So you've built a great collection of content and it's gated with Webflow's User Accounts system. How do you promote it and SEO it effectively using excerpts from your gated content, to find customers?
Webflow's User Accounts solution as a rigid gating approach;
Originally, the User Accounts team planned to offer element-level conditional visibility based on access-group. This would have been ideal, as you could build a public CMS page, but secure the paid content. Unfortunately the project was stopped before that feature was completed, and to my knowledge it was never fixed to a workable state.
Unfortunately, the basic login/logout conditional visibility feature does not work well here because if you use it for this purpose, anyone can create a free account and access your paid content without even verifying their email address.
The general strategy here is to make some of your content accessible to non-logged in users and Googlebot, while keeping the bulk of your content gated with User Accounts.
How your expose a "preview" depends a lot on your content and structure, and what you're needing to secure v. what you're wanting to SEO.
These are a few approaches I've used in projects;
Say you have courses, and lessons. The course has all of the overview, some art, and the complete lesson ToC. The lessons have the high-value content. This is known as a mater-detail content structure.
Here I'd make courses one CMS collection, and lessons another. Courses is public, lessons is gated.
Users and search engines would be able to see the information about the courses and the list of lessons but not view the lessons themselves.
You can see that structure here in Sygnal-U. The first lesson named Overview is the course page itself.
If your amount of content is reasonable, and the content you want to SEO/preview it in a single collection, you can create a a special preview page for it.
The way I do this is;
If your content were largely richtext, you could excerpt it or create an AI summary in your automation, and use it to populate an Excerpt field in your Preview collection.
This gives you some meaty SEOable content to show on your preview page, without exposing your main content.
My favorite design is a reverse proxy that will deliver partial content when the user is logged out, and full content when the user is logged in. Essentially, the page is public in Webflow, and the proxy handles the gating transforms itself depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in.
The options for controlling the UX are very elegant, and are best controlled through custom attributes that the reverse proxy reads to modify the page, e.g.;
However I ran into a few sticking points and never completed the experiment;
The inability to easily determine the logged-in user's access groups is where this approach loses its value. Without that, you can't securely gate content and you have no ability to vary content access, e.g. basic, pro, premium levels.
