I managed to design my first website with Webflow and now I am starting to discover the world of SEO. I realize that it would have been easier to apply some of the SEO basics before, but unfortunately that’s not the case. In the forum I did see the same question asked in 2014 but did’nt find the answer. Is there someone who knows?
Is it possible to change the image name afterwards?
Downloading, change name and upload it again doesn’t seem to work. Assets sometimes show the new name but the published site keeps showing me the old name with a very very strange name with lots of numbers like:
Where does this URL name come from and how can I solve this? Meaning, getting rid of all those numbers/letters and showing the updated name of the image.
The url shows on what cloud service the image is hosted. It’s not classic storage and services somehow have to rename all files to ensure they have a unique name. They’re not having a folder for just your project, maybe not even for just one client like Webflow. So the renaming, the folder structure, the URL, is hardly controllable, even by Webflow I guess.
I too would like to benefit of a cleaner URL for my individual files. Takes me time to make sure I export clean names, and it ends up being a bit deformed.
That’s the reason. Now I thinks it’s completely useless to start to fight this at this time. A hundred times useless. All of this exist for optimal speed reasons and is deployed at a very large scale.
Let’s have a drink and not pick this fight
As for you issue wanting to rename files, make sure the file is a bit different and that you unpublish before publishing. Cloud services are maybe smarter than us now and can tell if an image file is the same (content, checksum…)… it’s not being fooled by us just changing a name. Reexport jpegs by changing the compression ratio by 1 unit, or take the time to pass the pngs into a good optimizer app. The content will change and you’ll save some space in the process.
Oh and as for SEO: the SEO guys around me came multiple times to me this year to ask the same question: “What are those URLS for images?” And they refer to cloud services hosted images. URLs look just like yours. Because they’re used to urls like thesite.com
So I explain and they realize that hosting practices have changed. I’ve been asking what could be the harm in terms or SEO. They’re super serious about their job and confront, test everything. But so far no one came back concerned. I personally don’t think there’s any SEO effect on having images hosted that way.
As for the clean file names, they have very very little benefits apart from reading code directly or browsing a site as text. There is no accessibility issue as alt= have to be defined anyway. There is no system using the file name as a possible alt text.
Thank you @vincent , for your extended answer.
This is what I did:
I replaced the ‘old’ image temporarily for a random image. Deleted the old image from assets. Unpublished the site, republished, replaced the image by uploading the ‘new’ image, (which I compressed 5 points less). And it worked!
But… is all this effort of any use for SEO??
As you said, we cannot win this URL battle, so changing the image name will never provide us a clean URL.
Is defining the ALT text only enough? and can we just forget about the image name?
Webflow needs to do someting about imo. Because doing all that image optimization, just to find out webflow is still using the “old” images, is really frustrating.
