Webflow Assets CDN URL - Options?

Design help General
1

Hi Folks,
I posted about this issue sometime back here
Has anyone come up with a solution or a workaround for this? We are developing a new Webflow site for a large national charity. They have advised they will be uploading 100s of publications and have stressed that the publication URL needs to be presentable and look like it sourced from their domain. With the CDN URL that is produced when a Webflow Asset is uploaded to the CMS, it doesn’t appear to source from the site at all and looks “untrustworthy”. Can anyone offer a valid solution to this so I can point assets to their actual domain address?

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

2

Reverse proxy. I do this all the time.

In your case, I’d probably use Cloudflare R2 for the storage ( are they PDFs? ), and then either designate a path like mysite.com/pub/... for these or possibly do a subdomain like files.mysite.com/...

3

Hi Michael. How does Reverse proxy work for a CMS editor? They are going to want the ability to add up a PDF, when they wish and have it present as
www.mysite.com/publications/annual_report1.pdf. How does the big nessy CDN URL translate to this?

4

The path is fine.
My preferred approach is to keep it simple;

  • Designate someone to upload the PDF’s directly to e.g. Cloudflare R2
  • Those files are then served on the clean, domain-branded URLs you want
  • Editors then just use that URL in their CMS links

However if editors want to work directly in the designer and content editor, it’s possible to build a bit more infrastructure and integrate them directly.

The cleanest architecture would probably be;

  • Editor uploads the PDF directly into a File field in the CMS
  • Reverse proxy gets a WF API webhook event on the newly created / edited CMS item
  • It then determines a filename either from a CMS field / slug on that record, or by extracting it from the original filename that was uploaded.
  • That map e.g. /publications/annual_report1.pdf → Webflow asset CDN URL is stored in a key-value store
  • Requests look that up and rewrite the file

This keeps your files on Webflow and all admin work done in Webflow directly but the reverse proxy exposes those files on clean branded URLs that you choose.

A third level to this is to automatically rewrite your pages so that links to the CDN URL are automatically replaced with the clean branded URLs. Then the editors don’t need to change a thing in their process.

I find myself building reverse proxies a lot because while Webflow is generally very un-opinionated on page design, it’s extremely opinionated on delivery, and clients want Webflow’s hosting conveniences without the constraints.

Drop me a message if you need pro help building something, but I highly recommend you learn what you can about RP design also, it’s well worth it.

1 Like
5

Thanks for your help.