Thought this was the best topic to post this in given the date and issues described.
I’m pretty surprised by the fact that my site performs worse than a copy of the site (with some pages removed) on a free plan.
This tells me that for website loading and rendering, the server capacity units do not add any value. There is another topic about cloudfront being very slow and I’m wondering, seeing these test results, what we or Bubble can do to help improve this or if Bubble can give an update on which changes will come (about) when to solve these issues.
The 5 sec load issue already exists since 2015!
I tested three sites:
App Copy - About page
App Version test - About page
App Version Live - About page
The about page has one html element with js and is just one container with 2 images and a couple of paragraphs of text.
The Copy page is an exact copy but with 80% less pages and no premium plugins. The About page, however, is the same as the others.
These are the test results (as per https://www.webhostinghero.com, I tested a few times to see an average that made sense, as I also saw 11 seconds load time at one point!)
Copy app
Version-test
Version-live
Now I’m no expert, so please tell me what I’m looking at but if I look at the main ‘red’ issues:
Make fewer http requests
There are hardly any components on the page, and they are all grouped so that would be as fast as possible. There is just one script on the page directly (and two in the header through settings), so I’m not sure what to improve here.
Add Expires headers
This is a method of caching elements if I understand it correctly. However, this does nothing for first time visitors.
Compress components with Gzip
This is the only difference between the main apps and the copy app, none of the premium plugins are loaded. With the increasing number of plugins from various different sources, will this become an even bigger problem moving forward?
Reduce DNS lookups
As mentioned, I use a few external services on my site. I could bring this down by 2 or 3 but not much as I’m using most. I do see a lot of cloudfront here. Is it acually useful or is it basically hampering performance at this point? Not sure…
Honorable mention
Some plugins seem to require a lot of unnecessary resources. Take Ziggeo for example. I only use it on one page but for some reason it thinks it should load on every single page!
I don’t know how easy some of these issues are to fix, but I really hope there are some easy wins to be found here!