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Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

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Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#71

Post by jokethrowaway »

tshaddox wrote: post #8
itake wrote: post #2

notion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and "great seo"? This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68. [0] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [1] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.co…

42 is pretty bad and I'm getting a 33 on potion.so, 60-70 on the demos (it could be that the server load from HN is contributing to it).

I just spent some significant effort fighting against Next.js and its bundles just to go from a 68 -> 90 for my own project

The difference was day and night on a real phone on 3g

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#72

Post by weird-eye-issue »

tshaddox wrote: post #8
itake wrote: post #2

notion websites are so slow. Google's page speed for your home page has a score of 42. Why does it say "fast page speed" and "great seo"? This [1] demo scores 81 and this[2] has a 68. [0] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [1] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... [2] - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.co…

42 is actually awful... My WordPress sites with large amount of images and content are all above 90, easily

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#73

Post by zapt02 »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #68
zapt02 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's built on top of Notion, so you pay for Notion and you pay for Potion as well. :-) Actually it's a bit funny because Potion is 2.5x more expensive than the Personal plan on Notion, even though the utility of Potion is provably smaller.

Isn't it because of scaling? The bigger a service becomes with a large audience, the cheaper they can sell things for.

I don't think scaling is much of a factor when it comes to cloud cost. Most clouds (AWS, GCP etc) charge for usage which scales linearly. The bigger you are the more you pay. Additionally there are many free resources for small startups. For example Potion is hosting their site on Vercel which costs $20/mo for <1TB/mo traffic.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#74

Post by tshaddox »

b9a2cab5 wrote: post #51
tshaddox wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, 42 isn't actually that bad. PageSpeed Insights scores are incredibly strict (that's a good thing) and not at all linear with visitor perception of loading speed. news.ycombinator.com has a 100 score, but if you compare the actual "Lab Data" it's not a massive difference. First Contentful Paint: news.ycombinator.com: 1.3s, potion.so: 2.7s The biggest difference is Time to Interactive: news.ycombinator.co…

The hit to your SEO rankings matters a lot more than the actual load time.

I doubt that’s an issue if people seek out your website and use it. Unless your primary growth strategy is Google SEO, I doubt that tweaking your PageSpeed Insights score is going to do much in cases like this where the site actually does load quickly in practice.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#75

Post by gavin_gee »

Whilst there will be lots of folks who complain at performance - its not as if notion is designed to be the backend api for a website, but i have to believe that continuing to drop the barrier to entry even below wix and squarespace has to increase the addressable market for this. I for one still get frustrcted at the level of effort for wordpress, wix and squarespace. could this really be used as the main website for a company, perhaps not but there are lots of other uses like documentation sites that could be interesting use cases

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#76

Post by encoderer »

aetherspawn wrote: post #49

I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this! Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues? Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so.…

If anybody wants to know what it's like running a SaaS, here you have it. A wonderful comment, a perfect potential customer, a ton of work to make it work! The only good part is that once you do it once it works for other customers, too.

I mean this in just the warmest way to the author of the comment, it's just as a SaaS founder, what an emotional roller coaster it took me on.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#77

Post by skinnymuch »

aetherspawn wrote: post #49

I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this! Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues? Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so.…

For nav menu do you mean something customizable or breadcrumb “menu” following Notion’s/the url sort of thing?

What do submenus mean for this?

I’m using super.so right now and thinking of switching to this. It appears I’d have to do my own nav menu either way. Not completely sure how that would work. None of the showcase sites have much depth of pages if at all. Only the official site itself seems to have menus. Super provides breadcrumb horizontal “menu”. Not great either.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#78

Post by skinnymuch »

noahtallen wrote: post #38
satvikpendem wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care, they just want a site that works. It's useful because Notion itself is WYSIWYG where whatever you type is what shows up, much more flexible than something like WordPress.

> much more flexible than something like WordPress WordPress is endlessly extensible and customizable, so I don’t think Notion would be more flexible. Maybe Notion is simpler or easier to use, but at the end of the day, you’d still be very limited in what type of site you could build. WordPress is also getting close to releasing a WYSIWYG editor for the full site, which is also extensible and customizable. But this i…

The biggest benefit is you get to use Notion for the backend content creation. It is prett different from more traditional WYSIWYG editors like Wordpress’. I think for smaller sites including in some collaborative instances, Notion makes more sense than Wordpress. Of course Wordpress makes a ton of sense in so many ways. Including for most collaborative scenarios.

Mine is a hippie ish free organic growing virtual coworking community. So it is easier to get active members to add to Notion than Wordpress. I think this is an edge case though.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#79

Post by aetherspawn »

skinnymuch wrote: post #77
aetherspawn wrote: post #49

I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this! Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues? Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so.…

For nav menu do you mean something customizable or breadcrumb “menu” following Notion’s/the url sort of thing? What do submenus mean for this? I’m using super.so right now and thinking of switching to this. It appears I’d have to do my own nav menu either way. Not completely sure how that would work. None of the showcase sites have much depth of pages if at all. Only the official site itself seems to have menus. Supe…

Something like the “hover to pop out” menus on the notion.so website.

There are navigation menus in potion.so at the moment (they’re great!), but they only support 1 level.

For any site bigger than a placeholder site there’s virtually never going to be only a single level menu.

Re: Show HN: I built a website builder on top of Notion

#80

Post by aetherspawn »

encoderer wrote: post #76
aetherspawn wrote: post #49

I haven't been this excited about a website builder for a long time. I can definitely see myself switching from Squarespace to this! Could you please clarify whether we can use something like AWS CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of this without issues? Edit: Really need hierarchical nav menu's though. That's an immediate killer. I'll switch right now if you say that you can support submenus in the next month or so.…

If anybody wants to know what it's like running a SaaS, here you have it. A wonderful comment, a perfect potential customer, a ton of work to make it work! The only good part is that once you do it once it works for other customers, too. I mean this in just the warmest way to the author of the comment, it's just as a SaaS founder, what an emotional roller coaster it took me on.

I still intend to switch my site over. I think this is a great SaaS. I was literally looking for a Confluence static site plug-in the other day, and they all suck or didn’t support SEO.

This product is awesome. And notion is better than Confluence as a CMS.

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