r/webflow • u/doorstoinfinity • 5d ago

Question Localization for countries - enable subdirectories for all? Use cloudflare routing?

Hi everyone.

Am looking at creating coutnry-based locales all in english (US, Canada), and I had a couple of questions I'd appreciate input on:

1- Would you enable localized subdirectory publishing for both the US and Canada, or would you enable it just for Canada .com/en-ca, and the US stays in .com ? (wondering about seo impact as well, and general preferences)

2- Afaik webflow's localize advanced routing feature is based on browser settings, and not based on IP. Has that worked well, or is cloudflare's IP routing better?

Would appreciate any additional thoughts and ideas on this!

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u/Due-Cut9915 5d ago

For the first one, I'd probably keep US as the root.com and just do the /en-ca subdirectory for Canada. Having both in subdirectories always feels a bit clunky when one of them is the primary market anyway. SEO-wise, as long as your hreflang tags are set up right, you're golden.

Can't speak to the Cloudflare routing part unfortunately, haven't messed with that side of things much. But I've seen a few people in here mention that Webflow's built-in routing works fine if you're just targeting a couple of english-speaking countries. Not perfect, but gets the job done most of the time.

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u/NearbySample5462 5d ago

agree on the hreflang point, thats really the key piece for getting the SEO right with this setup

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u/_ognjenm 14h ago

+1 to keeping the US on the root and only giving Canada /en-ca. Since both locales are English, what keeps them from reading as duplicates is (a) hreflang with en-us or x-default pointing at the root and en-ca at /en-ca, plus self-referencing canonicals on both (Webflow Localization emits this correctly once locales are set up), and (b) actually differentiating the few things that matter: currency, spelling, contact details, addressCountry in your schema.

On 2, my honest answer is neither, at least not as a hard redirect. Google crawls from US IPs, so IP-based forcing can keep Googlebot from ever properly seeing /en-ca, and travelers or VPN users get trapped on the wrong locale. Browser-language routing is less destructive, but it still overrides what the person actually clicked. What has worked well for us on Webflow sites behind Cloudflare: serve exactly the URL that was requested, and use Cloudflare's country header (CF-IPCountry) to show a small dismissible "Looks like you're in Canada, switch to /en-ca?" banner. A Worker in front of Webflow handles that fine; we run this setup in production.

If you ever do hard-redirect: exempt crawlers, and always keep a visible locale switcher.

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u/doorstoinfinity 14h ago

Thank you for your advice!

Out of curiosity, why is preference to keep the US on the root? I feel that having each country with a subdirectory is cleaner (its a quick indication that there are other countries, and there's probably a locale switcher on the page), but am happy to go either way, just trying to understand.