Hey guys,
I've recently tried Adobe Muse to make landing pages. It's really helpful and I can create very attractive landing pages with it. It also fits well with different screens. However the landing pages generated by Muse always include 3 large js files, more than 180KB. The whole bunch of files can be more than 300KB if including some pics, say like a background pic(already compressed). I used my 3g phone to load those pages and the speed is intolerable.
I followed caurmen's lp guide and created landing pages with only 20-40 kb that is really great and fast loading. However I can't create complex pages because of my poor coding skills.
Is there a way that could reduce the whole size of pages made by Adobe Muse?
Are your making landing pages for mobile? If so then I would recommend against complex pages. Make sure it is as simple and light as possible. My mobile landers are usually under 10kb.
Check out zeno's guide to creating landers in muse. There's some great (and simple) tips on stripping the code and minimising file size
http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15421
If using Muse, you could reduce the size of image files using a graphics editor like Photoshop or Gimp (free) and reduce the size of javascript files:
https://developers.google.com/speed/...inifyResources
Another tool to create mobile/responsive sites is:
http://getbootstrap.com/
Remove all the JS.
Minify the HTML and CSS.
Pass all images through Kraken.io.
I'm not sure if Muse is going to be great for mobile landers to be honest. They really need to be responsive + use media queries and the more complex you make them in Muse, the more hand editing you're going to need to do in order to get them to be cross-device compatible.
I quite like Muse for rough-and-ready mobile landers, but you do have to chop out all the crap that it spams into your lander.
Definitely get rid of the JS if you're not using it.
Also, I'd go further on the images: once you've finished the lander, actually check each of the images and make sure it's saved as a JPG with reasonably high compression. Muse has a nasty tendancy to save images as uncompressed PNGs, which is ... sub-optimal for fast loading times in most cases.
Hey guys, thank you so much for giving great tips. I've cut the size from 350+ KB to 90KB. This is awesome. Although still a little big, it does improve the loading speed. I'll give a try to see the performance.
Also yeah, PNGs and Muse... this happens a lot if you try to style elements in a way that Muse can't do a CSS equivalent for.
Also, they made a seriously stupid change where if you use system fonts that aren't web safe or from the Muse Typekit repo, it exports them as an image instead (you will see a little icon in the bottom right corner of the text box).
What an absolute nightmare. Now, if I want to use fonts available on Typekit or Google's font store that are not in Muse's Web font library, I have to set them to a web safe font, messing with my formatting and layout, then change them in the CSS later. Why Muse why?
Naturally I have ranted in their support forum about how stupid it is to force image-based text exporting purely because of a font choice.