Initial page load speed

Hello!

As a marketer, I develop advertisement solutions for clients. I’ve been using Bubble in the past and I’ve been enjoying it but had to stop using it because of the initial page load speed (i still dream about bubble every day).

I ran a split-test with the exact same audience, same ads, same optimized content on landing pages, but different landing page builders.

  • Blank bubble page has a 3,4-sec first paint here in Denmark with realistic 4g speeds.
  • Alternative I was using for the split-test had a 1-sec first paint in Denmark with realistic 4g speeds.

The campaign was with Facebook ads, spending about 2500$ on the test.

83,54% clicked on the ad and ended up on the Bubble landing page.
91,34% click on the ad and ended up on the alternative page builder landing page.

The results were less than amusing. About 7,8% more actually ended up on the page using the alternative page builder, meaning cost pr. acquisition went down.

Does anyone know of a tool or some way to get the Bubble initial page load speed minimized? Bubble is the perfect tool for my workflow as i can create unique campaign solutions in 1/2 the time, but I can’t deliver solutions that don’t live up to best practice in terms of basic conversion rate optimization.

I’ve tried Cloudflare, but it does not seem to do anything other than trick the page speed tools. Also i ofc use optimized images, no workflows, use 1 font, no plugins, use classes for styles and so on.

Any input is appreciated

5 Likes

I’m interested in this as well. There was a discussion about this recently, and one of the ideas mentioned was to figure out a way to keep unused fonts from loading. Apparently, dozens of fonts were loading, and were a significant source of the page load delay.

I’m a novice on this topic, so sorry I can’t be more helpful.

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Bubble is adding Cloudflare to all of the apps and they are working on performance. That said, if they keep the page load at this poor performance, I don’t believe Bubble will survive the next five years if there are competitors like Webflow offering back-end development by that time.

I trust in Bubble and I believe they will make sure to improve this and be around in the next years to come.

PS: at this moment I’m not promoting Bubble to existing clients because of the SEO and Speed performance.

3 Likes

We recently launched a APP (using Bubble) to our current clients and after a few weeks a did a survey asking them for feedback. It was a tremendous success but the only complaint we had was related with speed/performance.

I started to play with Ionic framework this week and I want to learn because I might have to switch from Bubble if the speed doesn’t improve on the next few months.

I love Bubble (REALLY!) but the performance is no good (and I’m paying $129/month). I really hope they can sort this out.

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Same here. Fingers crossed with this CloudFare integration🤞

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It’s not related to cloudflare only. The page is really heavy, and a lot of things are getting loaded without any reason.

First way to improve things would be to only add by default most widely used fonts. Users should have the ability to add more fonts but it could slow down the app.

Right now hundreds of fonts are loaded, causing seconds of delay.

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@robert Yes fonts are heavy, but on other page builders, I use fonts that are just as heavy and it doesn’t have nearly the same impact.

@caioprezia That is also my conclusion based on feedback I’ve received, also from other developers being amazed at the speed to market and problems I can solve. The products that I can create are great, it just isn’t the best in terms of speed, which hurts revenue.

@jamesbond I can see other page builder providers such as Webflow using fastly as their CDN provider. So maybe Cloudflare can have some better effect when integrated properly - I am very excited about this improvement and skeptical as my own integration with Cloudflare did just about nothing.

@nocodeventure I also do not recommend the use of Bubble to clients for this reason, with longterm marketing-related products such as websites - but for internal tools I still do.

@niklasf Again, this is outside of my area of competence, but it would seem that Bubble should just copy what these other folks are doing if they can load fonts faster.

If that is too difficult for some reason, could Bubble have a checkbox option in the General Settings to only load a minimal package of fonts. I mean, for many of us, we don’t need all of these options, just a handful of good ones.

1 Like