It may be bad luck, but I’ve noticed degradation of performance in just the 3/4 months we’ve been using Webflow.
Suddenly, the editor becomes totally unresponsive and we lose an hour or two of time.
Maybe a coincidence, maybe related, but I’ve also noticed that publishing has been unreliable. I’ve spotted our own site being affected by 404s in the last few days following some updates. There was absolutely no logical reason for it. Republishing didn’t help, but refreshing the page 20 minutes later and the issue had gone. This particular one is very concerning, and we’ve created some synthetic monitoring on our site to see how often this occurs.
It’s been a few months, and a few more projects that I have battled my way through using Webflow, so I have some more observations.
I upgraded my internet connection to 1000 mbps down and 500 mbps up. I noticed a slight improvement in the Designer’s responsiveness from this. However when I say slight, I really mean slight. It’s still bad. In any case it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect everyone to be on a high spec PC or have an internet connection that is this fast.
I’ve had situations where I have been working on a project in the designer while an editor is making CMS changes. I’m not sure if, how, or why this would affect performance, but the editor was pulling her hair out with how buggy the editor interface was. It would cause her PC to become unresponsive. The CMS had around 150 individual items, so nothing too major.
Any nested collections on the page within the designer seem to cause lagging and unresponsiveness. Same with having multiple collections within a CMS template page.
Just ran into an issue where the editor started using 4GB of ram alone the other day. This is getting ridiculous, Webflow. The product you’re selling is becoming worse by the day.
Hi, same issue here. Webflow becomes unusable when client uses the editor on a 2k+ CMS items ( business plan ) website. It’s a pity to tell our client to hold on edits even if we have to do small visual changes.
Specs of the computer is a non-issue. It’s the code of the editor/designer that craps out when there’s “too many” (a ridiculous thing when they offer 10k item packages) CMS items.
Pretty much nothing we hadn’t worked out for ourselves.
Riley’s email sums it up really, Webflow isn’t going to work well with “a lot” of data being loaded onto the page from collections. In my experience “a lot” hasn’t been that much at all, but anyway.
This issue has been going on for years. If it’s a hard technical limitation of loading “a lot” of data into someone’s browser then so be it. If it’s a limitation caused by unoptimised code on the part of Webflow then it would be nice for them to fix it. In either case Webflow seems to be burying their head in the sand. Just be honest and tell us the real issue.
I’d recommend sending them a help request in the Designer (Question Mark Icon > Help & Feedback > Send us a feedback or help request) so they have more affected projects to look into as they figure out the issue.
I’ve also found that creating a shortcut for the Designer (and limiting other tabs) seems to make the Designer feel much more zippy than opening it up within my normal browser window—however this may just be placebo.
To add your own shortcut (in Chrome), open your Webflow Dashboard, click the browser menu (three dots), More tools > Create shortcut. Once you’ve got that created, navigate to chrome://apps in your address bar, right-click the newly added shortcut, and the Create shortcuts.
I launch it from my taskbar like any of my other apps (shown below) however you can add it as a desktop shortcut if that’s more your style.
My site is only 3 months old. When we were building it, the designer was extremely fast and responsive.
As we’ve added more and more pages and CMS collections, it’s become slower over time. And now it’s so bad that it takes 30-90 seconds to load another page, up to 90 seconds to publish a page, and lags and freezes anytime we are editing a page.
We also have top of the line computer specs (i7 2.2 GHz, 32GB of RAM, SSD Hard Drive, NVIDIA GeForce 1050 Ti graphics card). Also tried using every browser imaginable.
Hoping for a resolution because it’s becoming unusable to work with it.
If Webflow won’t scale for you and you need help migrating to something that does, I can port a design to a solution that will. PM me if you’re ready for no limits.
They will never do something, this problem persist for over 4-5 years and every time its getting worse. Unique solution is to export your website and forget about this laggy platform #webflowlag
I think Webflow has its place. It’s perfectly fine for smaller, simpler marketing brochure style websites. But yes, for anything beyond that we go to Contentful + Gatsby React.
Funnily enough I am writing this while I wait for the Webflow designer to stop being unresponsive in another tab. I tried to publish a large site.
A few months back an update was pushed that removed most of the performance issues we had. There is no lag when opening items/blog posts or typing in anymore. In general it’s still a bit slow in the designer part, though nothing like it’s been.
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