Imagine you have a great site hosted on Webflow, and it gets some good traffic. It gets such good traffic, that you're paying for the Business Plan.
As of Oct-2023, Webflow's Business plan allows;
- 400 GB of data egress per month, maximum
- 300,000 visitors per month, maximum
However if you have good SEO It's actually surprisingly easy to hit those limits, so what happens if you exceed them?
Webflow does not offer any form of overage charges- instead they require you to reduce traffic, or to upgrade to the next plan tier which in this case is known as Enterprise Lite.
The pricing for that jump varies, however it's significantly more expensive.
Webflow Enterprise comes with a lot of great features such as the ability to have multiple designers working in your project at the same time, direct phone support, and expansions on pretty much any limit... CMS collections & items, static pages, etc... but upgrading for traffic alone those increased costs simply do not make sense.
The pricing model would crush many small businesses.
How Much does Caching & Optimization help?
Here is a snapshot of the first 24 hours after a site was migrated to our Level 2 proxy-cache configuration.
Orange indicates hits that were handled by Cloudflare's cache, Blue indicates ones that were handled by Webflow.
Notice the blue spike just after we switched this on, as Cloudflare's cache was empty. Very quickly Cloudflare picked up the popular requested documents and began serving it directly.
Hos much is traffic ( hits ) reduced?
In the first 24 hours, traffic to Webflow was reduced by over 99%.
How much is bandwidth ( bytes ) reduced?
Here's a client's traffic before and after our proxy-cache solution was implemented at the beginning of Nov.
Here's the same site In the first 24 hours, looking at the cache view.
The configuration above illustrates our Level 2 configuration.
It's difficult to compare our Level 1 configuration because Level 1 uses Cloudflare Free, which does not have the caching analytics reports shown above. However it should actually be quite similar.
The main advantages of Level 2 over Level 1 are;
- Reports, you can see exactly what's happening.
- Performance. Image Optimization means a faster site particularly for mobile users.
- SEO. That optimized performance means likely better scores with Google Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals, which can improve your SEO rankings.
Notes
What are Webflow's limits per plan?
As of Nov 2023;
Bandwidth per month:
- Basic: 50 GB
- CMS: 200 GB
- Business: 400 GB
Unique visitor limits per month:
- Basic: 250k visitors
- CMS: 250k visitors
- Business: 300k visitors
How does Webflow count visits?
If you're familiar with how webservers log traffic, you know that there is ambiguity around how "users" are defined, identified, and tracked... especially in a world were cookies aren't guaranteed.
In support emails regarding this, Webflow has given actually several different answers, all in Oct 2023;
Monthly visits refer to "unique daily visitors". For example, if you visit your site once each day for 30 days, that will count as 30 visits. If you visit your site 30 times in one day, that will only count as one visit.
- Webflow Support, Nov 2023
Other Webflow personnel have added this;
Webflow doesn’t have an internal tool to monitor traffic and instead uses Semrush.
This is a very significant difference, since Semrush would offer a vague estimate of user traffic to the site, which is not at all the same thing as traffic to Webflow's servers. With a caching proxy, the traffic to Webflow's servers can be less than 1% of that.
What happens if you exceed those limits?
"The site visit limits we list are somewhat soft limits, in that we would reach out if you regularly went over a specific limit and ask you to upgrade to the next plan, but we definitely won't interrupt your service at all."
- Webflow Support, Nov 2023
In practice, Webflow's sales team will contact you and ask you to upgrade to Enterprise Lite.
FAQs
Answers to frequently asked questions.
