SEO, AI, Version Control, and More: The Best Community Insights From BubbleCon 2024

Some of the best advice for building on Bubble comes from the people who use it every day. That’s why we asked community members — from Bubble educators to company founders — to lead sessions at BubbleCon this year.

Let’s dive into some of their most useful tips and strategies for building and growing on Bubble.

Harnessing SEO

Buildcamp founder and Bubble educator Gregory John led a session on optimizing apps to improve search engine rankings, attract more users, and drive business growth.

Leverage SEO for free, compounding traffic

“Having a well-optimized and high-ranking app is like having a store here in New York on the high street — traffic is super high and consistent. And the best thing about SEO is that that traffic is free, and it compounds once you start to rank.” (0:56) 

Focus on content

“Google updated their search algorithm … it’s an update that boosts visibility for high-quality, user-focused content from smaller sites. This algorithm change is now going to start demoting the big players that use keyword stuffing.” (2:31)

Take advantage of low-hanging fruit 

“Make sure that you have a footer, breadcrumbs, and navigation links on every page. Every page should link to every page — that is low-hanging fruit, and it’s actually quite powerful.” (16:44)

Supercharging organizational growth with Bubble 

Michael Ong from Seagate, who brought Bubble to his organization, led a session on using no-code to make change happen fast within an enterprise company.

Start with small, meaningful wins

“When introducing something as transformative as no-code, it’s critical to begin with manageable projects that deliver quick wins. This builds confidence among stakeholders and allows (you) to demonstrate the value of Bubble in a low-risk environment.” (24:43)

“Choose a project that addresses a real pain point within the organization but is not mission-critical. This ensures that the project is manageable and allows you to demonstrate the potential of Bubble without the risk of major disruption.” (25:06)

Be proactive and show results

“Success brings attention — and with that, scrutiny from departments like infosec, IT, and legal. It’s important to anticipate these things and prepare for them proactively.” (25:23)

“In the first year alone, we saw a 10 times increase in the speed of development, and that translated directly into cost savings. The immediate ROI was critical for gaining further buy-in from senior management and expanding Bubble’s use across the organization.” (22:39)

Educate, advocate, and empower

"No-code is still relatively new for many organizations. At Seagate, part of our success was due to educating others about its capabilities and advocating for its broader use. For in-house developers, this might mean running workshops or creating documentation for other teams.” (26:00)

“One of the most remarkable outcomes of adopting Bubble has been the transformation of our product management team… Product managers, with no prior development experience, rapidly learned how to design in Figma and develop full applications in Bubble… They became like a full-stack team, handling everything from product management to design and development.” (18:38)

Managing large apps

Internal Bubble Developers Andrew Vernon and Sam Morgan gave a behind-the-scenes look at building on Bubble, for Bubble — sharing best practices for managing large apps, including version control, A/B testing, and automation.

Implement organized version control practices

Sam: “Short-lived, feature-specific branches, working in different branches, keeping your deploy pipeline clear, syncing often with your live version, and communicating — and even over-communicating — are the most important things in maintaining good version control practices.” (6:30)

Use analytics and testing

Andrew: “If it touches a key metric, that’s usually a really easy red flag. If this touches signup, if this touches app creation, we should probably experiment rather than just throwing something out with a deploy.” (18:38)

Andrew: “If you know that the change you’re making is better for the product and it’s a clear win, we would advocate that you deploy it.” (18:59)

Andrew: “As a developer, you could run yourself into a wall trying to experiment on every little change… [At Bubble], we only run an experiment if there’s a chance that you might roll back… If there is a lack of consensus across our team leading up to a project about a particular change, that’s usually an indication that an experiment might be the best next step.” (17:38)

Set up automated testing

Sam: “Automated testing is really something that you set up to make sure that your critical user flows and critical functionality doesn’t break with new work.” (24:03)

Sam: “[Browser-based tests] are some of the most important ones to master for Bubble, because most of the stuff that you’re going to be testing is user flows in your Bubble app. But there is another type of test called an API test … This test may seem obvious to experienced developers in the room, but basically [the test] is hitting one of your API endpoints and asserting something about its response, whereas browser-based tests record your screen and simulate user behavior.” (28:32)

Leveraging AI for better no-code building

Bryan Tsao, Chief Product Officer of Jasper, discussed building AI products for people and businesses. He gave an inside look into growing teams and AI insights every founder should know.

Use AI to bootstrap and scale 

“I think we’re going to see a single-person company be able to become a billion-dollar company, because once you have all these tools ... as they get more and more sophisticated, smarter and smarter, they become more like agents. Soon, somebody’s going to found a company that grows without a standalone marketing department at all.” (32:21)

“Even if we had 10 times as much money as we do or 100 times the budget, there is no way that we could personalize a thousand emails a week... the step function change in both what you can do and achieve... for the cost of less than one person’s salary. That’s what’s going to be transformative in driving results.” (17:16)

How AI is shaping the future of app development 

James Devonport of UserLoop hosted a fireside chat with Bubble Ambassador George Collier and Emily Bennington from Codi Technologies. This session dove deep into how builders can use AI on Bubble.

Use no-code and AI for faster development 

Emily: “With Bubble, you’re able to bring that AI idea to life so quickly, then start testing it, making changes… With AI, that testing phase is so key, especially getting feedback from users and making those changes.” (5:59)

George: “All of the other advantages ultimately boil down to speed… If you build an app on Bubble, you’re able to outpace companies that have been around for years… just because you’re able to develop so much quicker.” (7:43)

Plan early

George: “As a rule of thumb, planning earlier is always better because it means you don’t have to double back on yourself and change stuff that you’ve already built. So having a plan is always good, but it’s never too late to integrate AI features.” (10:23)

Emily: “That concept of being able to put unstructured data in and have the AI return it as something that you can use in your interface for users I find very innovative because it’s just kind of incredible how quickly that process can happen (27:34)