Tutorial
Beginner

Improve Your Webflow Site Speed with These Tips from Timothy Ricks

Discover why your Webflow site slows down as you build more pages and learn actionable tips to optimize interactions, styles, and assets. Implementing these strategies can significantly enhance your site’s performance and user experience.

Summary:

As you build more pages in Webflow, you may notice your website slowing down. This slowdown primarily stems from how Webflow handles interactions and classes. Each time you create an interaction, like a hover effect for your homepage image, Webflow includes the code for that interaction on every page of your site. Similarly, classes, such as a blog grid, add styles to every page, even if that page doesn't contain the blog grid. This redundancy can significantly degrade site performance.

One effective alternative to Webflow interactions is using CSS animations, which allow for greater flexibility and reusability. CSS animations can be applied across multiple elements, with the ability to override properties like delay and duration without adding extra code. For scroll interactions, the GSAP library is recommended, which stores interaction code within section components, ensuring it only loads where necessary.

Optimizing styles can also make a substantial difference. Utilizing reusable classes, known as utilities, helps keep your CSS lean. For instance, renaming a specific grid class to a more general one allows it to be used across various sections of your site without duplicating code. This approach not only speeds up your workflow but also maintains a clean codebase.

Fluid font sizes and spacing values further contribute to efficiency. A tool like the fluid builder can help you apply scalable font sizes across different breakpoints, reducing the need for repetitive CSS declarations. Additionally, using an autofit grid layout ensures that your site adapts gracefully to various screen sizes and user preferences, such as increased font sizes.

Key takeaways

  • Avoid Redundancy: Webflow includes interaction and class styles on every page, even if not used, causing slowdowns.
  • CSS Animations: Utilize CSS animations for reusable and flexible interactions, minimizing code bloat.
  • Reusable Utilities: Implement utility classes for common styles to keep your CSS clean and efficient.
  • Fluid Design: Use tools like the fluid builder for scalable font sizes and responsive layouts.
  • Optimize Assets: Compress images and minify CSS and HTML to enhance site performance.
Improve Your Webflow Site Speed with These Tips from Timothy Ricks