This is huge for us. We are building our third Website with HubSpot now and the results on mobile Speed are quite bad (20-40 score). We are optimizing where we can but it seems like HubSpot is loading a ton of unnecessary junk and doesn't give enough tools to optimize it further. We also checked if it's just us and went through some Websites shown here: https://designers.hubspot.com/inspire
Sadly most of them show bad scores on their mobile Versions.
We're having speed issues with our site as well: www.crddesignbuild.com. The original developers, Smartbug, did a bit of tweaking, but we still consistently get sub-50 scores on PageSpeed Insights, and some of our pages fail the Core Web Vitals test. Our traffic has dropped by 50% over the last three months, and we are not certain whether it is from a negative SEO attack we've been dealing with, page speed issues, or something else. In any case, we're trying to rule out the speed issue by pursuing further opimization.
We're trying to determine what sort of results are possible within the HubSpot CMS. Can anyone point to any Hubspot-hosted sites that score a 95 or better for mobile?
@dchambers Just saw your site was linked. Yeah..... you fail basically all of the above. Your assets aren't lazy loaded (not all of them). Slick sliders and redundant JavaScript is prevalent everywhere. And of course none of the animations are progressively done or as needed. Video backgrounds and thing slike that are horrendus for performance especially on mobile where performance tends to have worse metrics by nature which certainly isn't helping you.
A lot of stuff you're using as background images can be loaded as images in an <img> or <picture> tag and stretched to act as a background to take advantage of lazy loading and lots of other stuff.
That's a good high level list to start with. Look slike you're using Clean 6 which is good for quick drag and drops... for hubspot I guess.... but has a lot of mistakes and novice implementations which you now notice. People just think these things are good until they get down the road and go "oh wait... that's not right".
In their speed report you see all the module CSS chaining? Yeah. Cut it out into a single file / chunk it / minify it -> critical if you can afford it. That's your best option.
Move anything JS over to CSS that's possible cut out the rest. Defer all your assets. Make sure they're modern variants and sized appropraitely (width / height -> file size reductions and compressed). `<picture>` the variants or use HubSpot's cloudflare way of serving .webp which is pretty half ***ed in my opinion. But, better than nothing I guess and it's done for you as long as you don't use `?noresize` on image sources.
Stop using ridiculous heavy webfonts -> subset them by needed glyphs / unicode scripts -> use system as fallback or preferrably the main for no font loading. Mae sure they're not blocking. Ideally adjust the FOUT for matching font metrics to reduce content shift.
Similarly other assets can be deferred / made non-blocking and optimized. Make sure you're not doing anything ridiculous like hijacking and long polling that gives good perceived performance but bad metrics.
It's that simple on 99% of websites with good scores. However, HubSpot loads an insane amount of junk that as you said even after all this still results in bad scores leaving little hope or room for improvement.
If you parse HubSpot websites and bucet them by content almost every Hubspot websites weight is > 60% javascript which is insane. And many are >70-80%. The forms, ctas, i18n, etc are huge files and then people throw lots of garbage like slick sliders and other hubspot "standards" that certainly don't help.
We are in a similar position concerning speeding up our website. www.strouse.com We haven't had any luck to date, and if you can't optimize with minimal content, I don't know if there is much hope for us.
