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

Set 301s and use wildcards to automate the process.

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Thanks Vincent.

From what I understand, there isn’t anywhere to upload a list of Old URLs > New URLs?

For example - Because we have to use Collections that push pages down a level, pretty much every url is going to change, meaning for the 10,000 pages we are keeping, we need to create a redirect.

All of our old pages are in the root so don’t necessarily follow a pattern I can see where I could use the wildcard.

Any other ideas?

Just use wildcards and you don’t have to manually enter thousands of redirects… Vincent’s link explains everything.

Thank you for your reply.

Each one of our URLs are unique and contain unique content, essentially a 1:1 redirect is what we need.

From what I understand, Wildcards allow you to redirect folders or similar categories of content and look great for tidying URL structures for example.

What we have is a large number of unique URLs with unique content, where by moving to Webflow will change every URL.

We have a CSV of Old Vs New URLs ready, but you’re right, we don’t want to sit there copying and pasting 24,000 times! :wink:

Hopefully this will help me explain better…

Wildcards look great for 301’ing folders or categories like the example given:

/blog.php?category=music&post=beyonce will redirect to /blog/music/beyonce
/blog.php?category=travel&post=hawaii will redirect to /blog/travel/hawaii
/blog.php?category=food&post=pizza will redirect to /blog/food/pizza

However, every one of our current URLs are unique and in the root, so will be 301’d to a subsequent unique URL, such as:

/unique-url-1 will redirect to /collection-1/new-url-name
/unique-url-2 will redirect to /collection-1/new-url-name-2
/unique-url-3 will redirect to /collection-2/new-url-name-9

There isn’t any given pattern that I could bunch our existing URLs in to, but like I said we do have the old Vs new list.

EDIT:

Is it possible to upload a redirect file of sorts direct with the domain provider instead?

Nope. Manual copy and paste (unique URL’s) from a spreadsheet line by line is your only option if you’re deploying on Webflow hosting.

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Ouch… We currently have 23,992 URLs we need to shrink down to 10,000 to meet the Webflow limits.

Is there at the very least a way to use Wildcard to redirect based on a world in the URL?

For example:

/url-contains-cats redirected to /cats-collection

Not ideal but it’s better than the one-by-one approach

Can’t think of a quick solution for this. Are you able to share a light version of your spreadsheet, with at least 100 line items?

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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!