How to Set Up a Reverse Proxy on Your Site If Your Site Lives on Several CMSs

It’s not uncommon for companies to have, for example, their product or app sections on one technology stack, but then want their marketing pages on Webflow because it offers greater flexibility and speed than most other CMSs. 

However, this presents a problem. A fragmented site like this can lead to SEO conflicts, crawl issues, duplicate content, and even performance problems. The good thing is that there’s no need to migrate your entire site to a single CMS if you don’t want to. You can set a reverse proxy.

So, did I paint a situation you’ve found yourself in? Even if it’s not exactly the same, a reverse proxy can handle it, and I’m here to explain to you how. I’ll clarify how it’s configured with Cloudflare. I’ll help you understand how this process will enable your team to keep the site looking like a high-performing beast despite the fragmented setup behind the scenes. 

What Exactly Is a Reverse Proxy?

A reverse proxy is a server that stands at the front of web servers and manages incoming requests from a web browser, i.e., the user accessing a site through the browser. It’s an intermediary that aims to improve a site's security, reliability, and performance. 

Unlike a forward proxy, the typical proxy most people are familiar with, which sits in front of the user and protects them, the reverse proxy is in front of the origin servers and ensures the user doesn’t have to be in direct contact with them. 

The way it works is relatively simple: 

1. The user visits your site. 
2. The user’s request is redirected to the reverse proxy instead of the origin server. 
3. The proxy receives the request and inspects it to ensure there’s no malicious content. 
4. The proxy decides which backend server, or multiple servers, handle the request and forwards it to them. 
5. The backend server or servers respond to the proxy, which then passes the information to the user. 

So, in essence, the reverse proxy will act as the public face your audience interacts with, so they don’t have to deal with a collection of separate CMSs, like Webflow and WordPress. It ensures the visitors see a unified brand under a single domain. This also means the reverse proxy eliminates the need for subdomains.

All this makes the reverse proxy sound like a router. However, it’s more than that because it deals with multiple complex tasks like: 

• Encrypts and decrypts HTTPS traffic so individual CMSs don’t have to spend resources.
• Hides the actual IPs of your addresses, ensuring hackers don’t have easy access to attack your website. 
• Compresses your site’s code and images before they reach the user, making the site feel much faster. 

Why Use a Reverse Proxy? The Strategic Advantages

Although it might sound like it, the decision to use a reverse proxy is rarely purely technical. It’s usually a strategic move because higher-maturity companies typically reach a point where marketing and product needs are at odds. 

In essence, a reverse proxy can solve this friction by introducing a few important solutions. 

The most significant of these is that all of your website content now lives under a single domain. If you’ve been using two separate CMSs, you certainly had a subdomain along the lines of blog.mybrand.com. With a reverse proxy, this will simply be a single domain: mybrand.com/blog. 

This consolidates your domain's authority, makes crawling easier for Google, and keeps all keywords under the same brand. 

If you’re not already using two CMSs, doing so can make sense because no single CMS is perfect for everything. Many websites need two, and if your website is one of those, using a reverse proxy will ensure your brand’s strength remains the same. 

Either way, another benefit is a unified user experience and brand. No matter what you do, subdomains will always, at least slightly, suffer from differences in loading speeds and navigation issues, among others. 

With a reverse proxy, visuals become fully consistent, users start trusting your site more, and authentication becomes simpler. 

Lastly, by keeping everything under a single digital roof, analytics and tracking become much simpler. Tracking a user’s journey is easy, and there’s no headache from cross-domain tracking. 

When It Makes Sense for You to Set Up a Reverse Proxy

If you’re still wondering when a reverse proxy makes sense, I’ve prepared a few scenarios for you. They will help you determine whether you need to set one up. 

1. You want to prove your blog and other marketing pages. You’re currently using WordPress or another legacy solution for your entire site, but want to improve your blog section, it might not be enough. Webflow offers better speeds and flexibility, so you can migrate a part of your site to it and set a reverse proxy. 
2. You have a product that requires a custom tech stack. Many companies, especially SaaS brands, need a designer-friendly platform like Webflow for a marketing site and an engineer-friendly CMS like WordPress for their product. 
3. Your team needs advanced features that are not available in your current CMS. This tends to happen for companies that use unified solutions like Webflow. It’s not uncommon for your marketing team to need something only a WordPress plugin can solve. 
4. Your priority is SEO and aggressive organic growth. If you’re already using multiple CMSs, you can’t fully optimize growth without properly connecting them. As mentioned, setting a reverse proxy eliminates the need for subdomains, which is inherently good for SEO. 
5. You need to transition to a new CMS without doing it all at once. If you’re using a legacy system and want to move to a new one, and your site is already very big, it might make sense to stretch out the process. You can set up a new CMS and a reverse proxy to gradually migrate pages. 
6. You want to create a seamless documentation hub or a help center. Most sites use specialized software for this, like Zendesk, Intercom, or HelpDesk. By default, these create subdomains. 

