Best practices for scaling CMS items over 50k items

Scale responsibly

CMS scale significantly increases the limits of total CMS items per site and max CMS items per Collection, but it’s important to note there are still limits to other aspects of our CMS feature, such as:

• Total Collections per project
• Total fields per Collection
• Reference fields per Collection
• API requests per limit (RPM)
• Collection list element limitations

We recommend that all customers go through the exercise of planning their CMS Collections and shared data structures as per this video example.

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301 redirects

While there is currently no hard limit in place for the total amount of redirects that customers can add in Webflow, we recommend a best practice of 1,000 max for two primary reasons:

• Each redirect rule gets uploaded to a site's manifest.JSON file, which provides site information to visitors' browsers, and as a manifest file gets larger, there's more data for browsers to download.
• Webflow’s Site Settings page does not currently paginate the redirect table. The more redirects that exist on a project, the longer and larger the page becomes, which can result in page timeouts and friction when trying to access other page sections below (such as custom headers, advanced publishing options, and custom SSL certificates).

For the best SEO and site performance, customers should use wildcard redirects where possible, which will help minimize the total number of redirect rules.

If a customer will absolutely require more than 1,000 redirects, they may need to set up redirects externally through either:

• Their DNS provider (redirect at the DNS level)
• A reverse proxy server (redirect at the proxy level)

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Sitemaps

Google recommends that a single sitemap is no larger than 50MB (uncompressed) or 50,000 URLs. Webflow’s auto-generated sitemap will include static pages, CMS pages, and — when localization reaches GA — localized variants of each static page and CMS page, all of which will count toward that 50k recommendation.

If a customer will have more than 50k URLs in a single project (including its locales), we recommend they consider the following approaches involving a node server and proxy.

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Front end integrations

Customers commonly use third-party extensions like Jetboost and Finsweet Attributes to add front-end/client-side integrations and non-native capabilities for their Collection Lists. These extensions are built with unofficial Webflow API endpoints that have the potential to run into rate limiting, especially when used with Collection Lists at the item levels of CMS scale.

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Filtering

While it may not be an ideal UX for many customers to have separate pages for pre-filtered Collection Lists, Webflow’s native filtering capabilities are evaluated server-side so there is no risk of API rate limiting.

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Pagination

Webflow’s native pagination capability does not automatically add rel="next" and rel="prev" tags that can result in “duplicate page” errors in Google Search Console. Instead of using third party extensions to prevent this, we recommend that customers follow the instructions in the following GitHub repo instead: pagination-rel-next-previous.