Introduction to Reverse Proxies + Webflow

Overview, Benefits & Potential Downsides

A Reliable, Robust & Flexible Reverse Proxy, on Webflow

A huge thanks to Jakes van Eeden of Moon Milk Studio, who first introduced me to this incredibly straightforward and effective configuration approach for Cloudflare reverse proxies on Webflow.

Much of the thinking and materials in this course were incepted from Jake's original approach and ideas, and expanded from there.

Impacts

Generally all of the impacts of using a reverse proxy are positive;

• Performance. Very substantial performance improvements due to edge caching and automatically optimized images & assets.
• Cost Savings. As much as a 32x cost reduction, if your traffic is significant and is pushing you to outside of your annual Business plan limits ( Webflow Enterprise Lite starts at $15,000/year, Business plan annual is $468/year ).
• Powerful capabilities, like complex paths, merged sites, or geolocation data

What are the Downsides?

The Webflow Editor

If you are caching your site, this may impact your ability to use the Webflow Editor meaning the _?edit facility on your main domain. The reason is, it will be serving a cached version of your content which likely won't represent the actual current content.

Or, it may work just fine. Right now, I'm editing this content through Webflow's editor, on the public, proxied version of Sygnal's site.

If your encounter weirdness in your editing, we recommend that you use your Webflow staging site for editing instead.

Configuration Complexity

We keep configurations simple here, but it's possible to have a very complex configuration that may be difficult to maintain or debug.

Unless you're a pro at cached site configurations, we advise keeping it simple.

Additional Monthly Costs, for Advanced Caching Features

If you want more advanced optimizations and caching support, you'll have some added monthly cost;

• $20/mo for Cloudflare pro
• Possibly, if you want advanced Cassette use, a bit more cost
• Possibly, if you want advanced media caching, a bit more cost

Even with Cloudflare's free plan, you can get a lot of benefits here. We'd advise using the paid features only if you want the highest possible performance on your site.

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