Certificates on somebody else's schedule
Webflow turns SSL on by default for every site created since November 14, 2018. You connect a domain, a certificate appears, nobody files a ticket. That is a real convenience, and it holds right up until your domain setup needs a shape the platform does not have.
One site, one set of pages, one default domain
You can connect up to 50 custom domains to a single Webflow site. The same help article explains what that actually means a few paragraphs later: you cannot publish different pages to different domains or subdomains. All 50 serve the same site. One is the default and the other 49 redirect to it, which Webflow recommends so Google does not penalise you for duplicate content.
So the moment marketing lives on yourbrand.com and the docs need their own page tree at docs.yourbrand.com, that is a second Webflow site, and a second site needs its own Site plan. Basic is $15 a month billed yearly, Premium $25, priced per site. Two properties plus a staging copy on a real hostname is three plans before anyone writes a word.
On infrastructure you control, the second domain is a DNS record and a route. We run produlis.com on Cloudflare Workers and adding a hostname costs nothing beyond the thirty seconds of config. The $15 is not what hurts. What costs you is that the platform meters the exact thing you were hoping to stop thinking about.
Your customers' domains are not a product Webflow sells
If you build software rather than brochures, eventually a customer asks to reach it at app.theircompany.com. Webflow's domain model assumes every domain belongs to you, so there is nothing to configure. The answer is a different product.
Cloudflare for SaaS was built for this case. Its plan table as of August 14, 2026 includes 100 custom hostnames on Free, Pro and Business alike, charges $0.10 for each additional hostname, and caps you at 50,000 before you have to talk to sales. There is a ceiling here too: wildcard custom hostnames, custom certificates, CSR support and mTLS are all Enterprise only. A documented ceiling at 50,000 hostnames is still a better place to stand than a feature that does not exist.
Validation also becomes a decision instead of a default. Cloudflare documents automatic HTTP validation, which is simplest and can leave a hostname routing for a moment before the certificate reaches active, TXT records your customer adds themselves, and delegated DCV, a single record at your authoritative DNS that lets every future renewal issue itself. Somebody on your team should be choosing between brief downtime and customer effort. On a platform, that choice has already been made for you.
What holding the ACME account buys
Let's Encrypt publishes its rate limits and they repay a read before you need them. Fifty certificates per registered domain every seven days. Five per exact same set of identifiers every seven days, which is the limit that catches people, because reinstalling a client while debugging eats through it in an afternoon. Three hundred new orders per account every three hours.
Renewals coordinated through ACME Renewal Info are exempt from all of it. That exemption is the argument in miniature. Hold the ACME account yourself and you can adopt ARI, after which your renewals stop counting against any limit at all. If the platform holds it, you learn about certificate problems the way Webflow's own help center describes the process: click Check status, wait, remember that DNS can take 48 hours, and contact support if it is still wrong after two days.
Webflow is in the middle of migrating its DNS infrastructure to Cloudflare, and the help center says plainly that sites may carry one of two different record sets, so you should check Site settings for yours. The A record is 198.202.211.1 today. Sites built before April 21, 2025 have two A records and need both. None of this is carelessness on Webflow's part. It is simply what happens when the infrastructure underneath you belongs to someone else and changes on their calendar.
When staying put is the right answer
If you run one marketing site on one domain, everything above is theoretical. SSL is already on, the certificate renews itself, and you will go years without thinking about any of it. Paying $15 a month to never learn what DCV stands for is a good trade, and I would take it too.
The calculation shifts when domains become part of what you sell. A customer who wants their own vanity hostname, or a docs site that needs a page tree of its own, turns into another Site plan and another thing you cannot put in version control. Count how many of those you expect over the next two years before deciding this is a non-issue.
When we moved Stay World Class off Webflow and Xano onto Next.js, NestJS and Supabase, the domains were the least interesting part of the job. Lighthouse went from 55.91 to 91 out of 100 and LCP got 77% faster. The quieter win was that domain configuration stopped being a support conversation and became a few lines in a file, and nobody has had to think about it since.
