Forum Academy Marketplace Showcase Pricing Features

Dashboard Best Practices

Question
#1

I am working on a dashboard that has 7 links that will display 1 of 7 different Groups. Within a couple of the groups will be additional groups for additional information collection and management.

My question is having hidden groups the best way to build the dashboard?

I am trying to reconcile if those groups render and are just not visible until toggled and so the dashboard page is a resource piggy. Some of the groups have data being presented via an API so as the user clicks from one link in the menu to the next, the group that is revealed may need to refresh data from an API.

Is that a best practice or is it smarter to keep the page small and just have more pages in the app? My guess is more pages - would like to know what others think.

#2

Groups and elements that are hidden on page load are loaded on the page but not rendered until needed. If they are populated with data stored in Bubble, the data isn’t called and populated until the group is made visible (or if the data in the hidden element is needed by something that is visible on the page). I don’t know if the same holds true for data from an API.

Having a single page should be faster and less jarring than forcing the user to constantly have to switch and reload pages. It depends though on the user journey and what exactly you are showing.

Having a number of hidden groups on their own won’t bog the page down. What will bog the page is if you’re loading tons of data to the page, doing lots of client side processing, or using buggy plugins. Keep the page build clean, be very lean about plugins, do your due diligence on 3rd party plugins, and have the filtering of data done server side.

You can start with a single page and see how it performs as you build it, and if you are running into issues you can’t resolve, you can consider splitting it up. My advice is to build & test – ie with every new thing you add, test the page again for speed, so if something screws it up you’ll know right away and can deal with it now, rather than hunting for a needle in a haystack at the end.

#3

Thanks! We are working on a social media marketing platform that will stream LinkedIN content performance into the app and then allow the user to sort and tag content by topic or category or with their own html tags.

What we are looking at is a dashboard with an invisible RPG that would pull the content from LI API when a user navigates to the Analytics menu item. On the menu, they might select “Creator” and a popup would come up and the person can create an article and then submit it to the LI profile or page. They could also select a Data/Time and schedule it into a calendar that they could also access by selecting a menu item.