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I build in Next.js, and I have to admit something uncomfortable. On the public data, Next.js sites pass Core Web Vitals less often than Squarespace sites do.
That is from HTTP Archive, which measures real sites in the wild rather than a demo someone tuned for a screenshot.
It took me a while to accept why. Squarespace has a ceiling and a floor. You cannot make it much faster than it is, and you cannot easily wreck it either. A coded stack has no floor. Every third party script, every unoptimised hero image, every font nobody remembered to subset is yours to add, and most people add all of them.
So the honest version of the pitch is not that code is faster. It is that code can be faster, and only if someone is actually watching the numbers after launch.
If you are choosing a platform, the useful question is not which one wins a benchmark. It is who owns the performance in month six when nobody is looking.
Has anyone here measured their own builds against the population data rather than against a Lighthouse run on their own laptop?
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
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Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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I’m Talha, a Full-Stack Engineer specializing in Three.js, WebGL, React Three Fiber, and high-performance Web Development.
I build browser-native 3D product configurators, interactive BIM/IFC viewers, and custom WebGL applications that bring desktop-grade spatial experiences straight into the web browser.
As I’m new to Contra, I’d love to learn from experienced freelancers here: What strategies or workflows worked best for landing your very first client on Contra?
Any quick tips on proposal outreach, portfolio structuring, or client discovery on the platform would be super helpful!
Looking forward to connecting with fellow builders and clients here! 🚀
Strong showcase; combining Three.js, WebGL, and full-stack expertise makes the work feel both technically impressive and visually polished.
We spent a good chunk of time on the Clustta website going back and forth on tone. There was a real pull to make it feel loud and playful, custom illustrations, quirky copy, that whole energy. But every time we pushed too far in that direction it started working against the product itself.
What we kept coming back to was Notion. It's playful in small doses (icons, tiny illustrations, the occasional line of copy with personality) but the actual interface and messaging stay clean and out of your way. GitHub and Slack were reference points too, since both trust their product to do the talking rather than the marketing page.
So that's where we landed: a site that's calm and direct, with just enough personality showing through (a basketball emoji here, a crossed-out "final final" there) without turning into a distraction. Still tweaking things as we go, but happy with where it's settled for now
I didn’t design this sale page to make the burger look good.
I designed it to sell the experience around it.
The page moves through a deliberate sequence:
Hook → Story → What you get → Why it’s different → Social proof → Menu → Location → Urgency → Final CTA
Not just “How should this look?”
But “What should the customer see, understand, and feel next?”
