Need help with slow publishing

Hi All,

I was wandering if anyone has the same issue as I…

I have this project that I have been working on for some time, and over time I added and deleted many pages, and recently even though I have cleaned up most of my pages and removed all the unused ones, my site takes at least 1-2 minutes to publish - not like all the other sites that I have. Also, I have noticed that even-though I have cleaned up all the unused pages, in the backup section of the settings it still reads like I have 64 pages even-though I only have 16 - including the search results page and cms collection page… I assume that the slow performance is due to the fact that every time I publish the site all the 64 pages have to be published… So I am thinking it is some sort of a bug-or glitch - wandering if anyone has any experience with this - and or has a resolution!

Thanks in advance


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

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I would really appreciate if someone from the webflow team could have a look at my page - I can’t figure out why I have such a large backup… which I guess causes very slow publishing…

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I guess you could better contact support with this question.

Maybe it also takes a while because you havbe 333 items in your collection “DBWTHS”?

Hi @IVG, thanks for your comments about the slow publishing.

One thing that will help would be to review how to Troubleshoot website performance issues and check the steps.

One of those steps is to check if there are any unused styles that could be cleaned up, I could see quite a few in the style manager that could be cleaned up:

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A good next step is to check if the issue happens when logged into Webflow using the Browser Private mode.

It may be helpful to disable the browser cache so that updated files are always downloaded instead of pulling old content from browser cache.

If the issue persists, let me know so that I can dive deeper to help get this resolved.

@ElviraNL

I will be contacting support thats for sure - but having several hundred items in the CMS cannot be the issue - if this is the case then webflow CMS is wholly inadequate for anything serious - and to be honest I can’t imagine thats the case…

@cyberdave

I would love to give that a try, but I have a problem with this suggestion - on many pages I use the jquery custom code to add and remove comboclasses for animation purposes - and if select “clean up” , all the comboclasses that I have created will be deleted… I did this once by mistake and I still haven’t recovered everything… Do you happen to know any workarounds for that?

thanks!

Hi @ivg, well if you are using the classes then you do not need to delete those. If a class is deleted, it is gone forever until recreated in the designer, however the more classes on a site, the more of a performance hit in the designer there may be.

The number of items in the cms should not be too much of an issue, but if you are trying to show all 300 items on the same page, there could more of a performance hit for that.

I see also quite a bit of image and font download on the site: Image 2019-09-30 at 8.13.29 AM

I would recommend to reduce the fonts and images, when working with responsive sites it is best to keep page weight low, currently the site is about 5.2 mb with 92% of that being fonts and images alone. Reducing the number of custom/google fonts used will probably help.

Have you tried the incognito mode option in the browser to see if that helps?

@cyberdave, so the problem is not really with the performance but with the publishing speed - it takes a long time to publish, sometimes a minute or more - and based on my prior experience with other sites it is much longer than others… The other problem is that in the backup section it shows that I have 64 pages of backups - and I don’t have that many i have 13-15 pages max…



and my guess it has something to do with publishing speed… as it is publishing 64 pages (and I have no idea where that came from)

Lastly, I checked the fonts… I only have the fontawesome installed which at most is 1mb… so I am not sure why are you showing 2.3…

I have tried going via incognito and nothing changes - the performance is the same - and in any event I don’t really have an issue with designer performance - its the publishing…

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@cyberdave So the performance has gotten worse… the publishing sometimes takes 3-4 mins… no idea what to do…

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@cyberdave I think there is some sort of problem with my project - I have made a duplicate of it and started deleting pages and saving the backups after each delete - the number of backup’d pages have not changed - I am guessing this is not standard or expected behavior… am I wrong?

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Hey, @IVG I’m seeing the same thing. I’m also really interested in finding a solution here.

Thanks!

@DuncanHamra I am really hoping that someone from the Webflow staff or engineers has a look at it… I am really at a loss here…

You have a 91MB page load on just the Ocean Portfolio in the designer. Full res images. On publish the images are being responsively optimized. Try to do that on your local machine with Photoshop. See how long it takes. I am actually surprised the designer even is able to complete the publish task. Kudos to Webflow for that.

So on the published page you are still creating over 326 requests and a 20.73 MB payload for the browser.

I am a photographer as well. I understand what you are trying to do. I would not attempt what you are doing on Webflow for performance reasons and the nightmare of prepossessing images after making design changes. I want people to see my work, not spinning beach balls. Most people bail quickly if the page load takes to long. A reason why lazy loading images on a large gallery is a must. You are loading 122 images on this page.

Inspecting the page source shows images with dimensions of 1920x1275 that are scaled down even on my 4K monitors. So to when the page is loading on a smaller viewport the client is buried with an unnecessary load of that 1920px image.

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Personally I ruled out Webflow as a delivery tool for photo galleries where the images are served via the CMS and the CDN. I had a client that really wanted it to work for them and researched Cloudinary and ImgIx exhaustively. Can you pull this off using them with Webflow to handle the images src references, with support for lazy loading , responsive image generation and even DPI versions of images, and more. With the additional benefit of security, watermarking, on the fly generation as well.

Personally I would compare this to square pegs in round holes. At this point Webflow simply is not cut out for this use case. Might sound harsh, but I have worked on projects that involve millions of images. If you want personal help migrating this minefield, PM me. I will try to throw you a lifeline.

@webdev Thank you for your detailed response, although I can’t agree with your numbers or assessments. If I take all my underwater images in full resolution (of what I uploaded), they will be only 60mb so not sure why there would be a 91mb load.

Also, I don’t understand what is the point of resizing images to serve the appropriate size dynamically if its not getting used - I don’t understand what is the point?! - I can do this myself easier then the what webflow apparently tries to do but fails! If you are getting bombarded by full sized images then WEbflow’s competitive feature resizing the images and serving correct ones is a sham…

Further, I can’t understand why would 1080p images would get scaled down on 4k monitors - that is simply strange… I will certainly drop you a line to see what your thoughts are on the matter but it simply sounds strange to me… In any event I would really love for someone from webflow staff to weigh in on this - because something is seriously messed up with responsive images, loads, etc…

In any event, the problem that I am complaining about is not poor loading time on a live website - which seems to me to be acceptable, but the publishing time from the designer… And lastly, if you want to tell me that webflow can’t handle a cms gallery that contains 300 images, i would not agree with you - webflow CMS has plenty of shortcomings but an inability to handle 300 entries is not serious… you hardly need a cms to begin with with so few entries…

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