Help! - 301'ing 10,000's URLs

Thanks for your reply.

It’s literally two columns - Old URL and New URL, what the existing URL is on our old site Vs what the new URL will be.

Unrelated question: How’s your performance after importing 10k items into Webflow? Did you try adding anything to the cms collection in the editor/designer after?

Good question!

We haven’t imported anything yet as we’ve encountered another limitation with Webflow…

We’ve set Reference fields in the CMS so we can categorise our content, however Webflow does not allow you to assign a Reference field when importing a CSV… :see_no_evil:

The whole import feature is broken badly. We got around it by using Zapier and Integromat to import our database through the API. You can get the reference field ID (for example a category ID) through Integromat and then add it to blog posts!

However, we also got the 10k plan here, and when we imported ~6000 blog posts the entire thing just breaks. We can’t add new articles because the cms gets unresponsive. It’s been like this for two months now and I have no idea if a fix is coming soon or next year or anything.

PM me if you want a system that can handle that load with no issue. You can use your Webflow design too.

That’s worrying…

Surely content is stored on a database and shouldn’t affect the performance of the designer or CMS?

If Webflow isn’t meant for large-scale websites that’s fine, but it can’t handle 10,000 items this shouldn’t be an option.

Don’t get me wrong, Webflow is great and everything I could want design wise, we’ve just felt letdown on really basic things like not being able to upload a CSV with a list of 301s!

Yeah it’s kind of baffling. They even advertise it as perfectly capable of handling “thousands of blog posts”. The designer isn’t really affected by the large database, but trying to add anything in (and using the CMS interface) just grinds everything to a halt. It takes like half a second to type a single letter, and the CPU and RAM usage on my PC shoots through the roof.

But the worst part is the vague replies from customer support, that are just sending me a short “yeah we’re looking into it” every two weeks after I ask for an update.

@webdev thanks for the offer. We’ll wait a bit more and then I’ll consider it.

Thanks for the insight here…

That’s really disappointing to hear. I know nothing is going to match a custom system or something built by a dev locally, but that’s like advertising a car that ‘can’ go 200mph but will break before it gets to 150mph…

‘Looking in to it’ isn’t that helpful either.

I’m sure we’re not the only ones wishing to take advantage of Webflow to the capability it’s been advertised at? I wonder what the size of the Webflow dev team is as there are feature requests that seem to be basic features that still haven’t been actioned years later…?

I think they’re pretty big, but they’re also expanding a lot now (they recently got a huge money injection) so I have good hopes for the future. But yeah…

I really, really want to take advantage of the features of Webflow too.

How has performance been for the user? Has having more content made your website slow?

Webflow renders collection items and pages statically on publish. There should be no impact on page loads related to the size of the site (number of collection items). The number of collection items would potentially come into play while using the designer.

Thanks for putting my mind at ease!

Can confirm. Page is lightning quick even with the slow CMS handling.

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Phew, thank you! At least that’s something!

Interestingly now you mention it, another one of our sites on Webflow that only has 165 static pages/articles but has a lot of design elements (e.g. a lot of images per page) is also running slow in the designer…

@radicalrooster- Just an FYI … Optimize your assets before uploading them to the asset manager, you are working with resources based on the size you upload. This will keep the page loads down in the designer. If you look in dev tools you will see what I mean.

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Thanks @webdev - All images have been sized exactly in Photoshop for their purpose, saved for web and ensured that the quality they are saved at is a balance between quality and file size (the largest full-width images we use being no more than 200kb). I’ve then squashed all images through a Mac App called ‘ImageOptim’ to ensure they’re as small as they can be before uploading.

Tools such as GT Metrix are happy my assets are small enough and to scale, just seems Webflow Designer isn’t

Your doing the right things. The only way for me to determine what the potential causes might be would be to look at a read only link. If you wanted me to take a peak, you could do that privately. Up to now I have ruled out using WF on large sites because of current limitations, so I don’t have any to inspect the designer with dev tools.

Ok so I had an idea…

I noticed each of our OLD URLs ends in .html (don’t ask…).

Is there a way I can use the wildcard 301 to redirect any URL with that suffix?

We’re launching Tuesday afternoon regardless so any help will be awesome right now!

Sorry to double post…

But I was thinking the 301 would look like this:

‘/(.*).html’ —> ‘/’

Would that work in terms or redirecting any old page ending in ‘.html’ to the home page?