Chicago HUG Recap: Tips for Building Fast Pages Quickly

The Chicago HubSpot User Group held the first ever developer-focused meet up in the western suburbs of Chicago. HUG leaders Stephanie and Sarah wanted to make sure that our Chicago HUGs include all groups of HubSpot users—marketers, sales personnel and developers. With this goal, they organized a special meetup event and HubSpot flew out Senior Software Engineer, Matt Coley, to present. 

Between the unlimited short pours at Solemn Oath Brewery in Naperville and the Portillo’s Chicago-style hot dog bar sponsored by Diagram, Matt presented on “Need for Speed: Building Fast Pages Quickly.”

His presentation was broken up into two core discussions of a) building pages that are optimized for performance/fast rendering and b) building pages in a quick and efficient manner. Matt started out by discussing the responsibilities of HubSpot’s Content Platform team and which aspects of the platform they "own" including: content performance, HubL, HubDB, Content Search, COSIndex and AMP pages.

Here are a few of his HubDB optimization tips:

• Plan to avoid performance issues when scaling.
• ‘orderBy’’s are expensive to execute! Even with limits.
• Consider splitting large tables into smaller tables with shared schema.
• Filter order matters, quickly test by hitting the API directly.

And a few other ideas:

• Use HubDB if you want page scalability.
• Design templates so marketers never have to go into the design manager.
• Spend an afternoon reading through the HubL documentation.
• Actively contribute to the developers’ slack channel.

Matt struck a great balance of talking about complex topics in an easy to understand way. Making the event a great learning opportunity for technical and non-technical HubSpot Users.  

The next Chicago HubSpot User Group is July 19 at 6 p.m. at TechNexus. It’ll feature a professional headshot clinic and presentation from HubSpot’s VP of Customer Success, Alison Elworthy. RSVP here.