Ive tried building a real estate website on Webflow, however due to the fact that Webflow doesnt do serverside rendering, it will load all the real estate listings at once, which makes for a very poor load speed.
Even 2500 listings is 20MB of data.
Does bubble have this same issue? IS it possible to build a real estate website or app, that can have 10, 20 or 40k listings and be able to give the user a good UX?
What are bubbles limitations?
Also how easy would it be to use airtable as a single source of truth and update bubble via airtable data and the API?
Let me help you out with some insights on Bubble and how it might work better for your real estate website.
The good news is, Bubble allows you to paginate your data, so you won’t have to load all the listings at once. Instead, you can load smaller chunks, making things faster and smoother for users. You can achieve this using Bubble’s repeating groups, which let you display a set number of items per page, with handy navigation for users to browse through different pages.
Now, Bubble is a no-code platform, so there might be some limitations, especially if you need really unique or complex features. But for a real estate site with lots of listings, it should work pretty well. The actual limitations will depend on your specific needs and how complex your project is.
As for using Airtable as your main data source and updating Bubble via Airtable’s API, that’s totally doable! Bubble has a built-in API Connector that lets you hook up to external APIs like Airtable’s. You can use this to pull data from your Airtable base and update your Bubble app in real-time. Plus, you can use Bubble’s workflows to create, update, or delete records in Airtable. It’s a nice way to keep everything organized while still taking advantage of Bubble’s visual development features.
For example, in Webflow, to be able to filter all listings, you need to load all items, even with pagination. This results in 2-5k listings being loaded with thumbnails which is makes it slow. This is a real limitation in Webflow due to the fact that everything is loaded client side.
How does it work in Bubble? How would someone be able to filter through all listings in the database? THere is no server side rendering in Bubble currently correct?
So are you guys saying that the user wouldn’t have to download all 10-20k listings to be able to filter search property listings?
Page load speed would be fast as well?
Really this is the main issue I’m concerned about. In Webflow having 3k+ CMS items already starts to slow things down as the user has to download all items to be able to filter.
I think 40K items in the Bubble DB will be too much to handle… That’s all the reasoning. Tbh I don’t have any numbers to support my assumption. Just a gut feeling.
The magic number when it comes to limits for some of the features in bubble is 10k. For example,
currently, lists are limited to 10k items.
there’s a hard limit of combined value of 10k for elements, events and actions on a single page.
As others have mentioned above, using Algolia is a great solution to overcome bubble’s limitations when it comes to large data sets. Algolia is faster than bubble searches. And inegrating Algolia with bubble will enable advanced search features, such as faceting and filtering, to enhance the search experience for your app’s users.
Bubble’s true potential can be achieved through integrating bubble with external sources such as Algolia. And you can create a feature rich product with great user experience. I recommend bubble without a doubt.
Thank you for the detailed response. In real estate website many-to-many search is exactly what is needed as a primary functionality of such a website or webapp.
On the flip side, I have a friend with a software company who has offered to build us a web-app at cost-price pretty much at around 14k USD. Which might be the better option right now.
We currently have a Wordpress website, which has served its purpose well the last 3 years since we started our agency, but now we have opened a second office in a second location and want to upgrade to a website where we can easily have multiple cities and we will end up with around 20k+ listings in a year and a half from now and possibly 40k listings in the next 3-5 years.
And we want a scalable website with low page load speeds to be able to give a good UX and also get a good ROI on google ads.
Why not keep it with Webflow. (I’m assuming you already have a product built there and it’s possible to do what I’m about to explain with Webflo-…I mean “bubble” )
Pay 1/5th of your budget to getting someone to set you up with a MongoDB database that will hold all your data for basically free. Set up a few searches and you can host millions of datapoints and just return 20 top results each search.
(Idk if it’s possible on webflow, but I have a few Million records in my MongoDB and it takes 1-2 seconds to get data returned via Data API here on Bubble. )
There are some approaches for doing a many to many search server side, so I don’t think that will be a limiting factor. Built correctly, Bubble could handle a real estate site with sufficient speed.
But if your site is heavily reliant on SEO, you’ll want to be comfortable that Bubble performs well enough there.
TLDR this is possible to do in Bubble but you’ll need to use some “search as a service” like Algolia or Typesense.
I’ve built/maintain exactly the application you’re talking about for a realtor operating across 4 states. I won’t name them but we have over 100k records we instant search using a custom plugin I’ve built to connect with Algolia/Typesense. Bubble is able to natively search/filter results fairly quickly if the filters you’re using are setup well. But the moment you want to do text based/fuzzy matching searches (say to return results even when someone misspells an address) you’re going to need Algolia or Typesense because native bubble searches just take too long to return results (10+ seconds).
While there are Algolia/Typesense plugins available right now, they all miss the mark in terms of giving Bubblers the full power of those respective services while still being easy to integrate/maintain. And rolling your own integration using the API connector is very doable but requires a lot of TLC to get setup/maintain.
I’m launching my plugin in restricted beta on April 10th (we currently have a handful of customers using it and will be taking on 10 more before officially launching in about 6 weeks) but let me know if you want a sneak peak at our demos/what it looks like to use in the app editor. Best of luck!
Oh so that’s what you’re working on, @zelus_pudding. Good to see yet another someone who really understands what Bubble devs need working on a plugin like this!
