Hey — it's Rames
I've been in France for two weeks now — and it's been a blast. The weather has been quite nice, and I've been enjoying the cold. I loved going for walks in the morning — walking on the frosty grass, gazing at the beautiful lights, and seeing that happy face on our dog Fidji.
I've always been a Hot > Cold guy, but these two weeks made me reconsider that a little bit…
3 Ways to Make Notion Faster
Notion doesn’t have a reputation for being the fastest tool out there. Although they recently pushed updates to improve load times, there are a few extra steps you can take to make it even faster.
1/ Make Notion Faster — Databases
Big databases are the main reason for which your Notion can be slow. Fortunately, there are things you can do to remedy.
- Create filtered views of your databases and linked databases. Instead of displaying the full length of your database with all its items, create filtered views depending on your tags, dates, status, etc. This will help Notion as it won't have to load all the items or all the properties.
- Limit the number of linked databases you have on your pages. Use them only when necessary / useful.
- Still on linked databases, you can limit the number of items to be loaded. If you sort your database to see the most important / urgent items first, you won't miss anything (plus, you can still load extra pages at the bottom of your linked database). To limit the number of items, go to your linked database settings → Load limit.
2/ Make Notion Faster — Page Content
Now, big pages with a lot of text, images, widgets, and other types of blocks can also take some time to load. But there are a few things you can do to improve load time.
- One of the most obvious things to do is to compress your images. Compressing an image makes it lighter and thus takes less time to load. This also applies to GIFs and videos. You can use tools like TinyPNG (for images) or Ezgif (for GIFs and videos). This tip is valid for all other tools and websites, by the way.
- Limit widgets! This is going to be hard to hear for 'aesthetic' template lovers, but widgets are not really optimized for page speed. If your Notion is slow, try limiting your use of them.
- A less obvious way to make your Notion faster is to nest content into toggles. Toggles 'hide' content and thus help Notion as it doesn't have to load its content right away. Use toggles to segment your information into multiple sections. And don't forget that you can also use heading toggles.
3/ Make Notion Faster — Additional Tips
Finally, to make your Notion experience quicker, make sure to regularly:
- Export your workspace and delete archived content: You can export your Notion workspace in your Settings & Members → Workspace Settings → Export content.
- Use the desktop app instead of the web app: It's better suited for maximizing speed than the browser.
- Reset Notion: If you're experiencing bigger, ongoing issues, please check out this resource to learn how to reset Notion.
All these tips come from NotionEverything guide — I highly encourage you to check it out if you want more details!
2 Resources
1/ Notion vs Evernote — A Comparative Guide
I have always loved tinkering with note-taking apps. Before becoming a passionate Notion user, I was all in with Evernote. I used it to store all my notes, and it contained my entire life. Quite similar to my current Notion workspace.
However, there are many differences between these tools. So, to help you understand which tool is best for your needs, I have written a comprehensive guide where I try to outline most of the key differences between both tools.
You already know which tool I prefer, but if you are still unsure about which one is best for you, give it a read! It should answer all your remaining questions 🙂
Read here
2/ NotionBL — Show Backlinks as Graph
One feature I'd love for Notion to work on is a visual representation of all our backlinks. I'm not asking for something as fancy as Obsidian, but just something that would help us see the interconnections between all our pages and database items.
In my quest, I stumbled upon NotionBL. NotionBL does exactly that, and the output is a minimalist, but beautiful graph with clickable items. Although you need all your pages to be nested within the same database, it's still a huge leap.
It's still in beta, and I hope to see improvements, but it's awesome that someone managed to create such a cool third-party tool!
Try NotionBL
