By Anonymous · 2026-08-14 · 968 views · 17 votes
Dawn theme, currently scoring 90s on mobile. I want to build 3-4 landing pages for paid traffic and I'm worried a page builder will wreck that.
Has anyone measured before/after on real pages, not the vendor's demo store?
Jonas_B
Measured both on the same landing page last quarter. Rough numbers, mobile, PageSpeed Insights, median of 5 runs:
Dawn native section page: 91
Same page rebuilt in PageFly: 78
Same page rebuilt in GemPages: 74
The drop is mostly from their CSS/JS bundles plus whatever images you drop in without compressing. Two things that recovered most of it:
1. Only publish builder pages you actually use. Every published page loads the app's assets on every page of the store in some builders, so delete drafts.
2. Lazy-load everything below the fold and don't use their video backgrounds.
After cleanup PageFly was back to 86. Honestly either is fine if you're disciplined. Neither is fine if you go wild with animations.
Jonas_B · 2026-08-15 · 14 votes
Measured both on the same landing page last quarter. Rough numbers, mobile, PageSpeed Insights, median of 5 runs:
Dawn native section page: 91
Same page rebuilt in PageFly: 78
Same page rebuilt in GemPages: 74
The drop is mostly from their CSS/JS bundles plus whatever images you drop in without compressing. Two things that recovered most of it:
1. Only publish builder pages you actually use. Every published page loads the app's assets on every page of the store in some builders, so delete drafts.
2. Lazy-load everything below the fold and don't use their video backgrounds.
After cleanup PageFly was back to 86. Honestly either is fine if you're disciplined. Neither is fine if you go wild with animations.
Anonymous · 2026-08-15 · 0 votes
This is the most useful comment about page builders I've read anywhere. Thank you for actually measuring.
Marta_L · 2026-08-17 · 3 votes
Adding a data point: on a client store with 12 published PageFly pages, the app's CSS was loading on the homepage which used none of them. Unpublishing 9 pages we didn't need bumped homepage mobile score by 6 points. Point 1 above is real.