@stuart4 Fantastic Post. I have been working with Support for a few weeks on issue #3 Google PageSpeed Insights & LightSpeed. We compete in a very competitive SEO landscape as I assume many others do and page load performance on static and low compute pages is a real problem. After looking in detail there seem to be some major issues with the size of run.js and static.js (the main bubble JS libraries) which cause mobile and desktop performance to suffer, which has an impact on Google ranking. I suspect the impact is quite high given how poor the performance is but this is purely speculative. This is a fundamental issue for sites attempting to score high in the Google ranking algorithm.
You can see in the image below the performance we are seeing.
I have made some suggestions to support to assist which might help but I assume it’s on a larger list of issues.
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Currently, Bubble loads all core plugins in these 2 files for every page, regardless, even if the plugin is not used. This could be addressed by creating separate .js files at deployment time for each page which only includes components/plugins for the given page (hopefully reducing the size).
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There is no minification going on in these files which is perplexing. But I assume there is a reason behind this. That said, this would go a long way to reducing the size I assume.
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I also wonder if breaking these files up into smaller files might help as they could be parallelized. Again, I am not an expert on this front, so basically, just a hypothesis that would need to be tested. Someone with knowledge of whether the Google mobile client would parallelize would know better if this is a viable solution.
In any case, I will update the thread if I hear anything further from Support. I do feel this is a critical issue for Bubble itself and any site attempting to rank high on Google.
It should be noted, that the actual performance on mobile does not seem to correlate directly with PageSpeed Insights. The end-user experience is completely reasonable. That said, I assume user experience would improve as well if these issues were resolved.
If anyone has further input please let me know.
Regards,
River