inbuilt support for <link rel=alternate ...> to cross-reference your content.
  • CMS content can only exist under one path which means if you have a blog, you’d probably need 3 different blog collections.

Overall, a bad SEO experience.

Hopefully that will change later this year as Multilingual features are added, but it’s important you realize your site won’t SEO well until you address those issues. Most devs go with a solution like Polyflow or Weglot.

Alternatively, you could host these as 3 separate sites, with 3 separate domains and 3 separate language settings, and cross-link them. You’ll get much better results and a far more manageable admin experience.

If you want to ignore all that, and you’re really only interested in redirecting those domains into specific folders, you can do that externally. Some DNS providers offer good domain redirection facility, I use Cloudflare’s DNS and Cloudflare rules for this.

You would need another domain to act as your site’s main domain, let’s call it domain.com, and that would be the only one identified in Webflow’s site config.

Your 3 lang-specific domains would all be configured externally ( e.g. Cloudflare Rules ) to redirect to their respective folders, e.g. https://www.domain.com/ca/home

Remember redirects will change the domain, so someone typing www.domain.it will see the URL change to https://www.domain.com/ca/home. You’ll also need to consider what you want to happen to subpaths like www.domain.it/contattaci. Does it go to /contattaci or to /ca/contattaci or to /ca/home/contattaci? Cloudflare will allow any of these depending on how you configure it.

Another path, if you really want to keep the site together but split it across domains, is to research reverse proxy setup.

4

Hi @memetican @webdev Thank you for responding.

I did try to separate the sites. For example, yesterday I purchased another webflow site and assigned our domain.uk. The challenge is that we can’t link the CMS from the main site.

We update our products, dates, and times, on a frequent basis. Yet, doing this for 10 separate websites is redundant and allows room for human error. Even exporting and importing the CMS collections through a CSV file is not efficient.

In essence, each site has the same design and CMS collections. But changes in currency, language, and products per region; and obviously, it’s domain extension. So, it’s not only a language setting I’m looking for.

I’ll look at the suggestions you posted.

Thank you again for your time.

5

@pochat - I do not recommend Webflow for multi-lingual sites based on the limitations more eloquently laid out by @memetican.

I work with far more capable CMSs that can deliver a robust enterprise level multi-language experience with no SEO issues. Feel free to reach out for more information.

6

Again, trust Jeff’s instincts on this- it’s well worth reaching out to him to determine if there is a better solution for you.

If you decide to stick with Webflow as a basis for your multilingual site-army, you might dig into Whalesync and Power Importer Pro to see what they can give you in terms of automatic cross-site CMS synchronization.

Hopefully all of this is placeholder stuff for a year or 2 until Webflow has usable native Multilingual support.