Bubble.io SEO ... Problems and Solutions

I think that may be a useful solution to the buttons with workflow redirects as these are not found when crawling by the looks.

Absolutely, and there is where you would need to be careful building apps for both humans and search engines to consume data (if you want parts of the site indexed correctly that it).

Bubble is super powerful as a single page app and with dynamic content but the tradeoffs is the page data is not always readable by search engines.

My thoughts on this is the developer would need to consider if the data should also be consumed in search and if so either there should be consideration to SEO pages for this purpose. whilst still allowing for the usability of the site visitor.

If you were building a marketplace or a job board its likely you need the user generated content found by search engines as part of your marketing and growth strategy - so ensuring this data is visible is key.

I wouldnā€™t entirely rule it out, I think with a bit more digging we can come up with a Bubble SEO planā€¦ all the things that are needed to do to ensure everything is set up when launching ā€¦ its why i created this thread.

I just want to use the one framework, i like it, so we just need to understand it better from this angle.

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!00% agree and it seems like madness to run two independent frameworks - app and marketing when Bubble should do both perfectly.

And the purpose of this post is to understand any deficiencies, issues and try to work together for an SEO plan of action for any serious Bubble ap that wants to rank.

And really appreciate your posts @josh24

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Absolutely there are choices to make in terms of whether a search is best done server-side or client-side, but unfortunately with more complex searching, Bubble wonā€™t give you that choice. An app with a smaller database will work fine with client side searching, but will be in for an unpleasant surprise once you start getting a lot of records. The time to download and filter the records kills the speed, and then having all those records in memory can crash the browser.

On SEO, agree that you need to always have a good optimized structure when designing, but still Bubble writes the code (and downloads all kinds of stuff unrelated to the page being loaded) and my concern is that Google has a hard time digging through all of that. One of the SEO experts I read says to launch in Wordpress specifically because itā€™s such a common platform that Google really knows how to read it.

I originally launched my public facing pages and blog in Bubble but eventually flipped them to Webflow. I would greatly prefer to keep everything in Bubble, but Webflowā€™s code is really clean and loads crazy fast, so when competing for organic SEO (which is extremely competitive in my sector) I felt I needed to get any incremental advantage I could.

However if my SEO depended upon content in my database (which it doesnā€™t because my content is password locked), then Iā€™d be using Bubble SEO the best I could.

(This is a great thread BTW and I appreciate the posts ā€“ I think Bubble SEO topics need a lot more attention).

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Hey @ed727

I genuinely want to understand this a little better - when you say you donā€™t get a chance of client-side/server-side searchingā€¦

So I absolutely think Bubble needs to do a better job of communicating in the Bubble manual about what functions are handled client side vs. server side - that would be a huge help if they communicated particularly what would be handled client-side and I know would have saved me countless hours.

For me it was a huge help to read @petter guide on Bubble performance. Actually Iā€™m pretty sure Bubble reference this somewhere in their documentation which I find interesting :grinning:

However, when I create apps, understanding how those search operations work I consider that in my database design and then construct my app and searches in such a way that I can handle the heavy lifting on the server. I get that this is a roundabout way and difficult for a new/novice user to do, as Iā€™ve learnt by reading & trial and error. But I guess the point Iā€™m trying to make it that itā€™s not luck of the draw and there are ways to build your app so this isnā€™t a problem if you understand the consequences of how you build your app.

Even if you go down the path of a Wordpress site or similar, if you have a massive database youā€™d always at some point use a third-party service to help speed that up, which of course you can do in Bubble with Algolia fairly easily, or any number of similar services.

So I guess the moral of the story is that there are still ways to optimise for this, no platforms are perfect, but Bubble should take a stronger opinion and provide more guidance in a lot of cases on how they think people should use their product - which I think would save people so much time building apps, but also save server resources.

On page SEO

I agree. I think Bubble sees itself as creating the pages behind a login mostly, so this isnā€™t top priority to solve. But there is a huge opportunity to sell subscriptions to people just looking at building landing pages if they considered this some more.

