Beck

Great to hear the issue is solved.
To avoid fractional positions while moving, activate snapping, and force pixel alignment. Do not activate "move by whole pixel", it will not allow to remove fractional positions via mouse.

It is best to keep a social media/sRGB preset for uploading to web. sRGB is the standard applied when no profile is embedded or the profile is corrupt. Color profiles can get dropped when uploaded to sites which use backend scripts which ignore profiles when reprocessing the image for rescale. Sometimes thumbnails get this treatment and it can cause color shifts between thumbs and uploaded sources.
*Many things can happen also if the client redownloads their imagery from online, as they are apt to do, edit it or resave for themselves someplace and it is very likely to lose a profile that way.
In short: Always use sRGB for web, especially where redistribution is likely (even accidental), unless it is for other artists, ie usually portfolios. Even if most machines can support embedded color profiles and that site supports non-sRGB standards, etc, you don't want a users screenshot of that image showing a terrible color shift floating around in the wild if their particular hardware or third party application accessing that site cannot support displaying it.
CMYK is supported by some browsers but I would not trust it as well-regulated support as CMYK is designed for printers.

Hey Stuart!
The file you provided is a cleaner curve! I followed your steps and recreated this and it worked! 
Thank you so much
For anyone following this, just a few more tips that I found: 
a. Change Colour to black
b. Rasterise
c. Scale Down
d. Copy into inkscape
e. Convert back to vector (by going to Path > Trace Bitmap > apply settings on right sidebar) 
*Simplifying the curve may help clean things up too by going to PATH > SIMPLIFY
f. Paste back into AD
 
Thanks everyone for your help! 

For example there are some third party tools on the net which allow to reduce/optimize vector nodes for SVG files. So if you export as SVG vectors, optimize/reduce nodes with a third party tool and then reimport that result back into ADe. - For example Inkscape offers ...
Automatically reduce (remove some) nodes to smooth an SVG How to reduce the number of nodes in a traced map using inkscape? ... And what I showed above, is a node decrease via tracing/a-vectorization of your initial shown bitmap, the tracer/vectorizer I used optimizes the vector nodes it generates for PDF/SVG output.
Beside that some well known tools/plugins for Adobe Ai do offer to do such things in an easy to use manner, for examples see ...
Astute Graphics reduce vector nodes

Well as NotMyFault already mentioned, there's room for improvements here and thus to simplify/optimize/reduce overall nodes usage.


grunge.afdesign

Hi Beck,
I would consider the option of rasterisation for this. As it's a vector, you can create a raster image of any size so there's not going to be many use cases you wouldn't be better off this way.
Lee

Maybe it will be easier to start over and simplify the design before merging curves? Large parts of design are fully opaque, so you can create one rectangle and delete all round shapes instead of merging thousands.
then, the dots are almost round, but have some dents leading to having many nodes instead of 4 only.

One big reason for bigger production file sizes is that Affinity apps miss the InDesign option for "Automatic (JPEG)" compression, which means that the program [i.e., InDesign] determines the compression / quality ratio by analyzing each image and varies the compression rate according to image properties. Affinity apps, by default, need to use very high quality setting of 98% for ALL images, to avoid an issue where a random (lower-quality) file, when compressed, will show clear artifacts. Affinity apps also miss separate handling for color, grayscale and monochrome images (the last mentioned are not actually even supported in Affinity apps). 

The more you rasterize, the larger the document!
To reduce the file size, you want to rasterize as little as possible, at as low resolution as possible, and with the highest compression as possible. (Been there done that since decades when email file sizes still mattered because… analog modems over landline; anyone here old enough to remember?)
That said, the PDF library that Affinity is using (pdflib) is not as effective and smart as Adobe PDF. In Affinity I was never able to match the size/quality ratio compared to corresponding draft exports from InDesign or Illustrator, applying approximately the same settings. The main reason being how PDFlib handles transparencies, layer effects and adjustments: poorly, i.e. it goes by "if in doubt just rasterize everything".

For commercial printing you will almost certainly want cmyk, crop marks, 300dpi and most importantly remember to set export as pages rather than spreads which despite creating and setting a preset (something I recommend you do) it always defaults/reverts to.

