Do you have your app and landing pages / website on the same app?

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I started a topic a while ago but didnt get a lot of responses even though I think this is a valid issue more people should face. Then again, maybe not but then I’d like to know too!

Continuing the discussion from Domain + sub domain best practices:

To me it sounds safer to separate the actual app and the website/landing pages that should drive traffic to the app. I’d like to know if having landing pages on the same app as the actual app may cause an issue when there is a lot of traffic or if it is not so bad because basically they are static pages.

In my case its a corporate ‘site’ and localized product pages (of which I’m still not sure if I build those out separate or just translate them) on different domains. The corp doesn’t even necessarily link towards the actual app.

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I think it kinda depends on what you’re building. When I made QritiQ, it made sense to have it all at one place: The website (platform) is the product, so there’s no need for marketing/landing pages.

But when, for example, I would build an accounting-app or whatever, I would probably have the Bubble app at “app.example.com” and create the marketing website “example.com” using WordPress or something. Why?

  • Within WordPress I still have more control over the design. (For me it’s still a little easier to create a nice-looking, responsive landing pages with WordPress. But, to each their own, of course.)
  • SEO
  • Cost: Like you’re already saying: What if your site goes viral? You don’t want that to hurt the speed of your app. Visitors will also mean more workflow runs, so you’ll reach the limits of your Bubble plan really quickly.

There are also benefits of it having all within Bubble:

  • All in one place. Easy to manage!
  • You’ll be able to add log-in screens etc. right on your landing pages.

So, like I said, it depends on what you’re building I guess. :slight_smile:

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True about the ‘what you are building’ part. And I do think it’s smart to keep sites and app separately. But I truly dislike working with services like Wordpress. It is the reason I learned to build html sites in the first place.

However, doing it on Bubble is just quicker and more flexible. I just need to figure out the tradeoff between:

Having multiple domains + sites on a single app, let’s say the ‘website app’. Since you can only add one domain to Bubble, any redirects will be then displayed in the destination url. I’ve read about ways to circumvent this but not sure if that is possible on Bubble. Could someone confirm if this is possible?

Sign up will indeed be faster if you do it on the app.

Localization may be easier and cheaper using Bubble.

Integration with the Bubble app will be easier from another bubble app than a Wordpress run site I presume

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The trouble with having everything on the same page is that it may create a very high exit rate.

When you have people travelling along the website and relevant anchor texting, it creates a lower exit rate as well as bounce rate because the site hierarchy and structure make a lot of sense to the end user.

Also, if the domains have no real connection to the website, you will be chastised by Google for delivering traffic all over the place, jack up bounce rate (because people will be leaving relevant domains) and eventually hurt your organic exposure.

Look at #3 to understand better.

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@vincent56 and I have already discussed this a bit privately, but I’ll add my five cents here to in case it’s useful for someone else.

I made our entire app in Bubble, but the landing page in Wordpress, and here’s why:

Wordpress worked out of the box
For the features I needed for the landing page, Wordpress (with the Divi page builder that I use) offered it pretty much out of the box, whereas in Bubble I would have to build it. For the app of course, it was the other way around – Wordpress couldn’t possible match Bubble’s flexibility. Wordpress was just a lot quicker, and would be 100% responsive instantly.

I didn’t want traffic on the landing page to affect the app
They could of course be separated, but it would cost more. At our current traffic level and Bubble package, a spike in traffic on the landing page would noticeably affect the app.

Bubble is not yet fast enough
As much as I love Bubble, it’s just a fact of life for now that it’s slow compared to other platforms. For a while, I did a hybrid, with Wordpress as the main site, and a registration form powered by Bubble in an iFrame. Without Bubble, the page loaded fully in about 4 seconds (I can’t remember the exact time). Adding a Bubble form with two text fields and a button, it took nearly 20-25 seconds to load the same page, which hurts conversion rate and SEO significantly. I just couldn’t defend keeping the form vs. loading time.

I don’t know how Bubble performs SEO-wise
Bubble might be SEO friendly – and it might not be. I just don’t know. What I do know is that Wordpress is extremely SEO friendly, so it felt safer to go with. The loading time is of course not helpful to SEO either.

There are many perfectly good reasons to build a landing page in Bubble, of course. But with the tradeoffs described above, it just wasn’t right for us at this time. It might change in the future. Optimally, I’d like to have everything “speak the same language”, but not at any price.

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I see people are still reading this thread. Things happen fast in the Bubble world, and while I do stand for most of what I’ve written above, some of it deserves an adjustment after ten months.

Bubble is not yet fast enough
To be clear, there are still some areas with room for improvement in Bubble’s speed, but overall it has become a lot faster. Also, new tools have been introduced and techniques discussed on the forum to make sure that the app is built in an efficient way. Overall, it’s no longer given that a Wordpress site will perform better than a Bubble site. It depends on a lot of variables.

** I don’t know how Bubble performs SEO-wise**
A good dialogue with Bubble support and having seen some cases, this is up for discussion. As it often is with SEO, there’s no clear-cut answers. Some people still prefer a Wordpress frontpage and think this performs better (or are afraid to “poke the bear” by changing it), while other’s are getting excellent results with Bubble. The Bubble homepage itself (which is built in Bubble) performs well, for example. I won’t say “Bubble is on par with Wordpress”, but I won’t say the opposite either.

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Peter its great to ready your input on segregating landing and main app. Bubble landing is slow , especially on mobile and I am paying the price for this as I have 1,000 landing pages and they just don’t load fast enough. Do you have a recommendation on what platform to use and if to use it as a sub-app ?

Edit : Here is a landing page example from my app. Some pages have even more questions.

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Hi @Prashant

First off, I’m not an expert on the different platforms, so it wouldn’t be right to give any direct recommendations I’m afraid. Secondly, I’m not sure such a direct comparison should be done, as there are a lot of variables that determine page speed, and it’s not given that a Wordpress page with the same content will outperform your Bubble page (though it might).

I just tested your page on Gmetrix, and compare it with a simplistic Wordpress site I’m running, and your site loaded 479ms faster, even thought it is 1.27 MB bigger. Your slowest loading components are not actually related to Bubble, but are the mylivechat.com and Google Tag Manager snippets, adding more than 1.5 second in total to the loading time. This is a one-time quick analysis of course, but it does illustrate that Bubble is just one of many variables that determine page speed, and I think people are too quick to judge it as the sole culprit.

That being said, if you are frustrated with the current speed, I would experiment a bit with different solutions before making a decision. I’m not saying a change in platform will not help, I’m just saying it’s very hard to tell without testing. I encourage people to not throw all their eggs into that basket, when actually a range of small tweaks might give a bigger improvement than the huge task of rebuilding your app elsewhere.

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Thanks Peter for your input. I love bubble and and a big supporter. But like all things in the world there a few draw back which they are working in. I raised in another forum that Google is now indexing basing on mobile page load speed and somehow bubble framework is scoring very low.

I will consider loosing some of the images / apps and bump up the plan to see if it makes a difference. Also my landing pages are dynamic meaning basin on URL the content is loaded into framework. Most performance apps see when page html is loaded and not full data load. So users are experiencing slower speeds than what some of these apps suggest.

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Yeah, the mobile loading speed score has been discussed in some other threads, and is a current drawback, I agree. The team is aware of it, but that’s all I know atm.

Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful here, but I encourage you to post any learning you make from your process, both us users and the Bubble team are in a state of constant learning about how to improve loading speeds, so any details are interesting.