I’m not sure where to put this question, I’m just a frustrated Bubble user.
My Situation
I have a website that is built on Bubble. Halfway through development I realized after talking to several developers that moving my database to something like Xano would be wise as I’ve got a database of ~8,500 products and it’s being updated by the minute with new price information.
The concept was simple: House my product data on Xano and then use Bubble’s frontend to display it. With Bubble not having to chrun through it’s own database, one would think that would free up the capacity.
The Problem
A video went viral talking about my website on TikTok last week and traffic exploded. Sadly, most were met with a blank site as Bubble completely crapped the bed. I get it; 2,000 users an hour for a price comparison site is a bit much for a $29/month plan. I’ve since made lots of optimizations to lower usage on Bubble (which was mostly “Page Load” and “Other”) and finally bit the bullet and upgraded to Professional. With traffic now much lower (200-400 users an hour), a dedicated server space with bigger capacity, and Bubble not having to worry about anything in the DB (since it’s all on Xano) surely the site will be good to go, right?
The Reality
Of course not! As soon as I allowed my users to once again make search queries to my Xano DB to find products, users were reporting blank pages, endless loading bars and often just the classic “app is busy” screen from Bubble.
I’ve gone through every optimization guide for Bubble for “scaling” and I’ve even ran tests to Xano to see if that was causing issues but when I run calls to Xano (even during mass traffic times when my Bubble site won’t load) the longest a huge search query to my DB take to process is about 0.17 seconds.
With the holiday shopping season just around the corner, I have zero faith in Bubble right now. Why can’t I just have a server that scales with me rather than forcing me to use bloated space with a ceiling? Is there something I’m missing? Do I just have unrealistic expectations of a nocode platform?
I’m not sure if I’m allowed to drop links in here but if you wanted to test the site out yourself to see if you see anything obvious that I’m missing, it’s https://techaudit.tv
What, exactly, are you using Bubble for if your database is external? The front end web serving (simply speaking, page loads) in Bubble is the source of your slowness. Is the front-end, no code page builder that fucking awesome? (Because it’s kind of not.)
This is a serious question, asked in good faith. (Also, surely you know who I am.)
Also, I run multiple personal plans just to provide support to Bubblers who use my open source plugins. You can’t seriously be saying that the personal plan price is exorbitant in your context.
(Is Bubble shitty price/performance compared to Google Cloud Functions? Sure. But that doesn’t seem to be what you’re paying Bubble for.)
If your site could otherwise be static and you have the skills, why on earth would you be paying Bubble anything?
I’m SERIOUSLY curious about this. What is it that Bubble is providing to you AT ALL? The Expression Builder? I mean… c’mon.
FWIW @brandon8 you’ve done a really nice job on this site - looks great - loads quick for me - not very useful feedback but just giving you a compliment - kudos
It mainly comes down to the fact that Bubble is all I really know. I’m not a developer and can’t code and don’t have time to learn of all that. Everything I read is that Bubble is the best solution if you want that app-like experience that can do complex things. I suppose I’m unsure what defines “complex”.
I do like the idea of offering different experiences to different users. For example, when I’m logged in as an Admin, I have a Group that is my “Admin Dashboard” that appears that lets me do things like automatically post a link to the product in my Discord, send a tweet, push an email out to a select group of people, etc.
Little stuff like that is nice to have and I don’t know if that falls under a complex feature that only Bubble would offer, or if there are better visual frontend builders that can both scale with me (charge me all you want, just promise the site will stay up!) and offer similar app-like features.
A few months ago when Bubble came out with an announcement about new pricing plans they were going to introduce and pissed every Bubbler off, Xano got a lot of free publicity as a Bubble alternative. Around that time some users suggested Bubble were throttling connections to Xano. I’m not sure if that was/is the case but could be a possibility.
Also, if you contact Xano support, they should be able to pin point where the issue is.
First, great looking site! It was quite responsive for me. No lag at all. However, I will weigh in on what you might want to do. Bubble, while a no code solution, is still complex to use. You don’t have to be a developer to use it, but it does help. That having been said, perhaps this site might help
So I’ve been digging into this a bit more. Right now as I’m typing Google Analytics is showing my site is getting about 300 users an hour and everything seems fine.
Last night when I pinged my Discord community that the site was “ready to go” with some of the new search features, it was crashing for about an hour. Zero stress on Xano’s servers (I have one of their highest plans and I’ve personally worked with them to make sure it’s well optimized). The site, at that time, was getting about 200 users an hour. So something is up.
I woke up this morning and thought “I bet I have a random scheduled workflow I built months ago that is just firing off a ton of workflows at some random schedule”. Well, that wasn’t it. But take a look at this:
That hour long spike is when Bubble crapped its pants. Notice the workflows running in the bottom left? Seems pretty normal/stable. But look at the visits! That flat steady line you are seeing is the ~300 users an hour. But during that spike Bubble measured ~44,000 visits! That was not my audience. Even if EVERY PERSON in my Discord went to the site suddenly that would only be around 2,500 people. No chance that happened.
Yet no spike in workflows and Google Analytics didn’t detect any of it. I want so bad for this be a user error on my part or even some sort of DDOS attack but I really would hate to think that Bubble can’t handle this kind of traffic.
The funny thing is my SEO is garbage right now, which for an affiliate-based site, is an important thing to have. Also, because everything in Bubble is dynamic (certainly some big advantages to that) it’s not the most SEO friendly platform, that is, if you aren’t willing to roll up your sleeves and make it a focus.
I don’t have other platforms in mind at the moment. The closest would be Weweb from my research. I plan on introducing more “app-like” features to the site that involve a lot of conditional logic so staying with Bubble is ideal since I’m very familiar with it. My main concern is just being on a server than can scale with my traffic.
With the recent discovery above regarding the spike in “pageviews” that don’t seem to be real, it makes me more optimistic about Bubble as there may be something deeper going on. Still waiting to hear from Bubble!
I would strongly recommend splitting your approach - rebuild your site with something more purpose built for content / affiliate. You wont get very far in the SEO game when competitors are just gonna load faster by a wide margin (see lighthouse below):
- kudos 
