5 Common Adalo Performance Issues (and How to Fix Them)

You’ve poured your heart and soul into building your app on Adalo. The design is sleek, the features are innovative, and you’re ready to share your creation with the world. But then you hit a snag—the app is slow. Laggy screens, delayed data loading, and unresponsive buttons can frustrate users and undermine all your hard work. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many Adalo creators face similar hurdles. The good news is that most Adalo performance issues are fixable.

As a no-code platform, Adalo gives us incredible power to build complex applications without writing a single line of code. However, this flexibility means we sometimes build in ways that aren’t optimized for speed. Think of it like this: you can build a house with any layout you want, but a structure with a solid foundation and well-placed support beams will always be more stable.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through five of the most common performance bottlenecks I’ve seen in Adalo apps and provide practical, actionable steps to fix them.

1. Your Database and Lists Are Working Overtime

This is, without a doubt, the number one cause of sluggish Adalo apps. How you structure and display your data collections can make or break your app’s performance. When a screen loads, Adalo has to fetch all the data you’ve asked it to, and if you’re not careful, that can be a very heavy lift.

The common culprits include:

• Loading too many items at once: Does your home screen really need to load all 10,000 products in your database? Probably not.
• Using custom lists unnecessarily: Adalo’s native lists (Simple, Card, Image, etc.) are highly optimized. Custom lists offer flexibility but come with a performance cost due to their complexity.
• Nesting lists within lists: This is a major performance killer. Each nested list multiplies the data requests, leading to exponential slowdowns.
• Complex on-the-fly calculations: Asking Adalo to count items or perform calculations on a list every time the screen loads adds significant processing time.

How to Fix It:

• Embrace “Load Items as User Scrolls”: For any list that might contain a large number of records, enable the “Load Items as User Scrolls” option in the advanced settings. This feature, often called lazy loading, only loads the items visible on the screen, drastically cutting initial load times.
• Set a “Maximum Number of Items”: Be realistic about how much data a user needs to see at once. On a home screen, maybe you only need to show the 10 most recent posts. Go to your list settings and set a maximum number to prevent the app from fetching your entire collection.
• Prioritize Native Lists: Before you build a custom list, ask yourself if you can achieve a similar design with one of Adalo’s native list options. The performance gain is almost always worth a minor design compromise.
• Store Counts in Your Database: Instead of using a filter to count how many comments a post has every time it’s displayed, add a “number property” to your ‘Posts’ collection called “Comment Count.” Then, create a simple action that increments or decrements this number whenever a comment is added or deleted. This way, the app just reads a number instead of performing a calculation.

2. Unoptimized Images Are Weighing You Down

High-resolution images are fantastic for marketing websites, but they can be disastrous for app performance. If users are uploading photos directly from their modern smartphones, those image files can be huge and are not optimized for quick loading in an app.

How to Fix It:

Adalo uses a powerful service called Imgix to handle image display. You can, and should, leverage this to your advantage.

• Use Imgix URL Parameters: When you display an image, you’re not just pointing to a static file. You can add parameters to the image source URL to optimize it. For example, you can add ?auto=compress,format to the end of the image URL. This tells Imgix to automatically compress the image and serve it in the most efficient format for the user’s browser (like WebP).
• Resize Images Appropriately: You can also control the dimensions of the loaded image. If you’re displaying a thumbnail, there’s no need to load a 4000-pixel wide image. Use Imgix parameters to resize it on the fly. You can find a full list of what’s possible on the Imgix API Reference.

3. Your Workflows Have Too Many Steps

The logic you build behind your buttons and actions is another area where performance can degrade. A single button click that triggers a long chain of conditional actions can leave a user staring at a loading spinner, wondering if the app has crashed.

A common example is a “Sign Up” button that:

1. Creates a new user.
2. Updates their profile with initial data.
3. Adds them to a “Welcome” list.
4. Triggers a welcome email via an external API.
5. Then navigates to the home screen.

If any of these steps lag, the entire user experience suffers.

How to Fix It:

• Simplify Sequential Actions: Review your workflows. Are there any actions that can be combined or run in a more efficient order? Try to limit the number of actions tied to a single trigger.
• Offload Complex Workflows: For multi-step processes, especially those involving third-party services like sending an email or updating an external database, consider using a separate “loading” or “processing” screen. This provides immediate feedback to the user and allows the actions to complete in the background before moving to the final destination screen.
• Rethink Your Logic: Sometimes, a slow workflow is a sign of overly complex logic. Ask yourself if you can achieve the same outcome in a simpler way. Perhaps instead of five actions on one button, you can split the process into two smaller, faster steps for the user.

4. Your Screens Are Too Crowded

It’s tempting to pack as much information as possible onto a single screen to avoid making the user navigate. However, every component, every piece of text, and every conditional visibility rule you add to a screen increases its load time.

A screen with multiple lists, numerous buttons, and complex visibility rules (e.g., “this button is only visible to logged-in users who are also admins”) requires Adalo to do a lot of thinking before it can display the page.

How to Fix It:

• Divide and Conquer: Break down complex screens into multiple, simpler ones. For instance, instead of a single dashboard with lists for “Tasks,” “Projects,” and “Team Members,” use a tab bar where each tab leads to a separate screen for each category. This ensures the app only has to load one list at a time.
• Limit Components: Be mindful of how many elements are on each screen. A clean, focused design is not only better for user experience but also for performance.
• Be Wary of Visibility Rules: While powerful, excessive use of conditional visibility rules can slow things down, especially within lists. If you find yourself hiding many elements on a screen, consider if a separate screen for that specific user role or condition would be more efficient.

5. Inefficient Use of APIs and External Collections

For many advanced apps, integrating with external services like Airtable, Xano, or other APIs is essential. However, poorly configured API calls can introduce significant delays. If your app has to wait for a response from an external server before it can display content, any slowness on that server’s end will directly impact your app’s performance.

How to Fix It:

• Filter Data Before it Reaches Adalo: When using an external database like Airtable or Xano, try to filter the data on the server side as much as possible. For example, instead of pulling all your records from an Airtable view and then filtering them in Adalo, create a specific Airtable view that only contains the data you need for that screen.
• Cache Data When Possible: If you are fetching data that doesn’t change frequently (e.g., a list of countries), there’s no need to call the API every single time the screen loads. While Adalo doesn’t have advanced built-in caching for external data, you can build simple caching logic by storing the data in a temporary collection after the first successful API call.
• Use Optimized Endpoints: When working with powerful backends like Xano, design your API endpoints to be as efficient as possible. Combine data from multiple tables into a single endpoint if it means you can reduce the number of separate API calls your Adalo app has to make.

Wrapping It Up

Tackling Adalo performance issues is a process of optimization, not a one-time fix. As you add more features and your user base grows, you’ll need to continuously evaluate how your design choices impact speed.

Start with the low-hanging fruit: optimize your lists and images, as these often yield the biggest performance gains. From there, refine your workflows and screen designs. By building with performance in mind, you can ensure your Adalo app is not only powerful and feature-rich but also fast and enjoyable for your users.