I remember looking at Webflow in the past to sell memberships to a course and for what I wanted to do it was going to require a Webflow subscription and like 2-3 other paid services to get some Frankenstein setup. All things that would be achieved in Bubble without too much hassle, but I initially didnā€™t even think of Bubble as itā€™s not really how they position their product.


Josh @ Support Dept
Helping no-code founders get unstuck fast :rocket:save hours, & ship faster with an expert :man_technologist: on-demand

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The performance book you reference is a great resource. One of the things it discusses in the section on Bubble performance limitations is that more advanced searches usually get pushed client side.

My personal hurdle (Iā€™m not an agency, but built an app for my business idea) is simple list-to-list searches, such as if you have a few subject tags on a thing, and you want to be able to select multiple tags to search on. This currently involves an advanced filter and intersect with. I have on my list of to-doā€™s to rebuild some of these structures as joining tables, then intersecting multiple server-side searches and seeing which ones run client or server side.

More generally, Iā€™ve also seen Bubble experts telling users to use an advanced filter to accomplish a search need, which indicates that client side is the only option in some cases.

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@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 itā€™s on a larger list of issues.

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. 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

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Thatā€™s great stuff River,

I feel like at least this is all moving in the right directionā€¦

Please update if you can when you have more details and hopefully if there is enough community support they push forward with changes.

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I also think the load time of pages hinders indexation initially when Google first discovers new content and crawls it due to the js etc as mentioned.

To me as a user of the apps they seem pretty fast, this is why itā€™s probably a crawl budget thing, computing resources for the crawl.

If that is the case an indexation service with say a subdomain and wordpress via the wp api that has all the main seo items and content then a canonical back to the bubble pages. This could then be submitted regularly for Google to crawl and should help with rankings in the interimā€¦ As a thought

Itā€™s possible via zapier, but probably isnā€™t to tough natively, although Iā€™ve not yet tried.

And interesting link I found on this post:

In relation to single page aps and vue or JavaScript rendered sites.

Lots of detail here to digest for those interested.

Here is another article on client and server side rendering:

https://www.botify.com/blog/client-side-server-side-rendering-seo

Here is another interesting discussion on bubble seo in the forum

http://forum.bubble.io/t/do-you-know-a-seo-successful-bubble-website/153118

Thanks for adding details on the overall seo best practice veronica, a useful post, however her weā€™d like to addressā€™s the technical seo issues that are causing people in the Bubble.io community concern.

Does zerocode have any opinion, ideas on the core issues outlined here ? @ZeroqodeTeam it would be good to get a long term users experience :blush:

Thanks

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Hey @rivergalli did yo ever get any more feedback on your support issues?

Hey @stuart4, I understand where youā€™re coming from. A lot of the advice people will give are to use the built in features, mention SEO best practices, all while glossing over the lack of technical ability within Bubble for SEO.

I went down the rabbit hole in November - ultimately waiting to find the technical talent to implement a Weblfow landing page and having the Bubble app in a Subfolder. Iā€™ll let you know if I find someone.

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I continue to stay in contact with Bubble support on a weekly basis and the current message is they are investigating. I also pointed them to this thread to ensure they understand this seems to be a pervasive issue, which I believe should be addressed. The issue I contacted them about specifically is only the js file sizes and blocking performance. I will continue to bring this up with them.

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thanks for the follow-up, appreciated. My objective it to keep all issues I (we find) in one place to stop the endless searching for info by everyone.
Thanks again.

Hi, I think Bubble has expanded its discussion on SEO in its manual, which includes addressing things that come up in Google audits as well as some other common questions. I donā€™t recall seeing this when I originally read the manual, but maybe it was already there.

SEO - Bubble Docs

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That Iā€™m is an excellent read. Seams like page load speeds are the final piece of the puzzle

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Very interesting, they have tried to address a lot of point and added some ideas to try. I will likely take a section at a time and list it here to be commented on so people can have opinions, tests listed.

Some handy video walkthroughs on some Bubble SEO configs: SEO Tips for Bubble - YouTube

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