Hey @bfl, I appreciate you reaching out! I’m Dustan and I lead our performance team at Webflow. (👋 from Webflow Performance)
The issue you reference sounds to be primarly concerned with the published site. We haven’t had any Webflow-specific concerns raised regarding published pages yet, but the general guideline is that you only-pay-for-what-you-use. The performance of published sites is almost entirely in your control. For example:
- Only CSS you add to the site in the Designer is in the published site. Additionally, you can use the Styles Manager to clean up unused CSS selectors as well. How to Remove Unused Styles/Classes - #2 by Waldo
- Only JS-powered features you use are included in the published site. If you don’t use Interactions 2.0, then the Interactions 2.0 JavaScript will not be in the published page. If you don’t use any Widgets like Tabs or Lightboxes then that JavaScript willl not be in your published pages.
- In the Settings panel you have individual options to enable minification of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Images and videos are often the largest cost in page size. We have support for automatically generating responsive images to help with a part of that problem. You can learn more at our feature page (https://webflow.com/feature/responsive-images or in our University article (Responsive images in Webflow | Webflow University).
- We host your site through a globally distributed content delivery network (CDN). You can learn more about how our hosting works at Reliable and lighting-fast website hosting service | Webflow. The biggest cost here is on the publishing side or dynamic pages. Static pages are pre-rendered at publish time so you as the Designer have to wait for that to finish. Dynamic (CMS-driven) pages are rendered on-demand for first use and then cached after each publish. This can have a short server-side delay for the first user to visit a given page, but then is cached and served from a global CDN until the next time it is published.
From the original all-time-low forum post, the performance issues listed there are primarily regarding our Designer product itself. This is where almost the entirety of my teams focus is. I’ll be posting an update here on the forum later this week sharing our progress since the beginning of the year and what to expect over the coming months.
Cheers!
– Dustan