How can bubble be so slow?

I have been using bubble for a year and a half. Speed was always an issue. I came back after a couple of months and the situation seems worst.

I tried an experiment to see if it was only an impression. I made a new that it is a blank page with a text. No plugins installed. Nothing but a text. These are the results from PageSpeed Insights:

These results are pretty bad for a fully functioning website, but for a blank page, they are a disaster. How can bubble be so slow?

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I’m surprised at the speed of my site. I’ll do another test tomorrow. @bubble?
With 3 units more: 9. From a virtual amazon s3 windows server: 26.

update: You’re right @neerja, in Dec2018 it was at 10.

@JohnMark post updated for more recent stats: Airbnb shows score of 35 and Uber shows 5. PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse metrics are not a good reference point as you can see major tech companies scored low which is inaccurate for page load times experienced by users. That said, we are working on optimizing for this score.

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After 8 months, you made no progress. With these performances, bubble’s users can forget about ranking in google.

I supposed it was a momentary problem, not a “built-in feature”. Then I will look elsewhere, thanks for your time :D.

@lucarenga1 We are making as much progress as large tech companies :slight_smile: See post above. In our experience, this score is not strongly correlated to ranking as most apps are able to rank high with the built-in SEO settings. Email our team if you have further questions about optimizing for your app.

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In my experience, speed is an important factor when it comes to seo, but I have no problem changing my mind. Can you share some of those bubble-app that rank high? :slight_smile:

I think for what’s offered, bubble isn’t that bad…
name other sites that you can do just as much or more (while retaining no-code friendly UI/UX) that out perform bubble.

If you can name a few then maybe I’m on the wrong platform. :+1:t2:

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Sorry, but I don’t get your comment.

Right now, I am considering performance (speed) as the only variable. And when it comes to speed, bubble is probably the slowest no-code builder I ever tried, by far. Like it or not, speed is something you can’t ignore in 2020.

I have no doubt that it is one of the most powerful, but that’s not the point here.

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I agree that Bubble should be faster. I dont agree that you said Bubble is not making progress. Bubble apps are much faster now since the last update.

They are making progress everyday. You shouldn’t place your mouth where your eyes haven’t been. That said, which plan are you on?

Can we see your database setup and privacy rules? I bet you haven’t even created anything useful with Bubble yet.

You can prove me wrong. Looking forward to your answer.

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I agree with your argument regarding performance. However, like @neerja stated, metrics by PageSpeed Insights are usually misleading and inaccurate - so if you’re basing your app’s performance issues on that premise, you may want to reconsider. I have Webflow apps that score much lower than your score.

Below are PageSpeed Insight’s scores for Uber and Airbnb respectively.

Uber:

Airbnb:

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My compliments for the rudeness my friend.

I have built and sold two Saas on bubble. In addition, I built a marketplace that was pretty complex.

I said that this was a blank page, just to test if the performance issue where on my side. If a blank page performs so bad, that I can easily think that the problem is on bubble’s side.

Again nice to meet you.

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I am not evaluating the app performance based on PageSpeed Insights only. I take into consideration those stats for SEO’s purposes, because Google does the same.

I know that there are lots of tech companies whose website sucks, according to PageSpeed Insights metric, but they are so big that: 1. they don’t rely anymore on SEO. 2. they have so many backlinks and so muc domain authority, that can easily compensate for the bad PageSpeed Insights metrics. The average bubble users can’t say the same, unfortunately. The average bubble user needs to optimize everything, if he wants to rank in google for decent keywords.

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I found Google PageSpeed Insights to very subjective at ranking your real website speed.
I usually use Pingdom to really figure out whether there is something we can\should improve.

https://tools.pingdom.com

Here’re the example result of Airbnb on Pingdom by the way.
Not mind blowing, but not as awful as it looks like on PSI (1sec page load is not too bad).

I understand that it does not help the perception of Google of your website, which is what you are saying :slight_smile:

IMO the real problem with Google is that it just does not like dynamically rendered websites.
A lot of Insights from PSI are about removing this script and that script, or changing something in the way they load\work.

Google favors good old static html websites that sit still while it crawls them.

All that being said - I fully agree that Bubble has a lot to improve in terms of speed, and I also agree that there is visible progress over the last couple of years.

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I’m not being rude, that’s not my intention. It’s just missing some emoticons on the text. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

+1 for pingdom tools.

I also find https://gtmetrix.com quite useful as well, pretty extensive report and easily exportable.

Initial test

2nd test (still probably not cached)

Initial test

Again 2nd test (again these are probably not cached from different browser)

I also ran a initial test on a Zeroqode template (I’m not picking on Zeroqode here, I just wanted to use a template that has a pretty complex and element intense frontend.) Note: this is on the Hobby free plan, so possibly throttling page load:

And here is a initial test of a site I run thats on the ‘Personal legacy’ plan, again quite a large page (index):

With both Bubble sites within the waterfall of page requests I have noticed a few things that are adding relative delays to a full page load, not sure if these are normal:

Font requests from Googles Font API

Javascript requests


Now I’ll be the first to admit I’m not 100% sure what I am looking at and how these variables are calculated to process the end results, but thought I’d share on the subject of testing tools and page performance under live sites.

Also for general context for averages for insight:

image
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Sorry for the long scroll :wink:

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Holy cow that’s a lot of font requests…

+1 for Bubble being slow. But i hold my breath because i love it.

Anyone know of a way to offload fonts with Bubble?

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I’ll need to do some speed tests between using the integrated Google Fonts API and using custom fonts, loaded over Cloudfront via this technique - but it might be a quicker way round (the latter technique).

I’ll do a couple of tests over the weekend if I get time and report back with findings.

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Here are the findings over some quick tests in relation to the above post:

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