I can not get a quasi blank page (a single button) to get better than a 69 on performance using lighthouse and curious if anybody has a bubble built site with a 70 or higher in performance.
I get this response when asking chatGPT for help on how to improve…
A score of 69 indicates moderate performance—it’s not terrible, but it’s below the ideal threshold. In Lighthouse, scores above 90 are typically considered excellent, while scores below 50 are poor. A score of 69 means there’s noticeable room for improvement in areas such as resource loading, script execution, and rendering optimizations. Given that many of these factors are controlled by Bubble.io, it reflects the inherent overhead of the platform rather than just your page’s design.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that a load speed of 2-3 seconds definitely feels like it is instant to my naked eye. My concern on lighthouse speeds is how that does or does not affect Google rankings or SEO as Google puts a heavy heavy focus on speed to determine if a site is good or not. I’m not sure if lighthouse shows the same methods Google does to determine speed and the score from lighthouse as indicative of the same markings Google would apply.
We have control over these 3…we can achieve 100 across the board on these 3, although you need to monitor it as sometimes things happen in Bubble that can cause them to slip a bit.
It is also something I’ve learned recently to test in incognito mode and in live…both ChatGPT and Bubble support have suggested as such.
If it is the local part that makes you not worry about SEO, the rise of voice based search and its propensity to be localized, especially in the way we speak the question prompts that often includes our location or wording to the effect like ‘near me’, any type of SEO strategies implemented that make use of voice based search strategies can have benefits. It is actually in my mind something that the future of apps is localized. Since now so many people can easily get something off the ground for next to nothing, it will really become something that people shed the notion that all apps must be set to take over the world, and embrace the fact that large fish in small ponds can eat really really well.
If it is an idea that it is not live on browsers, and is an actual native app, than yeah, I don’t think any SEO you do on native apps has tangible benefits as the google bots are not crawling live apps…but if it is a bubble built app, it is live on web browsers, and so can get some marginal benefit from SEO…but of course, if your strategy doesn’t incorporate or need SEO there is no reason to try and focus on it.
I’m still trying to understand the importance of the lighthouse performance metric as related to how google ranks sites.
Below is what ChatGPT has to say on the subject of the lighthouse performance scores impact on google rankings…
A Lighthouse performance score of 69 is considered moderate, but it could negatively impact your SEO and user experience. Here’s how:
1. Impact on Google Indexing
Crawlability: If your pages load slowly, Googlebot may not crawl as many pages within its allocated crawl budget.
JavaScript Rendering Issues: If your site relies heavily on JavaScript and it’s slow, Google may not fully index some dynamic content.
2. Impact on Rankings
Core Web Vitals (CWV) Ranking Factor: Google uses Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) as ranking signals. A low performance score may indicate issues with these metrics, lowering your rankings.
User Experience (UX) Signals: If visitors experience slow loading times, they might bounce, reducing dwell time and sending negative engagement signals to Google.
Mobile SEO: Since Mobile-First Indexing is standard, a sluggish mobile experience could hurt rankings, even if desktop performance is better.
3. How to Improve Lighthouse Score & SEO
Optimize Images: Compress images (WebP format is ideal).
Reduce Unused JavaScript & CSS: Minify and remove unused code.
Enable Lazy Loading: This helps with initial load times.
Use a CDN: Improves content delivery speed globally.
Leverage Caching: Reduce server response times.
Optimize Third-Party Scripts: Remove unnecessary third-party scripts or load them asynchronously.
Should You Be Concerned?
A score of 69 is not disastrous, but improving it to 90+ can enhance rankings, user engagement, and indexing efficiency.
Focus on fixing Core Web Vitals, as they have a direct impact on Google’s ranking algorithm.
So this seems to imply it is important to enable Cloudflare which I think is the CDN and enables some extra caching I think. Necessary to remove unused plugins for avoiding third party scripts that are unnecessary…I’m not sure the optimization of images and lazy loading are applicable to improving a blank page performance score.
Yes, I should have explained that it’s a property management app. The only users that will create an account will be tenants. So even local SEO isn’t important for it.
The tenants can submit maintenance requests, view and print their lease, sign a new lease, pay, etc.
You are right @boston85719 … if Lighthouse scores matter for your business, it is extremely difficulty to rank with Bubble at the moment.
Through various caching and proxying ideas, I think Advany from CoAlias and PageRabbit has been able to serve up much better scores on Bubble apps. Its a paid service and is the only effective option that I’ve been able to find for Bubble apps.
For apps at my agency, I serve up all content through a different server and build only the “app” portion on Bubble. Lighthouse doesn’t quite matter for the “app” portion. This works fine as a decent compromise for me.
Sure, the performance score plays a role in SEO. However, if you look at the top-ranking websites for their most important keywords, you’ll notice that many of them don’t have an outstanding performance score. As long as the performance is decent, domain authority and backlinks are far more important for SEO.
Are there any Bubblers with deep SEO knowledge? The HubSpot Academy offers some free courses on the topic.