Reverse Proxy Implementation Overview

Before we move on to a step-by-step guide on setting up a reverse proxy, I’ve prepared an overview that explains the architecture of how the pieces fit together. 

Even though it seems complex, it’s actually all about managing paths. 

It starts with the source material, i.e., the server where the content currently lives. With two CMSs in place, you effectively have two origin servers. The crucial thing here is for both to have temporary, hidden URLs so the reverse proxy knows from where to get data. 

From there, we move to the proxy layer. The industry leader here is Cloudflare, which works as a gatekeeper for your root domain. So, whenever a request reaches Cloudflare, it can’t know on its own what to do. That’s where the serverless code comes into play, specifically Cloudflare Workers. It essentially reads the incoming URL and decides which origin server to talk to. 

The last piece of the puzzle is the routing logic. It’s essentially the map for the whole process, or simply put, the If/Then logic for your site. 

It’s also important to understand that the proxy doesn’t only redirect users. It also changes the actual URL in their browser bar. So, for example, the proxy routes the user to mybrand.com/blog while also sending the actual content from the origin CMS to them. 

Step-by-Step Setup: Configuring Your Reverse Proxy

We’ve arrived at the actual setup process, but before you get into the meatgrinder, make sure you have the technical prerequisites:

• Complete DNS control. You need to be able to point your domain’s servers to Cloudflare. 
• SSL certificates. You need a strategy for handling encryption. This ensures there are no handshake errors when the reverse proxy communicates with the origin servers. 
• Map of directories. You need a clear overview of which subdirectories belong to which platforms. This will avoid routing loops. 

If you have this handled, here’s the process for connecting Webflow and WordPress sites. 

Step 1: Prepare the origin websites 

To route traffic, you need the origin sites to have their own temporary addresses. In other words, both Webflow and WordPress must have specific staging domains or subdomains. If one of these is a secondary origin, ensure that it’s set to no-index, so Google can’t find its content. You need it to find that content through the proxy once it’s set up. 

Step 2: Point your DNS to Cloudflare 

Since Cloudflare cannot act as your reverse proxy without owning the traffic that’s reaching your domain, you need to point your DNS to it. You can do that through your domain registrar by changing the Nameservers to the ones provided by your Cloudflare account. Additionally, you also need to set your main domain as Proxied. 

Step 3: Create your Cloudflare Worker

To handle the routing logic, you need a script for it, and that’s the Cloudflare Worker. You can create it in your Cloudflare dashboard, where you can also give it a name and then deploy it. 

Step 4: Add the routing logic

You need to replace the default code with a script that can identify paths. You need to create a custom JavaScript snippet for that, which is usually done by adapting a standard template from Cloudflare’s documentation. 

Step 5: Configure the routes

With the script in place, you need to set when it will be triggered. You can do that by visiting the domain section in your Cloudflare account and adding a new route. It should have your brand name with an asterisk at the end, like mybrand.com/*, and you need to select the worker you’ve created. 

Step 6: Test and validate

The remaining step is testing the proxy. You can do that with a tool like Postman or by checking the network tab in the browser’s inspect tool. The server header should show Cloudflare, and links like mybrand.com/blog should actually serve content from your secondary CMS.

Bottom Line

Setting up a reverse proxy is crucial if you have multiple CMSs and want your audience to access a single domain that feels visually unified. As you’ve seen, this will also provide better performance and the right signal to search engines. 

The process is somewhat technical, so if you don’t have someone in your team with the know-how, you can always reach out to Flow Ninja. We can be your WebOps team that handles this for you, as we do it almost daily for many of our clients. 

Plus, the process requires coordination between marketing and development, which will avoid SEO and performance complications with your website later down the line. But with the right help from true Webflow natives, you won’t have to worry about a thing.

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