The designer becomes so slow and laggy that it's unusable

Lucky for you! I haven’t noticed any improvement at all.

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Me neither… I haven’t noticed any improvement at all.

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In response to all in thread having issues with lag time in designer.

I have had this issue for years. Especially on larger projects.

One of the issue’s is pubnub resources taking too long to fetch resources (look as console whole webflow is loading). This happens because the more items you have in CMS, CSS, JS, etc there is a chance to confuse the system.

For every CSS edit, the CSS file does a rewrite. The bigger your CSS (more classes) you have, the slower your CSS edits become.

For every IX2 edit, the .js file does a rewrite. The bigger your ix2.js, the slower your IX2 edits will become.

Similar to CMS editor.

My fastest solution was building an iteration guide between me and other designers.

Each iteration we do optimizeizes CSS JS and CMS load, thus making designer more responsive.

I have requested WEBFLOW team to allow segmented CSS and JS per page(s) to allow faster Designer editing, and for better pasring logic to CMS collections. This is currently a wishlist item.

It will be greatly benficial to learn how to utilize CMS WEBFLOW API for collections with more than 1000 items

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I’m so glad I’ve found this thread. We have a quite ordinary level of CMS items, a mere 500 of the 2,000 our low-end CMS plan allows.

And it is absolutely driving me insane. Adding / updating a few collection items? Good luck because you’ll be there watching the wheels spin for ages. Bigger pages? You will wait 10+ seconds per load (why on Earth is it not cached?!). Page unresponsive? Hey, that’s just the Webflow life.

The Designer gotten progressively more janky, unresponsive, and sluggish as our website has grown from 10 pages to 40 pages, 50 CMS items to 500 CMS items.

In the past two days, we have had the “Page unresponsive” Chrome error THREE FOUR times. We’re using a separate Chrome profile, separate window, zero extensions, zero Chrome syncing, clearing browser history & cache after restart, and still?

Still?!

200 Mbps down & 20 Mbps on reliable cable.
System 1: i5-8600K with 32 GB of DDR4-3200, plus a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus
System 2: i7-1065G7 with 16 GB of LPDDR4-4266, plus a 500 GB Samsung PM981a

Both on the latest 64-bit stable Chrome builds (87.0.4280.141, as of Jan 12, 2021). These are no JavaScript slouches, but it feels like Webflow was built with Adobe Flash.

Just ridiculous. I’ve emailed Webflow, but it now looks like I’ll be instead filing bug reports into the toxic positivity void. The responses that have been shared from Webflow’s not-actually-supportive Support team are frankly embarrassing.

500 CMS items is nothing. Plainly negligent. Why on Earth would Webflow sell 2,000 + 10,000 CMS item plans…if the entire Designer breaks down at a mere 500?

Sat here for 5 minutes… - Jan 10, 2021
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Worthless when publishing - Jan 11, 2021
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You weren’t working, right? - Jan 11, 2021

Everyone has time for daily errors. You baked that in, right? - Jan 12, 2021

Two short hours after I made this post - Jan 12, 2021
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I’m genuinely afraid of how much more feature junk Webflow thinks it can jam into their ancient Designer, when Webflow cannot even address sincere, repeatable, daily crashes.

Audit panel? Not useful when it crashes.
Lottie animations? Nope.
Nested symbols? Must’ve crashed every single day of QA.
Lazy-loading and link pre-fetch? If it’s broken, why add more?

This thread is an unfortunate embarrassment to Webflow, Vlad, and his entire team. Nothing is more important than workflow-ending, repeatable, platform-wide application breaking bugs.

I came here expecting to find a fluke & unreproducible issue, or, if I was incredibly lucky, some reasonable workarounds. Instead, I’m ashamed to see Webflow hasn’t addressed with any seriousness long-term bug reports filed in excruciating detail, customers are told the Webflow platform is designed-as-negligent (do not sell things you cannot deliver), and others have volunteered their paid services to migrate users off Webflow.

It’s most frustrating because CMS users are genuinely…the most passionate, most devoted users of the Webflow platform.

I’ll rethink ever developing another site on Webflow and I’ll be sure to tell everyone else: “This is a single-page website designer that genuinely cannot deliver much else with reliability or performance. It was seemingly designed for a single page and Webflow has done hardly enough preparation since 2017, as the bugs pile up into 2021.”

