WD MX9 -web pages loading FAST! Anyone else?

[PaulWR]

I just threw up a site in progress to my host. I knew part of the new version 9 of Web Designer MX (I'm on Premium) had some new CSS handling to help speed up sites, but if this pans out like it is looking at first glance, this is a MAJOR improvement that would have been worth the price for upgrade alone to a lot of web builders. My page I pulled up had 27+ jpgs, the page is 1.7mb. Loaded in what felt less than a second, and was NOT cached, it had never been viewed online before, plus loaded same speed or a little faster on forced reload.

To get a better idea, I tested at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ which has a number of test tools including site speed.
It came in at about a third of a second for most loads, and occasionally at the two second range.

I have to check further into download speed when I have more time for it to verify what it really going on, but this is very encouraging. A site page from another site, built in Web Designer 7, similar in size/pictures but smaller at 1.3mb, is taking up to 10 seconds to load, but usually 2.7-4.5 seconds. Other sites of mine, including on the same server, have similar results comparing WD7 & 8 to WD MX9 page loading times. I tested four.

Anyone else noticing improved speed results with WD MX9?


Thanks,
Paul

[pauland]

Doesn't make much sense. Nothing that Xara can do will make jpegs load faster. If the page has fewer jpegs then I would understand. It's not just the size of the jpegs it's the number.

[PeteS]

In v9 there are a lot less bitmaps created. For example, solid filled rectangles are now exported as HTML objects rather than bitmaps as well as many other shape and fill conbinations.
In some cases, to provide support for older browsers objects may stil be exported as bitmaps and only used if the browser doesn't support HTML5. I think Xara's release notes have a lot more info on this.

[pauland]

Yes, I thought Xara might be doing that.

The OP seems to suggest that 1.3MB of bitmaps created from an older version is loading slower than 1.7MB on the new, which I would only think possible if the older page had a lot of small bitmaps.

It's good to see Xara sneak in a bit of HTML optimisation for newer browsers.

[Egg Bramhill]

Remember as well as the HTML optimization it also creates bitmaps for backward compatibility AND also creates hi-definition jpegs for newer tablets/phones, so whilst the total file size may be 1.7Mb the server is probably not serving up anywhere near this figure.

[Cloud]

The whole pngs shapes (boxes) exported as html/css is one of the best reasons for upgrading to v9. But even if you don't have v9 there are many ways to speed up a site, optimising jpgs is the best known one but also remember that the more requests to your server, the slower the site. For instance if you have a few objects (not text) then grouping then will speed up your site if you have a jpeg sitting on top of a . Try the tools over at pingdom, it shows how fast your site is and how long each element takes to load, the more elements the slower the time.