Email SIZE & Gmail Clipping
OK, I was recently made aware of something that I didn't know about. Gmail clips HTML emails at 102KB. OK, that is what it is. But...
Then I look at the actual email output of an HTML email (like a newsletter) from FluentCRM and it will make your jaw hit the floor. The massive amount of inefficiency in the code for taking the Gutenberg email and outputting into a properly rendered HTML email is SHOCKING.
Like, I have one section of my newsletter which lists out 6 bullet points. In my naive mind, I'm thinking a simple LI list with some links. No biggie. Well, apparently, that little section alone results in almost 7KB of code bloat in the email, full of repeated inline-CSS, each wrapped in tables, etc.
Now, I'm well aware that some weird things have to be done to make HTML emails look alright. But... is there's anything that can be done here to make these emails less full of CRAP?
Problem is, if one isn't careful, the clipping will result in artificially lower open rates. Because the email gets clipped off before the tracking pixel even loads. Unless the reader clicks "View Entire Message".
To be clear, I know this isn't a FluentCRM-specific problem. But, still... I feel like it is an issue that the system should be able to help address.
Will check the output HTML. We tried to make the styles and DOM as small as possible. Will check again. Regarding the pixel: Will try to load that at the first instead of the footer.
Email dom is really complicated and email clients want us to wrap every item in table for making sure it renders as expected.
Shahjahan Jewel Yeah, I know. That's why I know this isn't a bug. Just more like... a wow moment. I'm going to have to change some of how I handle my weekly newsletter because of it.
David Risley Maybe we can show the total size when previewing your email so you know if it will be truncated or not.
Shahjahan Jewel That'd be helpful, but it would need to measure it after all of the send-time filters.... because the Gutenberg editor doesn't show anywhere near what the final send would be.
Shahjahan Jewel Some minification and other filters at send-time could help, too.
Just checking to see if there is any progress on this issue?
I'm currently running into this issue as well. I just completed a draft of a newsletter I made with the Gutenburg editor, and my newsletter (in the Gmail app) gets to about 85%, and then I see the "View entire message" link, which opens into a ridiculously small pop-up window to read the entire email (Google obviously doesn't care about their users and readability!??)
Curtis Bisel I ended up re-doing my template and building it outside of FluentCRM's editor. And then it now sends as a raw HTML email. Much cleaner code that way.
David Risley ~ Ah, thank you! I think I understand what you mean. Yesterday and today, I've been rebuilding my Gutenberg editor template, and just being as conservative as I can be (not putting group blocks inside of group blocks, as an example) just to get the html code file size down as much as possible. I'm getting really close! (to having no clipping in Gmail) But I will definitely try your suggestion if it truly comes to that in the end. 😉