Comparing page builder bloat

Welcome back to the second edition of The Lab Report!

Wow, what a first week we had. We’re now almost 500 subscribers strong, which I truly was not expecting.

Does that pretty much make me an influencer now? Sounds like a good reason to go drop $3.5k on a new Macbook to me 😶.

Btw, thank you to everyone who responded back last week. It’s always nice to know that you’re not writing pointlessly into the metaverse…

Which uhhh… I guess we’ll all be doing from now on.

Anyways, let’s get into this week’s newsletter!

How bloated is each page builder?

Supa Mike from the Oxygen group recently updated his blog post comparing how much bloat each page builder loads by default on the front-end.

This article made quite a bit of noise in the past, as it put a spotlight on how out-of-hand some page builders were becoming.

The good news is that it looks like most builders have finally started to take page speed seriously.

Brizy dropped from 1624kb (!) to 271kb. Divi from 1243kb to 209kb.

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t obsess too much about the total kilobyte rankings. I wouldn’t choose Zion Builder over Bricks Experimental solely because it’s a few kb smaller.

Anything under 100kb is very good. 100-300kb is decent, <1mb is workable, and anything above that is… 😬

I just use it as a general guideline to better understand where a company’s priorities lie.

There’s also a lot you can do to to make a bloated site feel snappy on the front-end.

> Link to Supa Mike’s full post
> Link to FB discussion in the Oxygen group

Why Figma was trending this week

You don’t usually see too many tweets go ‘viral’ in our community, but this one did:

Needless to say, it got ratio’d pretty hard.

(More comments + retweets than likes, for you non-tweeps out there).

It got responses like:

And even one from the Webflow co-founder/CEO himself:

My take?

For one, I’m not a fan of telling people what they should or should not do.

Second, it’s even worse when you’re telling them something that’s objectively wrong.

Webflow – like any page builder – is not a design tool. It’s what brings your designs to life.

Sure, you can get away with ‘designing in your head’ and build out a page as you go.

It’s pretty much what we all had to do 2+ years ago when we used ThemeForest themes and could only build what the theme allowed us.

But now that page builders give us full design freedom, telling someone to explicitly stop using a design tool is like saying it’s better to not have floor plans when building a house.

Again – you can absolutely still build a site without designing it beforehand. But it’s almost always better if you do.

(P.S. I used to never create the design beforehand because it ‘took too long’, but I can tell you that my websites hit a new level once I did).

👻 _{Halloween deals worth mentioning}

It’s getting close to that time of year where we all spend a ton of money on tools that we think we might one day use.

The best deals almost always come on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, but sometimes it’s better to pick a tool you need now than wait an extra month to save $10.

Here are some of the better deals on tools that I actually use:

P.S. Full transparency, some of the links above are affiliate links. They help support the growth of this newsletter. That being said, please know that these are tools I’d fully recommend with or without an affiliate link. If you’d rather not use my link, you can always Google the product name as well.

Say crello to Depositcheques

Ok wow, brutal headline. Unsubscribe now.

But continuing a 2021 trend, we see another SaaS company get acquired.

This time it’s Vistaprint – now rebranding itself to “Vista” – acquiring Crello and its parent company Depositphotos.

Most of you will probably be familiar with Crello and Depositphotos from the LTD specials they seem to run every year.

This deal is actually a lot more significant than initially meets the eye. Vista is going all-out to become more than just a business card company.

They acquired 99designs last year, recently partnered with Wix, and are investing $250 million to build their digital services platform.

This acquisition appears as if they’re gunning for Canva next. Canva is valued at $40 billion and is pretty much the gold standard in the industry.

I’ve used both Canva and Crello before, and honestly Canva was just a lot better. Particularly for their photo selection and huge library of ‘actually-nice’ templates.

It’ll be interesting to see if Vista does anything with this, but packaging Crello & Depositphotos will be a decent head start.

The CEO of Depositphotos – Vadim Nekhai – will be staying onboard and is actually taking the role of VP of VistaCreate (Crello’s new name).

—

Random side note: it’s funny to think that Canva is worth $40 billion while Instagram was previously purchased for only $1 billion.

Friday Fast Tip: No more overlapping box shadows

Saw this one posted on Twitter a few months back.

Have you ever tried to set up a row of cards with a white background, only to notice that the box shadow of one card was overlapping the other?

This can give your card an unwanted bevelled effect.

But by putting “filter: drop-shadow(0px 5px 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.15));” on the element’s parent container (the grid), instead of “box-shadow: 0px 5px 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.15);” on each card, you can actually prevent this from happening.