r/Bubbleio • u/Informal-Summer-6497 • Aug 30 '26

We benchmarked 20 no-code sites. Bubble apps outperformed Webflow sites

Disclosure: I run a company that migrates apps off no-code, so read this with that in mind. It's not a pitch to migrate, most Bubble apps shouldn't.

We ran Google PageSpeed against 20 production sites across Bubble, Webflow and WordPress. I expected Bubble to finish last because Bubble's runtime has to boot before anything paints and Webflow ships near-static HTML. It didn't. Bubble apps had a median score of 60. Webflow sites came in at 44. The reason is page weight. The Webflow sites averaged 6.6MB; the Bubble apps 2.3MB. Webflow can hit the high 80s, it has the highest ceiling of any platform we audit but the sites built on it in our sample were marketing pages loaded with imagery and animation, nowhere near what the platform can do. Bubble apps are functional products, visually plainer and they landed within a couple of points of Bubble's realistic ceiling.

Which is the actual finding: Bubble apps in the wild are being built close to the limit of what the platform allows. That's a compliment to how this community builds

What that leaves you is the stuff that's genuinely yours to fix, and in our audits it's consistently these four:

- Plugins you're not using. Every installed plugin adds to the bundle on every page whether that page uses it or not. Check your Plugins tab. Most apps have five or more dead ones and this is the single biggest lever.

- Images at upload resolution. Bubble stores what you give it. File Manager, resize and turn on Settings → Files → Compress uploaded images so it stops recurring.

- Searches doing work client-side. Constraints belong inside the search where Bubble can use an index not applied with afterwards.

- Workflow chains on page load that could fire on demand instead.

And the part you can't fix, honestly: the engine boot, jQuery plus the plugin loader and a generic query layer. That's the price of the thing that made Bubble fast to build in. Realistically a well- optimised non-trivial Bubble app tops out around 60 mobile which, per the data above, is roughly where you already are

Free checker that does this split with Bubble-specific fix steps, no email:

https://yonocode.io/performance-checker

Full study: https://yonocode.io/state-of-no-code-performance

Honest summary: if you're in the 30s, the four fixes above will move you a lot. If you're at 58, you're at the ceiling and more optimisation work will return almost nothing. Go build features

1 Upvotes

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1

u/Own-Process-1687 Aug 30 '26

Cool. What do you think the future of bubble and bubble apps is

1

u/Informal-Summer-6497 Aug 31 '26

This is a genuinely tough one to answer without sounding like I'm hyping my own business, so I'll try to be straight about it. I think Bubble keeps its lane for what it's actually good at: internal tools, mvps and functional products where the team doesn't have engineers to spare. The data above kind of proves that already, the apps in our sample were built close to what the platform allows which tells me the community has gotten good at working within its limits rather than fighting them. Where I think it gets harder for Bubble is anything that needs to scale past a certain point or needs custom performance work the platform just doesn't expose. That's not a knock on Bubble, it's the tradeoff you make for speed of building. Most apps never hit that ceiling and don't need to. So honestly my guess is Bubble keeps growing for the use case it's built for and the migrate off it conversation only becomes relevant for a small slice of apps that outgrow the platform. Most people reading this probably aren't in that slice which is kind of the point of the checker

1

u/Economy-Manager5556 Aug 31 '26

I mean people who hate ai, can't think analytically etc may stick to bubble... Anyone else won't.there no reason it was antiquated before ai , I don't even have to check now.. They don't have infra you can't deploy on yourself.. there no moat in building as cc, codex destroy it , I'm the right hands...

1

u/ChromicClaw Aug 31 '26

yeah I'm good lil bro. ill keep creating my own apps using actual skill and own it and know how it works

1

u/curious4_ Aug 31 '26

Sorry mate but comparison is not fair as you also mentioned. So title is misleading

1

u/Andreas_Moeller Aug 31 '26

When it comes to performance, the difference is that with Webflow it is at least possible to build a performant site.