I had an SEO colleague look at my site and they thought the loading by Softr was pretty slow.
Here is the report:
Are there any plans too improve on these recommendations and make sites load faster?
This is something particularly on mobile where you see the font page upon page load.
Thanks for sharing @aar0n. We have a few improvements in plans but there is nothing significant and easy to be done to improve it right now. The platform is not purely optimized as website renderer hence has some shortcomings
Understood. Thanks artur.
Artur,
Are you able to share what the largest company using softr is? This honestly is a concern to me as I consider options to really scale and grow my website and I’m wondering how the larger companies /communities / products are using Softr. Investing time in SEO and all that and then ultimately having to switch off Softr due to page speed, among other features, would be quite painful if improvements aren’t made.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-rentsmart-fyi/4kse86e1pw?form_factor=mobile
@aar0n There are many Fortune100 companies using it. The question is what they are using it for and what’s the expectation. If you are looking for a website builder, many offer higher speeds as they focus on websites only and optimize for page speed etc… Softr is not a website builder, it allows you to build apps with non-trivial functionalities hence we are not able to dedicate ourselves full-on website optimization instead we make app building easier and give powerful features…
While I understand that Softr does not advertise itself necessarily as website builder … don’t all apps and tools have some sort of display that would irritate users if it were slow to load? Apps don’t work if a user can’t see that it can be used, and likely discourages use of it. A small lag is not what Aaron pointed out - he’s sharing how incredibly slow it is you can see it in the results. The speed of a tool is important across the board, not just for websites, and it is not a non-trivial functionality - it is BLP for most users.
Softr, who advertises that these companies use Softr, doesn’t know what these companies are using it for and what their purpose or business goals with it is?
@mscroggin I don’t know how you conclude that Softr doesn’t know what top companies are building, but I will leave it with you.
Please share if you have a specific page that loads slowly, and we will check. Aaron was sharing a generic webpage testing tool results that check how fast the webpage loads, and they are mostly designed to test basic and static websites. If you build an app where Users log in and see dynamic data or data dynamically comes from Airtable or other services, there might be a certain loading time involved.
I lately had a use case from a client and checked, and Airtable was returning data via API in 15 seconds, so in those cases unfortunately Softr can’t make Airtable faster.
Anyway, share your page, and will share why it might be slow.
Didn’t mean to cause a stir here.
I get Arturs point that we are dependent on the Airtable API and we are loading dynamic pages. I’m unsure why the page is still super slow, but part of it understand. Can it be improved? I’m sure it can. But again, I also understand Artur’s point.
Just sharing my exp here in case it helps, I hope it does.
I had a similar problem, and yes, there’s quite a few things Softr could do to speed up rendering.
However, I was able to improve performance dramatically, x3 faster, with just two changes:
Convert all images to WebP. I do it directly from the terminal using cwep see this quick tutorial
Get rid of all libs you don’t need, check everything you’ve added your <head>, specially fonts, Font Awesome is quite heavy and you’re probl downloading more than one version
<head>. It applies to all pages. Don’t use the integration and add the Stripe script only to the <head> of the page where you are going to use itRun your page/s through https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to see which are the blockers
Also, you can optimize for speed by breaking up list of items and items details in two different tables. So you don’t bring down with your list all the details of each item, specially if they’re heavy on images.
See below
thank you, Carlos. Looks interesting.
@artur any thoughts on the report my Rent Smart? I am showing a mobile score of 8… This seems caused by more than just the Airtable API that you mention above.
Do you see anything you and the team could do so users don’t have to get too technical?
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-rentsmart-fyi/sxj3a3997t?form_factor=mobile
Hi @Carlos thanks for sharing those tips. Will chekc out the libs and integrations. Those I haven’t done yet
Hey this is very interesting discussion indeed about what expectations should be around Softr + Airtable. I can share some thoughts of one of my latest projects that indeed is slow due to Airtable restrictions:
I late 2022 I’ve developed a dashboard report with lots of charts (+30 per page) and just a few records in Airtable. Until everything worked very well… but in Q4’23 it started to be very slow.
After some back and forward with Softr team, we realised that Airtable rate limit due to my extended base of 128 columns and nearly 5000 records. This scale of project is not something that Airtable supports.
Then I’m in the position of migrating my data source to SQL - integration by Softr expected by Q2’23 
For my case, for instance, would be unrealistic to expect the best SEO performance in such heavy load of data. What’s your business case @aar0n?
