Hey wix folks.
First of all, I think you’re doing an amazing job in giving us these easy-to-use design tools, while still providing us with the ability to - here and there - put in some custom behavior in code. This was one of the key factors which led me to believe that it is finally possible to move up a layer when it comes to building websites (less coding/less errors/less reinventing the wheel, more time for impactfull stuff).
I’m working with wix for about 2 months now and I’m still convinced. The issue with the loading time was always visible to me, but I hoped it will be better ones the site is moved to a premium package.
Sadly, this was not the case. It would be awesome if you could give an insight into the following observations (calls are sent from western Europe):
- I created an empty landing page on my site. This means no code, no images, no text, only a white background.
- Accessing this published page takes about 3.5 sec on average (this is reproducible).
- There seem to be a lot of costly calls to static.parastorage.com and frog.wix.com (which both seem to be hosted in the US).
You can see more details in a representative result from webpagetest.org (blue line = document complete)
As a (not web!) programmer myself this performance issue really bothers me, because I want to deliver a product that surprises positively in every aspect.
Since this data comes from accessing an empty page, I do not have much hope for any improvements on the user side, or are there some settings I’m not aware of? How about on your side?
I know that there are other questions about the issue of performance, but I hoped to get a detailed answer to how this problem is currently treated within the wix walls:
- Are you aware of it?
- Are you working on it?
- Do you have an ETA?
- Do you have any tips for us?
Best,
Sandro
2 Likes
This question must be answered byt someone from the Wix team and I think they will. I have a lot of sites up and running and the thing I can tell you is that yes, Wix sites is slower that a static HTML page. But they don’t seem to become slower and slower the more you do with the page. I have no idea why an empty page has the same loading time as a page full of images but it seem to be like that.
I have made a large hotel site and that site is loading around 2,5-3,5 secs and it is filled with Wix Code, images, slides and more and long as #%€# to scroll but still the same performance as a small site with less elements.
Looking forward to read what you will get for an answer.
Just want to add that I have no client that have shown degrades in Google Ranking, Shopping loss or anything like that using Wix.
Yes, I came to the same conclusion, since I already have some quite packed pages as well, and these also take around 3 secs to load, but I hoped to isolate the problem better when working with an empty page.
Let’s hope we get a feedback on this.
I have asked the team to answer your question.
Hi Sandro,
First of all, thanks for the kind words about the product!
We’ve been doing a lot to improve performance across the board, and including on Wix Code sites specifically. Improving it even further is our absolute top goal - so we hear you loud and clear, and we’re ‘on it’.
A few weeks ago, we took a huge step by introducing Server Side Rendering - dramatically improving loading times for all sites. We started out by focusing on mobile rendering, and we’ll be expanding to desktop within the coming weeks. So expect further improvements very soon, especially on initial render time.
As for the specifics you mention below. I’m not familiar with the exact methods used by webpagetest.org, but here are some points which may be relevant to understand the results:
- The static files you see are the JavaScript code which runs in the browser as part of our infrastructure. These files are typically very small, especially if your page is blank
- The ‘frog’ requests you see are all asynchronous. They should not be affecting the performance of your site.
- We do a lot of work to optimize for the first render of the page, and load as much as we can in the background right after. I don’t know enough to say whether these results accurately reflect that.
That said, let me restate what I opened with - we’re still doing a ton of work to make sure our performance is as good as it can possibly be. So stay tuned 
Uval
Hi Uval
Thank you for answering so fast and detailed, that’s very appreciated! And the optimizations you are doing all sound very promising, thanks a lot for prioritizing this
Will you do an announcement in the forum when these changes go live, or will they be introduced silently?
Looking forward to these improvements!
Cheers,
Sandro
Our deployments are gradual by geography and sometimes also other parameters. So it’s hard to know exactly when it will reach you. But I’ll ask the team to post to the “new features” forum when it’s open to all of users.
When is server side rendering coming to desktop?
Hi everyone,
Any updates about this great subject ?
No news about server side rendering on desktop ?
I’ve been a Wix customer for about a month now and have been developing a website. I’ve spent many hours now trying to improve page load times (specifically with Repeaters). I too have created an “empty” page, which is a page that contains no code (javascript) and only has a single text field (not bound to a dataset item). At worse, I can see a load time of around 3-5 seconds. When I start adding any items, especially Repeaters, I’m getting up to 15 seconds to load a page with a repeater bound to to dataset of only 100 items. I’ve been a software developer (non-web) for over 25 years and to me, this is unacceptable. I keep trying to implement all of the suggestions that both Wix and the community have posted, but I can’t get the page load times down. This is something Wix really needs to work on because it a web site had poor performance, you will loose visitors.
Hey
Use the new Page Rendering Page, works great. Go to Page Setting and Advanced and enable that. Works soooo great.
