Hi everyone,
We’re using Google Cloud Load Balancer (GCLB) to manage traffic to our domain and recently followed Webflow’s advice to publish our site to a temporary subdomain (e.g. wf . domain . com) due to the new DNS requirements.
Why we did this:
We can’t point www .domain.com directly to Webflow, since it’s behind a load balancer handling other services too.
To comply with Webflow’s new hosting requirements (and keep publishing updates before Nov 3), we:
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Created a temporary subdomain (wf .domain.com)
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Pointed it directly to Webflow (non-proxied DNS)
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Published the site to this subdomain
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Routed external traffic from www .domain.com to wf .domain.com via GCLB
It works technically.
But it creates two public URLs for every page:
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wf . domain . com/page
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www . domain . com/page
Known issue:
We know this creates duplicate content, which will cause SEO issues (split rankings, crawl budget, etc.), especially for our main site.
Questions for the community:
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Has anyone implemented a clean setup using Webflow + reverse proxy (like GCLB or Cloudflare) that avoids duplicate URLs entirely?
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Is it possible to 301 redirect all wf. domain. com/ → www. domain. com/ without causing redirect loops due to the proxy layer? Has anyone pulled this off cleanly via GCLB or another method?**
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We can add canonical tags pointing to www. domain. com, but is that enough to preserve SEO performance?
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Any tips on blocking the temporary subdomain (wf. domain. com) from indexing without affecting the live site on Webflow? (Webflow robots.txt affects all domains)
What we’re looking for:
An approach that:
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Lets us keep using GCLB as a proxy
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Keeps Webflow happy (CNAME/SSL setup)
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Ensures only www. domain. com gets indexed and ranked
Anyone in the Webflow community implemented something like this before?
We’d love to hear how you handled it or what long-term solution you’d recommend.
Thanks in advance,
Jean-Baptiste