How I built a dynamic video gallery with custom widgets

Recently, we wrapped up a year-long project to give the Duda University website a complete and total makeover. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should check it out. We transformed the entire experience to not only fall in-line more seamlessly with our overall brand, but to also improve the experience for new and returning learners. A big part of that experience improvement is the new video gallery.

I’m not actually part of the education team. Rather, I work with support to help solve challenges customers face every day. You may even have worked with me before! However, when I saw the opportunity to collaborate with the education team I was more than happy to jump in.

We had worked together before, during Duda’s annual hack-a-thon, to create a unique client onboarding experience that leveraged Duda’s own technologies like the Instant Sites API. While that project didn’t win, it did open the doors to a more collaborative future between our two departments. That’s when the video gallery was born.

Understanding collections

Internal collections are an extremely powerful tool within Duda. Developers can create their own custom database, then leverage the information within that data throughout their website. Want to create dozens of pages for different business locations? Internal collections make that easy, by injecting content from the database into a templatized webpage. Want to dynamically add staff members to a list? Connected data works with a collection of employees to make that task a cinch.

Custom widgets, though, are where internal collections can really shine. With the collections API, there is really no limit to what you can do with your database. A great example, of course, is our video gallery widget.

Internally, we store information like the video’s URL, thumbnail image, title, and description, then we populate that data into the widget. We also tag these videos based on type and topic to improve the experience for users.

Together, this data powers an attractive, filter-able, and searchable interface for educational videos that users can easily and intuitively navigate.

So how did I build it?

Dive into the Collections API

Custom Widgets are shockingly powerful. Beyond classic HTML and JavaScript, you can leverage a variety of Duda APIs and handlebars to create really unique experiences. For our video gallery widget, we used as many technologies as we could.

Let’s start with a quick look at the Collections API.

The code you see above is an example of how one might initiate that API. Where it says “collectionName” you would put the name of your internal collection. Going forward, you can reference the collection variable to access every item within your internal collection. Pretty cool, huh?

Of course, an unrestricted list of database items isn’t super helpful. Thankfully, there are a variety of organized ways you can query collection data. We use this within our widget to power features like filtering and searching.

Let’s take a look at search, to start.

Above, you can see the simplest way to perform a search using internal collection data. We take a variable, titled “query,” and check to see if the text within that variable appears in any collection items—specifically the field titled “name.”

The “IN” operator means that data appears, well, “in” the collection data. For example, if you were to search for a video titled “How to restore a deleted site via API” by searching for “deleted site,” you could. That’s because “deleted site” appears within the database title.

In that code, we also sort the results by date and we limit the number of returned results to 10. That ensures a predictable, quick experience for users. The most relevant data comes first, and it comes in a digestible amount.

Filtering works the exact same way.

Exactly like the search function I shared earlier, this filtering function uses the “where” operator to compare values. Here, we compare a “type” mentioned in the sidebar with an internal collection value named “type.” However, unlike the search function, we want these values to exactly match, so we use the “EQ” operator.

You can explore all of this in the developer documents, but that’s the gist of how it all works.

Making something beautiful

We know how to get data from the API, but how do we make something that looks fantastic? The first step, like any good project, is to plan ahead.

I worked with Duda’s rockstar design team to create something in figma that would guide my code. Then, once we settled on a look, I used handlebars, built into the custom widget by default, to bring it all to life.

In short, the data that is returned from the collections API is “injected” into the website via the handlebars. For the video gallery widget, that looks something like this.

HTML

 {{#each videoFrame}}
    <a href={{pageLink}} class="video-card">
        <div class="thumbnailContainer">
            <img class="videoThumbnail" src="{{videoThumbnail}}">
        </div>
        <p class="videoTitle">{{videoTitle}}</p>
    </a>    
{{/each}}

We can use handlebars, the “{{“ symbols, to place content dynamically into the widget. The special handlebar, “#each”, repeats the code for every item returned in the collection. Collection data is then shared with the widget using connected data. The HTML itself is styled using classes and CSS.

Putting it all together

In the editor, this all comes together to create a drag-and-drop video gallery widget that can be easily updated from a simple spreadsheet interface. This makes it easy for the education team to update their site without any help from developers.

Have you created anything using the Collections API? Share what you’ve built in our community on Facebook, we’d love to see it.

