# Coming from Google Optimize, will we get the same flash of original content?

Asked by Steve Callahan on 2024-03-19. Tags: performance, flicker, migration.

Our marketing team is one of the many orphans from the Google Optimize
sunset. We are shortlisting replacements and I have one scar that drives
the whole evaluation: the flash of original content. Our users would see
the control page for a moment before the variant snapped in, and the
alternative was the page-hiding timeout, which Optimize set at a generous
4 seconds. Our pages spent so much time hiding I started calling it hide
and seek, except nobody was seeking.

So the question for Croct: do we get the same flash or the same hiding
timeout, or is it handled differently? And can my team still build tests
without engineering tickets like they did in Optimize

## 2 answers

### Accepted answer from Marcos Passos (2024-03-19)

Neither the flash nor the timeout, and the reason is architectural
rather than a clever mitigation. The flash of original content is an
artifact of client-side swapping: the browser paints the control page,
the script loads the experiment rules, then it rewrites the DOM. The
hiding timeout exists only to cover that window. Croct resolves content
on the server instead, so the first paint is already the personalized
or variant content. There is no swap to hide, and consequently no hiding
timeout exists anywhere in the product.

For client-rendered SPAs the approach differs slightly: components hold
rendering via Suspense until the content arrives, instead of painting
the default first and replacing it. Different mechanism, same outcome,
the user never sees the wrong version.

On your second question, yes. Marketers build and publish
[experiments](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/experiment)
from the dashboard without code changes, which should feel comparable to
the Optimize workflow your team lost. Engineering is involved once, to
integrate the slots, and after that your team owns the experiments.

#### Reply from Steve Callahan (2024-03-20)

No more hide and seek then. Thanks Marcos, we will run a pilot on
our homepage hero.

### Answer from gterry (2024-03-20)

Fellow Optimize refugee, we migrated in January. One thing I wish
someone had told me: the mental model shift is that variants live in
content slots, not in a visual editor that mutates your page. Took our
marketing team about a week to adjust and now they prefer it, since
variants cannot break the page layout the way DOM edits sometimes did.
Budget a little onboarding time for that.