In this conversational segment, Dennis H. Lewis and Speaker A discuss Bubble’s shortcomings as a design platform, especially for creating slick, high‑performance landing pages. Speaker A argues that Bubble was never intended for designers and lacks the visual polish and fine‑grained control found in tools like Webflow, Framer, WordPress, Bricks, and custom CSS/GSAP workflows. They note that Bubble’s client‑side‑rendered JavaScript architecture prevents server‑side rendering, leading to SEO challenges and performance bottlenecks (e.g., sub‑100 ms load times for ad‑campaign landing pages). Dennis acknowledges these constraints but suggests there are untapped capabilities within Bubble, though the platform still falls short on pixel‑level control (vPorts, RAMs, ERMs) that designers have enjoyed for a decade on other platforms.
Chapters
Just to, to point out a weakness in Bubble, I still think that it's just not a place for designers. And I know that it's never been intended to be a place for designers where people can show off their work in a slick looking manner. But I do want them to put a little bit more emphasis on the types of landing pages, the types of pages, websites that you can actually build and have 'em look good. Like, It, it's a great platform to build apps. It's not so good to sell the apps. I kind of look at the websites that people are building with, uh, Webflow, Framer. We're building them with WordPress and Bricks and custom CSS and we're implementing GSAP animations. And man, I wish I could do at least a fifth of the things that we can do on all of those platforms in Bubble. So that we didn't need to do the marketing outside of Bubble, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, uh, and that comes to sort of the— there's some— there's a fuzzy area there, uh, you know, that brings in the SEO questions as well. Uh, you know, there's, there's things that just because Bubble is a client-side rendered JavaScript, uh, architecture always are going to make it a little bit, uh, questionable sometimes if it makes sense to put the— you know, if you're, if you're doing landing pages for ad campaigns and they need to load in under 100 milliseconds, you're probably not going to get it there with Bubble because there's just a certain amount of overhead that the architecture still requires because we can't do server-side rendering. But you'd be surprised. I think that there are capabilities and you can do more in Bubble than you probably thought you could do. But yeah, I agree, uh, exactly. It's sort of like also just being able to control the pixel, uh, widths and heights by instead of, you know, using the, uh, you could use the vPorts, you can use the RAMs, ERMs.
We lack all of those things. I mean, those things have been available for WordPress users for 10 years.