It’s clear Webflow’s developers cannot perform at the level their software claims to deliver. That’s A-OK to admit. Developers have finite coding abilities and this platform has severely outgrown its now years-in-the-making team.

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That’s the gist of it. No point being upset, just move to another plaform or workflow is all we can do. TBH it feels like Webflow is more of a marketing company than a tech company now. Rumour has it that a big platform update is coming. I haven’t seen any radical candor about this just yet, but a Webflow engineer did let a bit of info out in this Github issue I raised on an unrelated topic (yet with many parallels to be drawn to this forum thread).

So it could be that Webflow is building something totally new and not investing time into maintaining the current platform as they know it is soon to be obsolete. Who knows. Vlad did say this back in April 2020 which may be a hint at this too:

Anything new from Webflow would have to be pretty spectacular to draw me back. I deleted my account months ago because I no longer felt that I was getting value for money. I still do a little bit of Webflow work for existing clients that I built Webflow sites for (in their accounts), but for me the ship has sailed. Too buggy, too unreliable. I can’t see myself doing any net new work in Webflow beyond a basic landing page.

Better cool this thread down before they lock it. There is useful info here for those experiencing performance issues so would be helpful for this to stay up.

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Nailed it.

Webflow is not in any shape or form suitable for anything but the simplest websites that only contains single pages or less than ten of them. They had the audacity to write a blog post about how great Webflow is for blogs, which is frankly insulting. I’ve been trying to send feature requests and pointers for them to become a truly big Wordpress alternative, but I’m being redirected to the laughable wishlist.

I love Webflow as a concept, but I sincerely hope it gets a full overhaul.

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I’ve been using Webflow for 5+ years. I’m currently really struggling with Designer performance and just wanted to voice this here.

I would love if Webflow could provide some insight into what the performance issues being worked on currently are. Even if we just know the team is hard at work on this issue, it’s better than knowing nothing.

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When Weblow is slow… IS SLOW .

Please take a look of this video: When Weblow is slow.... IS SLOW

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Hi, is it better now? I opened up your site and it was still slow but not terribly slow.

Hi @EGAFutura,

We are actively working on improving performance in the designer. We have made some changes recently and are currently working on more performance improvements. I looked at your preview link and it appears some of our changes have sped up the load time of your site.

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Thank you very much @huwyca for your follow-up! We use Webflow in a daily basis, and I will let you know how the platform is performing in the upcoming weeks.

Wouldn’t it be better to make Webflow native? I was just about to get into the platform but having found this thread, I’m now thinking I don’t want to waste my time on learning it if it’s this buggy.

I would say it depends what you’re planning on building with Webflow. For smallish marketing brochure style websites Webflow is an amazing tool IMO. I would still use it for those. But yes there is a limit where these designer buggyness do issues appear.

I have started to learn coding (frontend) and finding it quite difficult, I am more of a creative person so understanding code is not so easy for me. When I found Webflow I thought this is exactly what I needed :slight_smile: but now I see this thread and I am back to square one :frowning:

I don’t think you should not use Webflow because of this. As above, it doesn’t happen on smaller, simpler websites. It’s large CMS sites where this comes up usually.

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There really were advances in performance! Now the problems are not so frequent.

There is still room for improvement: Webflow - Software ERP en la Nube EGA Futura

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/takesidedevsite?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=takesidedevsite&preview=cb70c7c94313b28868889a1f8be1e8e5&mode=preview

I only have about 100 CMS items… This is unworkable. Any fixes?

Hey Benjamin! I didn’t notice any performance issues when loading a preview of your site in the Designer. In order for us to better understand what you’re experiencing, could you kindly do the following?

  1. Clear your browser’s cache and cookies or access the Webflow Designer from an incognito window
  2. Take a screen recording of the performance issues including steps to reproduce - you can use a free tool like Loom for the video

Thanks for reporting this so we can have a closer look!

Yes I removed all of my CMS items. I had 15 conditional visibility blocks each set for a different layout. I didn’t realize this meant it was creating 15 versions of each CMS item and then hiding 14 of them.

NOTE TO EVERYONE: CMS conditional visibility is still loaded by the browser on the public site. Essentially I made the site 15x heavier than it should have been by relying heavily on CMS conditional visibility.

@webflow, it would be nice to not render hidden blocks in conditional visibility. Because you need to publish the site before the CMS populates this may actually be feasible.

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