I’m back with another Divi 5 update, and I have a lot of great stuff to cover. I will highlight what we accomplished over the past month, show you some Divi 5 interface improvements, cover the much-requested topic of front-end speed, and revisit the Divi 5 Public Alpha ETA.
Let’s get into it!
We got a lot done over the past month. 👇
If you tuned into last month’s update, you’ll know that we have been working hard to clean up all the bugs in Divi 5 in preparation for the Public Alpha. We carried that momentum into March and fixed an additional 80 bugs. We want Divi 5 to be in tip-top shape, even during its Alpha and Beta phases.
After completing the bug bash, we moved on to work on a vital dependency update, updating Divi to React 18 and further improving the performance of the Visual Builder. This was a big undertaking, but it made a difference. The Visual Builder is faster than ever.
We gave Divi 5 its first round of front-end performance tuning, cutting server rendering time and peak memory usage in half. We have often been asked whether Divi 5 will affect front-end performance, and I’ll be touching on that in more detail below. (spoiler alert, the answer is “yes!”)
We progressed on some of Divi 5’s remaining features, including Global Colors, Divi Presets, and Layers View. These are all close to being finished and merged into the beta. We only have a small handful of features that need to be finished before we can release the Public Alpha.
While the team worked on those crucial updates, I had a chance to give Divi 5 its first design review and polish. I love the new interface. It’s simple, light, snappy, and feels like a breath of fresh air. There are still things to improve, but we are honing in on something great.
While polishing up the UI, I also had a chance to add dark mode and a few color schemes for those partial to the Divi purple. 😊 Dark mode is great. It gives your eyes a break and lets your design take center stage.
The Visual Builder is much faster in Divi 5. It’s night and day. But what about the speed of your website on the front end? Will Divi 5 make your website faster? The answer is yes, and quite a bit faster at that.
Many factors are at play when it comes to a website’s speed. Divi is critical in some aspects, but many are outside Divi’s control. When you conceptualize the loading of a website, you can think about the following series of events and the importance that certain aspects of your website play in each:
The visitor must first connect to your website. The importance of having a CDN and a host with a fast infrastructure comes into play here. Your website might render quickly, but it won’t seem that way if it takes 5 seconds to connect.
The page needs to be rendered once your visitor connects to your website. Again, the power of your host is essential here because the CPU, memory, disk speed, and a handful of other things will all play a role. However, the software that runs your website, such as Divi, your WordPress plugins, and your PHP version, will also have an effect.
It’s at this point where Divi 5’s changes make a difference. Your website needs to take the page you built in Divi, parse all the data related to the modules you used and the settings you configured, and turn that into HTML output. In our tests, Divi 5 does this twice as fast as Divi 4, shaving off an entire second of load time. Peek memory usage was also cut in half.
The only way to achieve that kind of improvement was through the vast re-architecture we tackled in Divi 5, and I think we’ll make it even faster before it’s officially released.
Once your page renders, things like file size come into play. The visitor needs to download the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Images and wait for the page to become interactable. Divi 5 will also slightly improve things in this area due to the reduced size of Divi’s main script file.
Our goal was to release the Public Alpha in Q1 of this year, and as March comes to a close, we missed the mark. We’re close, but there are a few things we need to polish up first, and we decided to put extra work into what we are calling the Divi 5 Readiness system, which will help you understand which features are currently missing in Divi 5 and how those missing features may affect your existing websites. I’ll touch more on that next month.
However, we still want to let everyone test Divi 5 and give us feedback as soon as possible, so we are going to set up a live demo website that you can visit to play with the new interface. We’ll keep it updated as Divi 5 development progresses, and you can follow along. You’ll be able to experience Divi 5’s lightning-fast speed and stumble upon any quirks and bugs inside a safe environment. If you report the bugs you find, we can fix them before the Public Alpha goes live.
We plan to have the Divi 5 demo website up and running before next month’s update.
Here are the latest Divi 5 changelog entries. 👇
That’s all for this month’s progress report. Stay tuned for more updates, and don’t forget to follow us by email and subscribe to our YouTube channel to ensure you don’t miss a thing. I’ll return next month with another Divi 5 progress update and a link to the Divi Alpha demo!
The post Divi 5 Update: Front-End Speed Improvements (And Much More) appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
Are you struggling to develop fresh ideas for social media posts regularly? AI tools can…
In the past, building a website required web design skills and, in some cases, knowledge…
Hey Divi Nation! Thanks for joining us for the next installment of our weekly Divi…
Image quality can make or break the visual impact of your content. AI-driven tools have…
Are you building an online store? Then, GoDaddy and Shopify likely surfaced in your research.…
It’s time for another freebie! This time, we’re giving you a free Theme Builder Pack…