Hey all,
I'm looking for an efficient way to export my Affinity Designer 2 projects in two ways. 
1. As a much Lower File Size for client revision only 
I don't want to go over 5MB - these can be lower quality as they are only for client revision. I've tried exported using the settings: 
Raster DPI: 144
Rasterize everything
Downsample images above: 30 DPI
Jpeg Compressions Quality: 15
Colour space: CMYK (so they produce closest to colours we will print) 
Unchecked: convert image color spaces, honor colour spots, hyperlinks, layers, bookmarks
Allow advanced features - checked 

This still produced a file size of 45MB which is huge and not necessary for client revisions by email. 
The export process is super slow too and takes ages. 


 
2. High Quality file to specs for suppliers/printers 
I also want to export this same project as the current specs for supplier/printers. Happy to have these highest quality for print output. 
 
Maybe there are others out there who have tips on what they do as a work around. I'd like to avoid having to use any 3rd party programs to compress, this very time consuming. 
 
Most of our projects also include High Quality images, so heavy files. Just hoping we have more flexibility on file size when exporting! 
 
thanks! 
 
JNS - test file.afdesign

Inspecting the preview I see the export size is 1501 x 801. this lets me assume the layers are not perfectly aligned to integer pixel positions, leading to either blurriness or extra lines at the edges. You may consider correcting this, too.

Hey all, I realised I hadn't replied in here! 
After testing these, some of my artworks had the decimals in under transform which I removed. 
Some of the files also showed white line on certain screens too, so this is all fixed  
 
Thanks for your input everyone! 

@anto This is not the same thing. OP wanted to subtract the geometry (a destructive Boolean operation), while you are simply using the digger as a clipping mask.

Hey guys! thank you very much for your input. 
The window was opening in another screen! I have no idea how this happened and it was hidden off screen. Thanks for that!! 
 

You can set it for one click operation using the assign shortcut section of preferences, I've used ⌃ + M

Hey @Ron P.! This does exactly what i need and is so quick! No lag at all. 
Much much more efficient than what i was doing. Thank you so much!! 

Layer>Geometry>Merge Curves

I need to mention that this problem is also prevalent in Photo 2

Hey all, 
My concern is that I never had an issue like this on Affinity Designer 1 even with much larger projects. So curious to know whether this may be a bug or this is just how Affinity Designer 2 is. If that's the case, I could at least plan to create much larger projects in Affinity Designer 1 if i know it will be too slow in Designer 2. 
As for what @monkeycoder has said above, I think it's more a concern as we are experiencing this now which we hadn't in previous Affinity versions.
Thanks!

Update on this topic! 
While designing, I've found that Affinity 2 in general is much slower than Affinity 1. 
I tested this on another project where Affinity 2 was so slow and lagged I had to recreate it in Affinity 1 and then had no issues at all continuing the design. I've seen other forums stating similar experience - looks like happening to alot of others. 
I'll be moving back to Affinity 1 for all our projects from now,  I hope this gets fixed

Hopefully there are some updates soon because some users like myself are new to affinity and do not have license for v1, and its only the PDF format that taking a really long time to export plus not leverage off the available computer resources.

Hey guys!
It's definitely a well known issue. I've been following this other post for awhile now and many having the same problem. Seems like a lot of people (including myself) are going back to Affinity V1.  
Unfortunately no update from developers that I have seen yet 

Hello,
I have been having problems with exporting to PDF format in Affinity Designer V2.
A 69 MB file with only two pages, takes 30 minutes to export. 
I never had this problem with V1. 
My computer is a 2015 iMac, with a 2.8GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB 1867 MHz DDR3 memory and Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200
I would like to know what is going on...

Thanks,
JCorker

That is exactly the problem. The export is so dam slow even on a fast computer.
I am on a desktop with a Ryzen 7 5800x, and its taking a couple of minutes just to export 1 PDF. Not to mention that the entire software is in a 'locked' state during that process.
During the export, it is only using 10% of my CPU resources and not making use of whatever that is available to speed up the process.
This clearly is an optimization issue.