Hyperflow Hyperspeed

Maximize your Webflow site's performance with Sygnal's reverse-proxy solutions.

Want your Webflow-hosted site to be faster, and with better Core Web Vitals and Google Lighthouse scores? Do you need to cache your site to stay within your Webflow-hosted site plan limits?

There are a lot of factors that go into an efficiently-delivered, high-performing site, but there are two fundamental factors that apply to every site-

  • Maximize the speed of response, for each file requested
  • Minimize the download size of each file requested

Both of these are solved with Sygnal's Hyperspeed reverse proxy solution.

Our high-performance edge-caching network assures that your files are delivered as efficiently as possible, with only necessary traffic passing through to Webflow's live hosting server.

How does it work?

We identify all of the image and video assets throughout your site, and use high-performance edge-caching to make certain your website files are as close as possible to the user requesting them.

This has the effect of speeding up your site, and also reduces traffic and bandwidth to Webflow's origin servers by 80% to 95%, depending on your site design and the Hyperspeed configuration we build.

Sygnal's Hyperspeed has excellent coverage for asset identification;

  • IMG element assets
  • Responsive image assets ( IMG media srcset )
  • Style attributes which contain background images
  • Webflow's CSS file and image assets
  • VIDEO element sources, for Webflow background videos
  • Custom-embedded <style> CSS in your page that references Webflow assets

Optionally, we can add the capability to automatically optimize and resize your images throughout your site as high quality WEBP's for minimum file size. We do this not only for your assets, but for all of your CMS-stored images as well - and we do it automatically, even if new content is added later.

How well does it work?

The exact performance improvement depends on your site and content.

In general, we typically see 10 to 20 points of improvement in Google Lighthouse Scores.

Google Lighthouse score on a Webflow-hosted site + Sygnal Hyperflow.
In this example, image optimization is enabled for maximum performance.
Note: performance is an important aspect of your SEO strategy as well. This can mean a substantial improvement in your Core Web Vitals.

What does it cost?

We primarily use Cloudflare for our custom reverse proxy builds, due to its blazingly fast edge-cached architecture and high-performance workers.

One-time setup cost

Sygnal charges a one-time fee of $1,997 usd for a full setup. **

This includes...

  • Setup of your Cloudflare account for you
  • The migration of your DNS to Cloudflare DNS
  • The design, programming and configuration of your reverse-proxy
  • Configuration of your site for a high-performance reverse proxy
  • Written and video documentation for you of the administration and configuration aspects, to familiarize you with the setup and options
  • Weekly monitoring and review of your cache performance statistics for the first 14 days after launch, and fine-tuning of the proxy configuration to ensure it's optimized.

** If your DNS is already running on Cloudflare, or you migrate your DNS yourself ( in an un-proxied configuration ) and then invite Sygnal in as an administrator, we can discount the setup cost by $350.

Optional Cache Purge Feature

For highly active sites that publish frequently, we can add a second part to your integration which is a cache purge that automatically clears your cached content whenever you republish your Webflow site. This allows users to see your new content immediately on publication, rather than waiting for the cache to expire.

Optional Image Optimization Feature

For image-heavy sites, we can also build your Hyperspeed configuration to automatically resize oversized images and convert all images to WEBP. This w

Note: Webflow has recently added the ability to auto-convert your CMS assets to WEBP's as well, which we highly recommend as a general best-practice. However this does not resize over-sized images. Hyperspeed can improve on this by resizing all over-sized images, and automatically converting all images to WEBP's even when new content is added directly by your client through the Content Editor and CMS.

This feature adds a one-time cost of $750 usd to the project.

Each Hyperflow build is a custom development project, and we bill it as part of Sygnal's micro-consulting service, with the fixed cost shown above. We'll invoice you in advance of the project and we schedule each project in as soon as the payment is received.
Learn more about Sygnal's micro-consulting here.

Monthly costs

Hyperspeed leverages two core features of Cloudflare, and offers a fully managed monitoring & maintenance service we highly recommend.

There are two features you'll need on Cloudflare -

  • Cloudflare Pro account - $25/mo ( $20/mo yearly ). Gives you access to the full caching reports and performance reports, which are necessary for optimizing your site.
  • Cloudflare Workers - $5/mo. Expands on the KV store usage capabilities, which are an important part of our configuration setup.

Optionally, if you want dynamic image type conversion and resizing, Hyperspeed can provide that and uses Cloudflare's Image Processing.

  • Cloudflare Images ( optional ) - $usage/mo. Adds a small fee for image transformations, which we then cache. The cost tends to be quite small however your usage depends on how image-heavy your site is, and how often you flush the cache on site-republishes.
We generally recommend that you start with Cloudflare's $25/mo monthly plan for the first few months until everything is setup, and then switch to their annual plan to reduce the ongoing cost by 20%.

We also highly recommend our new Hyperspeed Monitoring & Maintenance service to ensure your site is closely monitored and continues running smoothly even through Webflow's regular changes.

Monitoring & Maintenance Service

The Internet is continually growing and changing, and both Webflow and Cloudflare occasionally make changes that could interfere with Hyperspeed's ability to cache your site fully.

