Performance Optimization - Lighthouse scores (WeWeb crushes!)

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Hello @clncsports :wave:

Great question!

Unfortunately, the Lighthouse scores of WeWeb apps don’t perform quite so well (yet! :grinning:)

When you click publish, WeWeb generates a Single-Page Application with a bundle of files inside a js app. As a result, the content is not there on page load.

Lighthouse scores don’t like that.

We pre-render the static content, i.e. content that is hard-coded on your app or bound to a static collection. That improves Lighthouse scores but doesn’t beat tools that are specialized in SEO.

If SEO is a primary concern, we recommend you use a specialized tool like Webflow or Vuepress. This is what we do for our own SEO-focused projects like the website or user docs.

WeWeb really shines when user interactivity and applicative features are your primary concern. That’s why we built our public roadmap and the upcoming academy in WeWeb.

We know users would love to have only one tool to build all of their frontends but we’re not quite there yet. We’re working on it though! We know it would help a lot of people.

Does that make sense?

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t performance improvements you can make or that we are discarding SEO completely :slightly_smiling_face:

Here are some things that you can do on your WeWeb apps that will improve its Lighthouse scores and, most importantly, the user’s experience:

  • follow SEO best practices when building:
    ** add titles & metadata to all your pages
    ** add alt text on all your images
    ** use headings for titles
    ** use elements with the correct HTML tags (e.g. buttons, select, etc.)

  • don’t load too much data on the page:
    ** compress images
    ** keep your pages short and simple
    ** avoid superfluous nested containers
    ** add backend filters on big sets of data
    ** fetch collections only when you need them
    ** use linked sections to avoid reloading data the user has already loaded

Let me know if that helps and if you have any further questions. I’d like to write a complete guide on the topic to help you and others build the best performing apps possible :slightly_smiling_face:

We are also recording 2 video courses for the upcoming WeWeb academy to help you with all of this! Feel free to send me a direct message if you’d like to be onboarded as a beta tester in early March.

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