Snippet performance impact & options

Explore how Optimize keeps your snippet fast and flexible.

Providing a seamless visitor experience is crucial — no one wants to deal with unnecessary latency. We'll cover how Optimize addresses performance to give your visitors the best experience possible and two different snippet modes to let you prioritize performance or privacy.

How the snippet reduces latency

These snippet features are always active to help achieve low latency.

• Asynchronous loading — lets your page load faster by preventing the snippet from blocking other code as Optimize runs
• Preconnect and preload — improve snippet performance by preparing resources in advance
• Content delivery network (CDN) — nearly 100 global locations deliver variations faster by keeping them close to visitors
• Caching — speeds up subsequent page loads by skipping repeated steps and serving optimized content more quickly

Enable performance mode for faster speeds

Like any script, the Optimize snippet adds to your page's load time — and the smaller it is, the faster it loads. The snippet has two modes you can switch between, depending on your priorities. Choose between performance mode, which reduces file size for faster loading, or obfuscation mode, which prioritizes privacy by scrambling the config data.

Overview

When someone visits your site, the snippet loads optimization configurations — including the names and IDs of optimizations, variations, and page definitions. This data tells the snippet which changes to apply.

You can store this configuration in a readable format (performance mode) or an obfuscated format (obfuscation mode). Performance mode improves load speed, while obfuscation mode makes your setup harder to interpret from the page source.

Performance mode vs. obfuscation mode

Performance mode — prioritize speed

Performance mode stores configuration data in a readable format that compresses efficiently. This reduces payload size and speeds up loading — often improving performance by 20% or more. The tradeoff is visibility: someone inspecting your page code (e.g., using Chrome's DevTools) could read this data.

Obfuscation mode — prioritize privacy

Obfuscation mode scrambles the configuration data into an unintelligible string, such as:

R1AIa0ZQBCsjBAMOLSAHR1V4dFFVJW98RlBWf...

This protects your setup from anyone casually inspecting the page code, but it can slow down performance due to:

• Less efficient compression, which increases payload size
• Extra processing time to de-obfuscate the data before use

How to switch modes

Open your Optimize site in Webflow, then:

1. Click Account Settings in the Navigation panel
2. Go to Performance mode vs. Obfuscation mode
3. Click Edit
4. Choose either Performance mode or Obfuscation mode
5. Click Save