Why are files hosted like this? https://assets.website-files.com/randomfilename

Publishing help Project settings
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Hi,

I’ve got a client asking why files are whitelabelled like this: https://assets.website-files.com/randomfilename and not on your domain.

I’d like to at least give a proper explanation??
Any have an reason?

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Webflow provides asset storage on a CDN. One is not built for each client as that would not be practical and this is how the solution is engineered. You can always use embeds and your own if you want to.

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Hi, I hope someone can help me with this question. I try to find out what is the difference between the two ways to store assets. I’ve seen a lot of sites which uses assets.website-files.com, but my sites have uploads-ssl.webflow.com what do I need to do to get the first opportunity?

Greetings
Cathy

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@C-Webcreation Uploads are the Asset manager links, website-files are the AWS bucket all our stuff get stored in when we publish. Effectively the Webflow CDN. So, when you publish and inspect you assets should sit on website-files, when you copy the link to the uploaded file in the asset manager, it’ll be uploads.

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Hi Jakes, thank you so much for your reply. Unfortunately I still don’t get it… I was talking about published sites only. I mean when I take a look in the browser inspector and there into the network tab – there are some sites using assets.website-files and some uploads-ssl.webflow.com.

I don’t understand the difference. Is one of them just at seperate hosted sites? (I guess not)… Just trying to find out where this comes from , cause I want to know if one of them is the better choise when it comes to gdpr.

Thank you and greetings

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A post was split to a new topic: Assets throw a 403 error

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Webflow moved us onto Cloudflare in 2025 and then left all our heavy stuff (images, CSS, JS, fonts) sitting on ‎their CDN.

So yes, we get O2O, WAF and the orange cloud — but:

  • No Cloudflare Image Transformations on Webflow assets by default

  • No unified caching on your own domain

  • OG/social images that aren’t exactly social‑friendly

  • Extra CORS weirdness if you try to get clever

We’ve been wrestling with that for years, each time a change comes we adapt, and now we’ve shipped a Cloudflare Worker that:

  • Proxies all Webflow CDN assets (images, CSS, JS, fonts, icons) through your domain

  • Uses Cloudflare Image Transformations to auto‑convert to AVIF/WebP with configurable quality

  • Caches originals + transformed versions at the edge with long TTLs

  • Treats OG/Twitter images differently so social previews don’t break

  • Plays nicely with the new O2O setup (no more hacky cassette apps or weird asset subdomains)

If you care about squeezing extra performance out of Webflow’s new Cloudflare hosting, I wrote up a full how‑to plus the complete Worker script.

cloudflare-worker-blog-hero-small
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Webflow on the Edge: The 2026 Cloudflare Asset Proxy and Optimisation Guide

https://www.milkmoonstudio.com/post/optimize-webflow-with-cloudflare-images-assets-caching-in-2026

1 Like
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Quick question: does this work on non-Cloudflare registered domains using DNS-only pointing? i.e. where nameservers aren’t on Cloudflare, just using A/CNAME records.

We’re currently using Bunny.net via DNS pointing which is configured similarly to your setup. However, last time I tried, it didn’t seem possible to get Cloudflare working with this config without nameserver changes.

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Typically the Nameservers are moved to Cloudflare, they do have a new feature:
Multi-provider DNS

Multi-provider DNS allows domains using a full DNS setup to be active on Cloudflare while using another authoritative DNS provider in addition to Cloudflare. Also allows the domain to serve any apex NS records added to its DNS configuration at Cloudflare.