Framer's DIRTY Secret - Performance SUCKS!

You're not happy about Framer's pricing. Now, this is weeks old, but why no one mentions the performance issues? Even on powerful computers, Framer drops frames because designers overload the pages with multiple shadows, filters, and layered effects that are heavy for the browser to render. Framer guys basically don't know how it affects performance. Also, copy paste components. Uh, no one is trying to figure out uh how they work or how efficient they are. As a result, the interface looks beautiful but runs poorly. frame it seems so heavy compared to most websites on web flow. This is TMO1 obviously having a bit of a rant there. What he's saying is totally true. I mean why is no one talking about this? Temo if you watch this go and go and look at my personal channel. My whole the start of my whole channel my web flow and code channel was all about exactly what you're talking about here. this idea that you've got a bunch of designers who um aren't aware about the the website kind of uh limitations and they are trigger happy with dragging and dropping and adding things and adding effects and whatever and lo and behold these sites get slow and sluggish. So, it's not that no one is talking about it. It's just this is not I mean first and foremost it wasn't part of we were talking about frameworks pricing. We weren't just going to suddenly talk about performance in the middle of a pricing discussion. Outside of that, um, this is a conversation obviously that's kind of tried and tested. Because of the accessibility, oh my god, I'm going to go on a rant now, aren't I? Because of the accessibility of things like Web Flow, things like Flamer, you're going to get a lot of people that don't care about web development and don't care about performance and things like that. They're just excited to get a website up and running. And you know, I'm guilty of that when I first started coding, copying and pasting JavaScript functions I didn't know what did and you know, different orders and you big bloated JavaScript file mess. You know, we we don't know what we don't know at the end of the day. So on the one hand there's a bit of sympathy and understanding that people of all you're seeing work of people of all ages think that so much is happening for them because of these no code tools that we're inevitably going to see very very um unperformant unperformant websites. We all like I'm running on a M1 Max MacBook Pro, you know. I let us know what you are using down in the comments, but we're all using very very uh powerful computers. Heck, the the our phone is a very very powerful computer. It's not safe to assume that everyone has got such powerful machines. Some people just have an old Android phone that can barely run the apps they've got installed on there. Some people are on computers that are no like web books or whatever they call those little thin things the the uh the ones the Apple air kind of like killed or whatever it we are building websites on machines that are very very powerful and because we're pro we think we need to get the best machine and we do you know otherwise we're wasting time building these websites that are super slow but we need to test our websites and Look at our websites on slow machines. The easiest way to do that is you can throttle your um I can't really show you on on here without whatever. You can throttle your network traffic. That's one way of of uh you know imitating slow network traffic. I sort of feel like I want to have a shitty little PC, a shitty little notebook that is maybe 10 years old just to run websites on because then you'll see if you work that into your process then you'll see how your performance is. The other thing is obviously uh Lighthouse. I used to I used to [ __ ] on Lighthouse a little bit because well I will [ __ ] on Lighthouse actually because what it can't tell you is you know we've got accessibility right you got an accessibility score what it can't tell you is that you've written a piece of JavaScript that opens a menu that is the only form of navigation on that page. It doesn't know what your intent is when you're writing JavaScript and you're having all of these things available to you. So, it will give you a good accessibility score, but actually if you if you know what you're looking for and you know if you look at the code, you'll be like, well, this is terrible accessibility because you're not letting the user know that there's a menu popup here and this and that. So, it can only respond to the the information that you give it. However, performance, it absolutely can tell you how performant your website is because it's probably running on, you know, either its own sandbox or it's doing some sort of CPU throttling or GPU throttling before it gets into Chrome, Chromium browser, whatever you're using. So, watching out for that performance score, I think, is a really important thing. you're working blind, but you can get an indication of how performant your website is. That way, you build your website, run it through run it through Lighthouse and actually get, you know, it might be running fine on your machine, but if if you got a Lighthouse score of like 20 or 50 or whatever it is, listen to that and try and get that get that score up. Um, so yeah, that's that's all I have to say about that one. related is uh another comment that we received on our anti-gravity. Oh, it's on my Tik Tok actually. God, this style of website actually irritates me. Just slow and so information. Now, this is um I'm hoping Yeah, it's on mute. This is the anti-gravity website which you know as designers and as people um who are into the finer [snorts] things in life like animations and things like that. At the end of the day you need to understand what the website you're building here we go here it is fit for. Who is this who is this website for? Is it a website where people want loads of information? Is it anformational website? Or arguably, arguably in this case, it's a promotional website in which you can, you know, you can be a bit more liberal with with fancy [snorts] designs and animations and things like that. I actually would argue this chap down here saying uh so little information, just slow and so little information. I would argue that there is actually enough information here even in this first paragraph. Google's anti-gravity is our agentic development platform in evolving the IDE into the agentic first era. That tells me everything I need to know about well not everything I need to know but at a glance that is what this that's what this tool is. So, I would argue there's a little information, but what I think he's done, uh, James Truth here, he's kind of flipped the table and thrown his toys out the pram a little bit, which we all do. I'm not saying there's [laughter] not saying there's anything wrong with that, but he's just seeing it and think he's just he's neglecting any bit of information that he receives from the point of just seeing all of these what he deems unnecessary animations. And that's what I mean. You need to understand what your the purpose of your website is. If it's not a promotional website, if you're not trying to gain attention, then you need to like if it's a productive or productivity focused website, then probably you're going to want to tone down the animations. If it is a promotional website, then yeah, not go nuts, but just have some fun with it. Now, these aren't hard and fast rules. What is a hard and fast rule is is understanding your audience, understanding the end user of the website before deciding whether animations and whatever is appropriate. That's where I think the annoyance comes from. From a personal taste perspective, some people just might they hate all of the animations. You what can you do about that? I don't know. Some people love the animations. You can't really do about you can't really do anything about taste. But what you can do is provide to the target market. And in fact, Google might not want James Truth downloading Google anti-gravity doesn't want him that you're you're by being very specific, and we've spoken about this in the past. By being very specific, you're also batting away those who you don't want. Like you there's no harm, no foul in that. You you you got to pick a lane and just run with it. And this is kind of my overall point here is that you're not going to please everyone. You're not meant to please everyone. Don't try and please everyone, but understand who you are trying to please and build and design for them. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.