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Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. Where FID measures the delay before a user's first click is registered, INP tracks the full responsiveness of every interaction across the page session. A good INP score is under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much page elements unexpectedly move while content loads. A score below 0.1 is good. Higher scores signal that images, ads, or embeds are pushing content around after load, which frustrates users and tanks conversions. These three metrics are a subset of Google's broader Page Experience signals, which also include HTTPS, safe browsing, and mobile usability. Core Web Vitals are the ones you can most directly control and improve. Why your clients' scores may still be poor Core Web Vitals scores vary dramatically by platform, hosting, and how a site was built. Some of the most common culprits agencies encounter: Heavy above-the-fold content . A homepage with an autoplay video, a full-width image slider, and a chat widget loading simultaneously will fail LCP every time. The browser has to resolve all of those resources before it can paint the largest element. Unstable image dimensions . When an image loads without defined width and height attributes, the browser doesn't reserve space for it. It renders the surrounding text, then jumps it down when the image appears. That jump is CLS. Third-party scripts blocking the main thread . Analytics pixels, ad tags, and live chat tools run on the browser's main thread. When they stack up, every click and tap has to wait in line — driving INP scores up. A single slow third-party script can push an otherwise clean site into "needs improvement" territory. Too many web fonts . Each font family and weight is a separate network request. A page loading four font files before rendering any text will fail LCP, especially on mobile connections. Unoptimized images . JPEGs and PNGs served at full resolution, without compression or modern formats like WebP or AVIF, add unnecessary weight to every page load. How to measure them accurately There are two types of Core Web Vitals data you should be looking at for every client: Lab data comes from tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest. It simulates page loads in controlled conditions. Lab data is useful for diagnosing specific issues and testing fixes before you deploy them. Field data (also called Real User Monitoring, or RUM) comes from actual users visiting the site. Google collects this through the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and surfaces it in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Field data is what Google actually uses as a ranking signal — and it often looks worse than lab data because it reflects real-world device and connection variability. If your client's site has enough traffic, you'll see field data in Search Console under Core Web Vitals. This is your baseline. Lab data helps you understand why the scores are what they are. For clients with low traffic who don't have enough field data to appear in CrUX, you'll be working primarily with lab scores. Set that expectation early so clients understand that improvements may not immediately show up in Search Console. Practical fixes that move the needle Fix LCP: get the hero image loading first The single most effective LCP improvement is adding fetchpriority="high" to the hero image tag. This tells the browser to prioritize that resource over everything else. If you're using a background CSS image for the hero, switch it to anelement — background images aren't discoverable by the browser's preload scanner. Also check whether your hosting serves images through a CDN with caching. Edge delivery dramatically reduces the time-to-first-byte, which feeds directly into LCP. Fix CLS: define dimensions for every media element Every image, video, and ad slot on the page needs explicit width and height attributes in the HTML. If you're using responsive CSS, you can still define the aspect ratio with aspect-ratio in CSS while leaving the actual size fluid. The key is giving the browser enough information to reserve space before the asset loads. Avoid inserting content above existing content after page load. This is common with cookie banners, sticky headers that change height, and dynamically loaded ad units. If you need to show these, anchor them to fixed positions so they don't push content around. Fix INP: reduce what's competing for the main thread Audit third-party scripts and defer or remove anything that isn't essential. Tools like WebPageTest's waterfall view or Chrome DevTools Performance panel show you exactly which scripts are blocking the main thread and for how long. Load chat widgets, analytics, and ad tags asynchronously and after the page's critical path has resolved. For most clients, moving non-essential scripts to load after the DOMContentLoaded event is a meaningful INP improvement with no visible impact on the user experience. For websites with heavy JavaScript — particularly those built on frameworks with large client-side bundles — consider breaking up long tasks into smaller chunks using the browser's Scheduler API or simply splitting components so the main thread isn't locked for more than 50 milliseconds at a stretch. What platforms handle automatically One of the practical advantages of building on a platform optimized for performance is that many of these fixes are applied by default. Duda, for example, automatically serves WebP images, lazy loads below-the-fold content, minifies CSS, and uses efficient cache policies for static assets. As of May 2025, 82% of sites built on Duda pass all three Core Web Vitals metrics — the highest recorded pass rate among major website platforms. That baseline matters when you're managing dozens or hundreds of client sites. It means you're starting each project close to or at a passing score, rather than diagnosing and patching a broken foundation. How much do Core Web Vitals actually affect rankings? Honestly, they're a tiebreaker — not a primary signal. Google has been clear that content quality and relevance still dominate ranking decisions. A well-optimized site with thin, irrelevant content won't outrank a content-rich competitor just because its CLS is 0.05. What Core Web Vitals do affect is the user experience that supports those rankings. Pages with poor LCP scores have measurably higher bounce rates. Sites with high CLS lose users mid-session. Those behavioral signals — time on page, return visits, conversions — are things search engines can observe and incorporate. 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A monthly one-page performance summary showing before/after scores builds credibility and makes your technical work visible. Prioritize mobile. Google uses mobile-first indexing, and field data shows that mobile CWV scores are almost always worse than desktop. If you only have time to optimize one version, do mobile first. Core Web Vitals aren't a one-time fix. Platforms change, new scripts get added, campaigns bring in new widgets. Build the audit into your workflow and treat it like any other ongoing deliverable, and you'll stay ahead of the issues before they affect your clients' rankings. Duda's platform is built with Core Web Vitals performance in mind. Explore how it handles image optimization, script management, and site speed automatically — so your team spends less time debugging and more time building.

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