As an example, Webflow's recent June 1st 2024 change to its assets hosting required a rapid update and redeployment of Hyperspeed to our managed client sites to maintain full caching coverage.

To fully protect your site, Sygnal offers a full monitoring & maintenance service, as well as a new maintenance-only option.

Monitoring includes-

  • 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring of your system to ensure that Hyperspeed is working and that your site continues to be optimized and cache-served. Our team is immediately alerted to any system interruptions on your site so that we can immediately respond. This helps ensure that changes made to Webflow, Cloudflare, and to browsers in general do not interrupt your optimized site.
  • Weekly review of your cache statistics an firewall reports to identify any performance, optimization, or security issues, and to make ongoing improvements,

Maintenance includes-

  • Ongoing updates. We're continually improving Hyperspeed and adding further optimizations, content coverage, and features. We'll update your site with every new deployment when you're on this plan.
  • New feature development. Along with the performance and caching benefits of Hyperspeed, we will be adding a few other features to benefit SEO,

Costs;

  • Fully-managed monitoring & maintenance - $180/mo.
  • Maintenance-only - $95/mo.
Our Hyperspeed Monitoring & Maintenance service is not required, however it's essential if you want to ensure maximum uptime for your site and assurance that your caching and performance are fully working and being continually enhanced.

Upcoming Feature Plans

We have a lot of ideas on the table. While we can't make specific feature commitments on what can be integrated directly into Hyperspeed, or provide dates, these are some of the additions we're exploring.

  • Sitemap enhancements like lastmod and priority, and multiple sitemaps.
  • 3rd party monitoring, to ensure your external services are also operating smoothly ( Make, Zapier, APIs... )
  • Site merge.
  • Webflow user accounts enhancements, like access-group-based element gating and user-specific CMS item gating.
  • External content merge, from Google docs and other services.
  • RSS enhancements
  • CMS to JSON data feeds
  • Page enhancements, like viewport configuration
  • CSS breakpoint customization
  • jQuery version update

FAQs

How is my site configuration affected?

Your domain name will remain wherever you've registered it.

Your DNS will need to be migrated to Cloudflare ( we will set that up for you ). This process is simple, and once it's setup you simply change your nameservers at your domain registrar to use Cloudflare's DNS.

Once that's complete, we do all of the programming and configuration needed within your Cloudflare account.

There are no changes to your Webflow hosting or hosting configuration.

Is my site still secure?

Yes. Your site has end-to-end SSL.

Are there any interruptions to my site or publishing process during setup?

None at all. You can continue publishing and updating your site as normal.

We'll build and test your reverse proxy, and the process of activating it is seamless. However we do prefer to do this step after hours ( as defined by your site's primary audience & geographic location ), just as a part of our sysops best practices.

If you use Google analytics, it's an ideal way to determine your daily and weekly low-traffic periods.

What if I wanted to "undo" the proxy setup someday?

Any time you want to disable the reverse proxy, you can either;

  • Return your Nameservers to their original settings, and use your original DNS, or;
  • Switch off Cloudflare's proxy settings in the Cloudflare-hosted DNS.

Either approach will return your Webflow site to its original un-proxied configuration.

How do updates work with caching?

In an edge cached site, our goal is to cache your Webflow site as much as possible. We can configure your caching depending on your publishing needs.

Typically, we use a 4 hour cache for HTML, which means that if you edit a blog post and republish it, it may take up to 4 hours for those changes to appear for some users. We can vary this to balance your performance goals with your update needs.

Does this work with Webflow ECommerce?

This is the one situation we have not fully tested. None of our current clients use Webflow ECommerce. If you use it, let us know.

How quickly can you implement this for us?

Contact us to make arrangements as soon as possible, and we'll schedule in your reverse proxy build. It takes less than a week for us to complete setup, but we have a lot of client requests so the timing will depend on our availability.

If you are in an emergency situation, let us known that you need an emergency solution, and we'll see if we can re-prioritize our project commitments. There's a surcharge for this added work of 50%.

What is the implementation process?

Once the invoicing is complete, the process looks like this;

  1. DNS Setup
    1. You send us your full DNS zone file, exported from your DNS.
    2. We setup your Cloudflare account and DNS, and invite you as account owner ( you have full access to your own Cloudflare account )
    3. You enable Cloudflare's Pro plan on your domain, which is essential for the cache reporting and certain advanced features.
  2. Nameserver migration
    1. You update your nameservers ( this is seamless )
      1. If you'd like to delegate access to your DNS to us temporarily, we can oversee this step for you as well.
    2. We verify all traffic is routing properly
  3. Reverse proxy build and configuration
    1. We build, install, and configure your reverse proxy and caching settings
    2. Activation, we turn on your proxy and test it
  4. Monitoring
    1. We watch your traffic statistics over the next two weeks to ensure everything is optimized

We'll do videos for you to familiarize you with Cloudflare's reports and how to monitor them.

How do I start?

Contact us, using the form below;

  • Send us details of your site, the published link and any details on specific needs you have, such as your current traffic to Webflow servers, where your site is "heavy" or "slow", and how frequently you publish.
  • We'll reply by email and finalize the details and billing for you to get you setup as quickly as possible

Contact us

Do you need this feature on your site?

We love working with great clients, and building great systems. Give us a shout.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)