Hi @guyom, thanks for taking interest in Webflow! I’d like to expand on the somewhat nebulous topic of hosting here.
If you have a simple website, or multiple sites, there really isn’t a better hosting platform than Webflow for the price. I’d like to expand on this in a more detailed blog post at some point but here are just a few reasons why Google PageSpeed is not actually giving you a correct representation of a Webflow site’s end user performance and why Webflow’s hosting solution is the easiest and fastest solution for your users:
-
Webflow puts all of your images, CSS, and JS on a Tier 1 CDN (Amazon AWS’s CloudFront). Massive websites like Pinterest, and Instagram use it to power their content delivery. What CDNs do is reduce the TTFB and TTLB (Time to First|Last Byte) significantly as your browser will now connect to the nearest geographical server (there are over 80 edge locations worldwide on Amazon’s CDN) to download the content. If you have massive images (you should be compressing them!) then this will greatly benefit your end users’s load time.
-
Google Page Speed also dings Webflow sites for putting scripts in the browser. The most common type of scripts on Webflow sites are Modernizr and TypeKit/Google Fonts. Modernizr is required for IE9 support and Typekit/Google WebFonts are required if you have custom fonts on your page. This is really in the hands of you, the designer, as you can always use system fonts or choose to not support IE9 if you want to remove scripts in the
<head>. -
Focus on end user load time instead, like DOMContentLoaded and the
loadevent (fires in Chrome DevTools when all assets have been loaded). This gives you a much better representation of how quickly a site loads as it’s actually measuring the time it takes to display the page, as opposed to using vanity metrics like “minification” (which only saves a few KBs), and “Don’t put script tags in ” (which is required in most cases for browser compatibility and web fonts)
For example: check out this new Webflow site, geospaces.webflow.com. The DOMContentLoaded event fires around 250ms and the DOMReady event fires around 1.8 seconds. For you to achieve this kind of speed, you definitely need to CDN all of your assets. Minifying the CSS or Javascript will only provide microscopic improvements on end user page load time.
That said, we still do our very best to make sure your site has all of these options, as they are still important! Here is a snapshot of our new publishing options coming soon!
