So you've built a great collection of content and it's gated with Webflow's User Accounts system. How do you promote it and SEO it effectively using excerpts from your gated content, to find customers?
Webflow's User Accounts solution as a rigid gating approach;
- Gated pages are not accessible to search engines, at all
- There is no native means to display a partial page, with some public content, and some private/protected content.
Originally, the User Accounts team planned to offer element-level conditional visibility based on access-group. This would have been ideal, as you could build a public CMS page, but secure the paid content. Unfortunately the project was stopped before that feature was completed, and to my knowledge it was never fixed to a workable state.
Unfortunately, the basic login/logout conditional visibility feature does not work well here because if you use it for this purpose, anyone can create a free account and access your paid content without even verifying their email address.
Approaches
The general strategy here is to make some of your content accessible to non-logged in users and Googlebot, while keeping the bulk of your content gated with User Accounts.
How your expose a "preview" depends a lot on your content and structure, and what you're needing to secure v. what you're wanting to SEO.
These are a few approaches I've used in projects;
Master / Detail Approach
Say you have courses, and lessons. The course has all of the overview, some art, and the complete lesson ToC. The lessons have the high-value content. This is known as a mater-detail content structure.
Here I'd make courses one CMS collection, and lessons another. Courses is public, lessons is gated.
Users and search engines would be able to see the information about the courses and the list of lessons but not view the lessons themselves.
You can see that structure here in Sygnal-U. The first lesson named Overview is the course page itself.
Preview Page Approach
If your amount of content is reasonable, and the content you want to SEO/preview it in a single collection, you can create a a special preview page for it.
The way I do this is;
- Make a Preview collection, it has a single-ref field to my Content collection
- Create one row in Preview for every row in Content, so it's mirrored
- > Setup automation to maintain that mirror for the client automatically
- > Use the same slugs, primarily for SEO reporting
- Then build a Preview page, you only pull through specific content, the title, brief, some art, etc. excerpts of the Content
- Your Preview page is styled to indicate it's a preview
- Some messaging around access plans and pricing for that content
- Big CTA around purchasing and a button to navigate to that secured CMS item's page
If your content were largely richtext, you could excerpt it or create an AI summary in your automation, and use it to populate an Excerpt field in your Preview collection.
This gives you some meaty SEOable content to show on your preview page, without exposing your main content.
Reverse Proxy Approach
My favorite design is a reverse proxy that will deliver partial content when the user is logged out, and full content when the user is logged in. Essentially, the page is public in Webflow, and the proxy handles the gating transforms itself depending on whether the user is logged out or logged in.
The options for controlling the UX are very elegant, and are best controlled through custom attributes that the reverse proxy reads to modify the page, e.g.;
- Truncate lesson rich-text to the first 400 words.
- Display the video thumbnail, but you can't play it
- Blur artwork images
However I ran into a few sticking points and never completed the experiment;
- Login state is determined by the http-only auth cookie, and is a decently reliable way to identify whether user is logged in.
- Access groups are difficult to determine for the logged-in user.
The inability to easily determine the logged-in user's access groups is where this approach loses its value. Without that, you can't securely gate content and you have no ability to vary content access, e.g. basic, pro, premium levels.
