Performance – basic page with poor pagespeed insights score

We’ve invested in building our landing page on bubble in order to save engineering resources. Google ad words is showing that it takes 7 seconds to load for a lot of users.

We have no DB and have optimized the images. Its nothing crazy on the page. As a test, I only added our Footer to a page and ran it through Google’s PageSpeed Insights — performance on mobile is 18 and desktop is 28. The vast majority of opportunity is to Eliminate render blocking resources (screenshot attached).

I’ve read nearly every thread on performance on this forum and am a quarter of the way through @petter 's book on performance. Have bubble users just accepted this as reality? Haven’t seen anything to improve this in particular.

I’m willing to talk to someone that knows their stuff for >$100 an hour. Please tag someone that might be insightful as this needs to improve ASAP due to UX and SEO purposes. @boston85719 — you’ve helped me with a few things in the past :slight_smile: . Thank you!!!

Jack

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This Google performance speed test seems to be a problem that’s hard to get around. My pages work plenty fast for the user, but google gives them low speed scores. In essence, Bubble builds websites that run as web apps, and all that code causes a page to perform poorly on Google’s tests, regardless of the experience of a typical user.

Ironically, many of the major apps perform poorly on Google’s tests as well (including Google apps like Youtube). Google’s measurement target seems to be a user with an outdated mobile phone in a developing country with slow internet speeds – and realistically that’s not the audience for many apps, including business facing ones.

Google has said it is taking page speed into consideration for SEO purposes, but I don’t know much it really weights this factor. It would be good to see Bubble weigh in on this a bit, in terms of its view on the issue and also whether it has projects on the drawing board to improve the situation.

In the forum some have discussed building a landing page on another platform that performs better in speed tests. I guess it’s a tradeoff for whether you want the downsides of complexity and cost of maintaining and integrating 2 platforms (plus a possibly disjointed user experience), vs. the upside of whatever landing page speed pickup you’ll get.

All this said, by all means you should explore making what you have faster and some experts on the forum can help you dig into that – things like image sizes, reducing groups, minimizing workflows, getting rid of plugins and really being sure that any 3rd party plugins aren’t causing issues.

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Hey @jack211 :wave:

I agree with @ed727, make sure there is nothing that is unnecessary in your app. Especially plugins that load into your app without anything even being put on the page.

Here is a test app I just created with absolutely no plugins, no elements on the screen. The only thing is the background color of the page.

On desktop for the page load speed it gets an 87, I think Bubble has done some improvements recently, this was never that high in the past. Good job Bubble. :clap:

On mobile it gets a 56. Again, this is the highest I have seen yet. It seems that they are continually trying to improve this.

There are some obvious things that @bubble can do to improve things as seen here in the images. Again, this is with absolutely no plugins. And all elements deleted.


Hope that helps! :blush:

@j805 www.NoCodeMinute.com

For All Your No-Code Education Needs:

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My experience has been that ‘outsourcing’ your landing page / blog / other headline assets to Webflow is both quicker / less engineering effort and more performant on SEO. I did use to everything ‘in-house’ but combining the two has been so much better.

Webflow templates are high quality, cheap and easy to edit. Blogging is out-the-box with good SEO everywhere. And you can get non-tech people to populate because it’s v simple to use. Meanwhile put your Bubble app at app.domain.com and keep the hardcore mechanics of your app isolated from the marketing front-end.

Happy to talk you through the setup, no money required.

p.s. a footnote on your actual Bubble app performance. I’ve just noticed that your speed testing your test-version rather than your published live version. I see significant speed bumps between test-version and live so I would avoid using any test / dev versions to benchmark speed. [edit - I was actually looking at @J805 's test app but the point may still stand]

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In my opinion, I wouldn’t pay much attention to Pagespeed Insights. I think someone on the forum correctly pointed out that Google itself doesn’t score well. We just re did our own website in Wordpress, which gets notoriously bad Pagespeed scores. Haven’t really noticed an issue in our SEO. I think content is king still when it comes to ranking on Google.

Unhelpful, I know. But maybe it’ll put your mind at ease. Use Bubble for what it’s worth – Super fast MVP – If your idea takes off using Bubble, you can afford to have a pro go in and build it with code and get you a great Pagespeed Insights Score… My 2 cents.

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Hi Jack

Sorry to say I don’t have anything else to add. Seems like others have responded with as much as you would need.

Most of the issues you will face with page speed are based around how Google interacts with Javascript based websites, which all Bubble apps are. Google is trying to get to grips with the fact the internet is changing and more sites are javascript based and since they put such a high emphasis on page speed for deciding on search result rankings (they equate speed with good UX and they want to deliver not just good content but also good UX), they are trying to improve how they handle javascript based sites.

Bubble has also noted many times they are constantly seeking ways to improve, and their funding round announcement indicated a large portion of resources will be dedicated to this.

If the app is going to need organic search traffic, then consider as others have mentioned and use another more static web builder for content/SEO pages, and the functionality of the app on a subdomain.

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thanks @ed727 @exception-rambler @boston85719 @w.fly @J805 !!

I’ve been tinkering with a few things and am making progress. Looks like 56 on mobile is the ceiling based on @J805 test, and hopefully we can get close to that. Going to try this lazy loading plugin this afternoon: Finished Loading (Lazy Loading) Plugin | Bubble

I have read a few things about getting Cloudflare set up to improve performance, but many of these posts are older. Do newer bubble apps already have Cloudflare configured automatically? Anyone tinkered with this?

Thanks again,

Jack

The best bubblers (landing pages) are in Webflow if that is an indication for you

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Awesome, thanks for the update.

I believe Cloudflare is automatic now.

could you share your app maybe? Would it be possible for example to use Webflow for the static pages but trigger a reusable element from bubble via API connector? I m having a booking system and need to book available spots by using a reusable element from bubble

regards

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