Do you need your Webflow paths to be more fluid?
Whether you're an SEO expert, or just trying to craft a logical organization for you website content, semantic paths are a central part of your site's design.
Unfortunately, Webflow's CMS has very rigid path rules, which effectively prevents you from building CMS-driven content hierarchies the way you want.
We can fix that.
In fact, this is one of the most-requested features we build for clients.
The only way is to do this on a Webflow-hosted site is to design a reverse proxy that can resolve your desired paths to Webflow's collection page paths.
We set these up for clients, and allow you to map your desired paths to the correct page content, any way you like.
Sygnal's approach;
There are several components to this solution but the most complex part of this build is often the path map itself.
We can design yours specific to your needs, to keep your paths as flexible as you want, and your administration as convenient as possible.
Here are some of our key approaches;
These are loosely ordered from simplest to most complex.
In general, approach #6 is most popular with SEO experts who want the flexibility to map paths arbitrarily, however it's also the most complex build. In most cases that's not needed.
We also support multi-level maps, which describes situations in which different levels of your path should be remapped differently, e.g.
/course/(course-slug) maps to a course page
/course/(course-slug)/(chapter-slug) maps to a chapter page
/course/(course-slug)/(chapter-slug)/(lesson-slug) maps to a lesson page
Do you need this feature on your site? Contact us.
The rewriting, canonical, and sitemap changes are actually quite straightforward. The complex part is the often URL map itself.
If your site doesn't change often or your path permutations are very predictable, you can hardcode that map into your reverse proxy code. But if you need it to be more dynamic, you'll need a way to build and admin your map.
One way is to use a separate CMS collection to store that map, and you publish it on a hidden page like /_map. Your reverse proxy can then parse it into data, cache it, and use it for path resolution. My SEO clients prefer this approach because it lets them use entirely arbitrary paths.
If you want to build an actual automatically self-managed hierarchy, that's actually more complex since you need to extract all of those ref & multiref relationships and construct that map dynamically. Due to its programming complexity, this is not recommended for most projects, I've only done this for universities which tend to have large and complexly organized sites.
Keep in mind you will also want to correct your canonicals and your sitemap.
We love working with great clients, and building great systems.
Do you need this feature on your site? Contact us.
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