Your app SEO may be impacted / Google Page Insights Issues

[boston85719]

Just want to give everybody a heads up that there was a change Bubble made at some point (I believe within the past 3-4 months) that has caused our scores on Page Insights to be negatively impacted. This seems to be a system wide error and can cause your Page Insights score to be decreased by several percentage points.

I came across this only because I tested a live app of mine, that previously had 100% on all page insight categories, except performance (the one that is really out of my control and completely in Bubbles ball park). Unfortunately, I found what was previously 100% had reduced to 95% due to issues of errors found in console and large javascript files missing source maps.

I first reported this to Bubble on June 17, 2024 and Bubble support has confirmed on July 3, 2024 with the following message

While our investigation has not identified the root cause, my team looked across several other Bubble apps and found that the same errors (browser errors in the console, missing sour maps) propagated on all other apps we tested. This indicates that a change in Bubble is causing the dip in these scores, as you communicated in your previous message.

Apparently it is now at this stage that engineering will be ‘looped in’…no expected date for a resolution at this stage, but hopefully they will fix it in a relatively timely manner.

For anybody with a new app trying to achieve great SEO, if you see these issues in your page insights, there is nothing you can do to resolve and it is an issue that Bubble engineering need to resolve for the entire system. For anybody with an existing app that relies on good SEO, you may see a drop until Bubble fixes the issue.

[sudsy]

Since source maps are a debugging tool used only for development and troubleshooting, I don’t think they will impact the SEO of a production site given that they load only when the browser’s dev tools is open. That is to say, source maps should not be an issue for bots, crawlers, or regular visitors to your website - or even for external SEO testing tools which “visit” your site in the “usual” way. (I suspect they can even be disabled in dev tools, but I don’t know offhand how to do it.)

The WebSocket error is a bit concerning though - especially if it’s occurring consistently. I’ve seen that before, but it usually resolves on its own.

EDIT

To elaborate a bit, I think the browser in this case is just attempting to leverage source maps to provide additional insights - perhaps about JS execution.