Does wx5 Pro provide a way to optimise linked files? 
Autore: Ian T.I am very confused and honestly quite shocked by the sheer number and the sizes of CSS files and other files that WX5 generates and links.
The raison d'être of CSS is to provide cascading style information that can be *shared across elements* and key to the concept of a CSS file is that it can be *shared across multiple HTML pages*, thus potentially providing a massive reduction in bandwidth, resulting in efficient, faster-loading websites, and/or allowing more useful content to use the saved bandwidth. Sending the same data twice would be pointless and unnecesarily costly in terms of bandwidth, load time, energy efficiency etc. Why then does WX5 Pro create a CSS file for every single page on the site even when a huge part of the content of each of these files is *identical* to the others?
Why does my 21 page site require over 30 CSS files? (They're mainly in a folder called pcss ).
When CSS styles are unique to a particular HTML page the CSS it is more efficient to include the styles in the page itself an extra CSS file will slow the load time a bit. Any styles that are shared across more than one page should go in a shared file. The idea of creating a huge CSS file for every page and even every object! makes no sense at all. I wonder if something has gone wrong with the software or whether there is a setting somewhere, that I haven't noticed, which tells to software to combine, consolidate and optimise the CSS as it should be.
Not only are these CSS files adding massive overhead to my site (nearly 3MB) but there are also dozens of other unnecessary files, some of which are actually loaded with each page. The site does not use the WX5 search engine or WX5 shopping cart or the captcha so why does WX5 add all these files and more to the site folder?
WX5 is creating even more overhead by duplicating image files. Just because I want to use the same image twice at different sizes doesn't mean I users browsers to have to download two separate files of the same image. Just the larger image will do. This would be understandable if one image was a thumbnail preview when the larger image appears first in the site, there is no need for a slightly smaller version to be generated and linked.
Now I have built my first website with WX5 it looks like it is going to take me many many hours work to to optimise it, remove unnecesary references. I believe I can reduce the data size of the site to less than 25% of what WX5 has generated. When it's done I don't suppose I'll ever be able to use WX5 to edit the web site again because WX5 won't understand my edits will just recreate all that unneccessary overhead again.
Please someone tell me that I am imagining this problem and that WX5 can create websites that are properly bandwidth optimised. I am finding it really hard to believe that it can't.
If WX5 can't do it, what do other users do to optimise their sites, or do they not bother?
Hello.
"Why then does WX5 Pro create a CSS file for every single page on the site even when a huge part of the content of each of these files is *identical* to the others?" - I think that it was easier for the developers to create the program itself.
"Why does my 21 page site require over 30 CSS files? (They're mainly in a folder called pcss )." - This is how the program works.
"or whether there is a setting somewhere, that I haven't noticed, which tells to software to combine, consolidate and optimise the CSS as it should be." - Try these settings. But I'm not sure they will help much.
"why does WX5 add all these files and more to the site folder?" - I think that it was easier for the developers to create the program itself.
"Please someone tell me that I am imagining this problem and that WX5 can create websites that are properly bandwidth optimised. I am finding it really hard to believe that it can't." - You're right. That's exactly how it is. You can try using Google PageSpeed Module on your hosting if it exists. But it still does not solve the problems you described.
"If WX5 can't do it, what do other users do to optimise their sites, or do they not bother?" - i tried this.
Autore
Hi Aleksej,
That's very bad news indeed. My disappointment in the WX5 has now gone from slight to extreme. There are relatively straightforward workarounds for most of X5s other failings I have encountered but this one is a real killer because it can't be avoided. I know a lot of the the product has been lazily programmed, especially where it comes to optimisation and avoiding unnecessary repetition of elements but the creating a mountain of repetitive CSS files and then not consolidating them is almost criminal. *It is the absolute number one feature that I genuinely expected to find in this product.* WX5 is supposed to make it easy to style websites. In reality, as it turns out, if you want an efficient site, you will end up having to manually reconfigure all of the styling. I have many years of experience hand-coding web sites but consolidating all this CSS looks to be a seriously daunting prospect. I really don't want to spend my weekend doing this. I'm sure that users with either little time or little or no understanding of CSS or JS will just be stuck with unnecessarily clunky, bloated, inefficient web sites.
Aleksej, I looked at your web page that set out to deal with this. You have obviously put a lot of work into it but it partly misses the root of the problem which is that WX5 should do most of this this stuff internally without necessitating days of incremental tweaking, (which, will likely be way beyond the ability or understanding of many of users of WX5).
I'm thinking that the only reasonably efficient way to do it would be to write some software to take at least some of the pain out of doing the necessary work tro properly consolidate the CSS files. I've looked for third party solutions to help with this but nothing I've found so far seems up to the task. Google Page Speed isn't really useful in this matter. It won't fix anything and it seems to be more focused on single pages rather than assessing if a site is efficient. But then even the individual HTML pages from X5 contain uneccessary repetition, and other content is repeated across the HTML pages when it could quite easily be shared in a js file.
I can understand that if, for example, you were to make edits to one page that was using shared a CSS file, then the WX5 might need need to do full scan to see if any other pages were using specific styling rules before altering or deleting them, and this would potentially slow down making page edits but an optimisation scan could quite easily be done in a single automated sweep either either when saving a page, when exporting the site, or at least as a feature in the 'Website Optimisation' section, however X5 doesn't address this issue at all. It avoids the subject completely and focuses on image optimisation (which is almost always going to best done in other ways so that feature is not of much use), and minification (which would be good thing but you will almost certainly want to turn that off when you reralise that you are going to have to fix all the CSS+JS manually.) The only other optimisation provided is basic SEO but the insane CSS file planning and lack of optimisation is almost certainly going to have a negative impact on SEO.
I suppose it's my own fault for buying the software without checking this out properly but the problem wasn't so obvious when creating one or two pages to check out the features. Bandwith optimisation of CSS and, everything else should be a core feature in a product like this. The concept of a single application like WX5 to collectively manage the contents of an entire website lends itself perfectly to getting this right, but instead WX5 gets it spectacularly wrong.
Sorry for slagging of the product but this lack of care by the development team really is unforgivable. I am genuinely shocked to see how X5 implements CSS files and certain other features. I was actually going to recommend WX5 to friends but I have changed my mind now. I couldn't live with myself if I did. Maybe if these problems were being addressed in the next release I would have a different view but dicovering this has led me to believe that Incomedia doesn't really care about anything that is hidden away in files and folders that potential new customers are unlikely to notice until it is too late.
I understand you. In an article on my blog, I showed an example of what you can try to do without editing the code.
But given the current situation with the assessment of site speed, these actions may not be effective.