ADR 01: Static hosting on Vercel

Why client sites are static exports on Vercel's free tier.

Status: adopted (2026-07-13)

Context

The agency pays Webflow hosting per site across roughly 30 sites, mostly for content that rarely changes. Webflow cannot be downgraded when a site uses its CMS.

Decision

Clone each Webflow site to a static export, store it in its own GitHub repo, host on Vercel’s free tier, one project per site. Team “withunify” (id team_CBuHDq1f14PhRXka9dkQHZs2).

Consequences

Marginal hosting cost per site is zero. Global CDN, SSL, and previews come free.
Sites keep working exactly as designed; we strip Webflow badges and SRI hashes during cloning.
Webflow-hosted forms still POST to Webflow until the forms module replaces them, so Webflow projects must not be deleted yet.
Editing requires our own tooling, which became the CMS (ADR 02, ADR 04).

Cloning gotchas (encoded in porter/clone.py)

SRI integrity hashes must be stripped after CSS rewriting or pages render blank.
The Webflow badge is removed via data-wf-domain and data-wf-status attributes.
CDN filenames contain spaces, parentheses, and double-encoded characters; decode fully.
Staging sitemap.xml returns 404, so the crawler follows internal links instead.