0:01
Hello everybody, I’m Michael Borgelt, owner and founder of 51 blocks and the WP help here Today I’m with the crazy optimizer Abdul this guy has does optimization on websites. So it’s never been seen before and today is our first installment of this of the show. And we’re going to kind of go through some of the results and give some recommendations of things that other people can do to help speed up their website. And yeah, kind of just go from there. Abdul is a little under the weather. So we’ll see how his voice holds up throughout this process, but we’ll kind of see we had to get this first one out and get started. So this is here we are we’re here with palm beach plastic surgery calm and here’s the results beforehand. And what you can see here is the Page Speed score, you know with Google Page Speed or sorry with gt metrics is 56%. The why slow is 54 the load time of 5.2 seconds so the load time not horrible. But you know, the page performance scores can be much better. So duel, why don’t you talk about kind of what you see as an ideal load time for websites and kind of where you’re trying to focus on I know where I’d like to see them for SEO. But let’s kind of start with you first with what you think you’d see with.
1:19
Yeah, for low times. Thank you, Michael. So yep, we love optimization. And I love to optimize websites. So I think just to add it, because I know visual marketing so I know how important page speed and load time is now for website is becoming very critical. So I think for me, that sex should be like for normal websites of business website, not more than three seconds. That’s what I like, if that’s the cutoff if it’s over three seconds. I know there’s room there, because if it’s under three seconds, and then there are some reasons why it can be there. But if it’s over three seconds, like this one on beach plastic surgery is at 5.2 seconds. So for me it is way over that. And even with the studies done by Google and other other businesses, they found out there anything about 300 console secondary people start moving patients. And nowadays I think it’s even getting worse because most of these studies that people, quote, have a four second three seconds are from 2015 2016. So I think it’s even worse now people expect websites go even faster. Now, I don’t
2:16
agree with that. I think we’ve seen a increase in traffic, not not total organic, like new users, but total users of 16 to 28%, just by some of us going in and optimizing a website like this. So that shows the importance of kind of the load time and how much more frequent people will visit your website. And we’ve also seen the bounce rate dropped as well,
2:42
because they’re able to get through multiple pages and not have to wait
2:45
as much. So yeah, I mean, just just to give real quick, I kind of jumped around here but the background. You know, I’ve been in digital marketing since 2009. have run my agency since then. Digital Marketing before is digital marketing in 2002 2009 help rank website on the keyword mortgage on the first page. So I’ve been doing digital marketing a long time, Abdul let you kind of talk about your experience that cloud ways and what you’ve done. So,
3:15
okay, so I think I’ve been also digital marketing I started in 2003. So since then I’ve been doing that since I’ve been very much focused on the SEO and SEM part as well. And overall digital marketing. So my interest in WordPress is quite old because I when I was working with digital marketing, I used to create my own websites. So I used to use WordPress very extensively. So that’s where my interest developed in WordPress as well. And that’s when my interest development speed as well because when I was working at a time time, even like nine years ago meant not many people used to focus on fast loading websites. They just wanted very interactive websites. So for me, that’s where I saw my head that, okay, we need interactive websites, but we need to load faster than the competition. And at that time, I saw that okay, if I’m loading faster than the competition, I’m getting better results. I’m getting better rankings That I think created the synergy in my mind that these two things go hand in hand. So I think that was the main like interest which developed in PageSpeed and lutein. And just like Michael said cloud where so I had worked for on one and a half years with cloudbees as well as a VP of growth and marketing. So I was focused working with them growing the platform on the marketing side of things. But so I think here I am getting a more mix of the marketing side of things as well and getting my hands really into the technical parts as well. So that’s what I love working on and whenever I get websites, I think Michael knows this as well when we get websites for clients optimization, I am really excited about that. And like for us it’s like something that we really love to do and it’s not something like you don’t take it as something we have to do it. Something I think we love to do it and like we obsess over it second ago I nowadays I think because earlier when we were doing optimization, we were getting high 90 scores, but now even if something is like 9596 we’re like why is it 95 Why cannot why can it not be hundred or why is the page load time two seconds? Why cannot ignore Under one second. So I think we are getting more like we’re getting more demanding of ourselves. And that’s, I think why we are better and maybe improving as well. Because we you’re not happy with what we have you always challenge yourself as well. Why can we not get that last last piece of milliseconds there?
5:16
Yeah, and I think that’s that’s the key is we’re not just focused just on seconds, like, we look at milliseconds. So we look at the you know, waterfall page events and seeing what’s taking so long and, and things like that. And obviously, you’ve been dealing with speed a lot longer than I have. That’s why it’s exciting for us to kind of work on this together. But let’s go through the Palm Beach plastic surgery and show people kind of what we’ve done here. So like I said, this is the results before, you know, they had some optimization installed previously, you know, a little bit of the waterfall effect here that you can see the compression happening, you can definitely see that they’ve had some optimization on the site through a couple of different plugins. So previously, this is this record. And now if I go to our results, There they are, right the 99% on Page Speed score 95 on why slow with a low time of 1.4 seconds? You’ll see that this you know, everything’s green pretty much there. Why slow has a lot of green is there as well? No. And, you know, I think this is another big thing that we constantly see, which is part of the reason we’re able to get these scores is the number of requests, right? So the number of requests here have 150 requests, this one’s now down to 16. And, you know, sometimes people are like, well, how does the site even still function? And absolutely, it still does, right? It’s still working 100% you know, everything still executing the way that it’s supposed to, I’ll let Abdul kind of get into the little technical side of stuff of how this is able to achieve this with such reduced requests and, and kind of kind of how we view it and how the load is taken off, you know, and we’re in place where and then we’ll get into some recommendations of some plugins other people can use If
7:00
they don’t want to use our services, then we’ll kind of talk about that. So go ahead and go.
7:04
Okay. So I think one of the key areas, I think Michael said rightly, that people are like, How is it possible? So I think one thing that you have to decide, first of all is that the people, developers normally working on websites and developing websites, performance is not a forte for most of them. They are mostly concerned about how the website looks and how its functioning. So like you have a lot of CSS files, different files, even if when you’re installing plugins, you have a lot of different CSS files going around, you have a lot of different JavaScript files going around. So what one of the key things that we did is that apart from a stack, which I come to like this, so much like that the US we have our own customized plugins as well a customized like a front end plugin as well that we use. So what we did is we try to combine all this into single request because what happens is when you have CFS loading for the website uses loading loading for the plugins that you’re using for forms for every different feature. It’s just reacting to the request and each request adds time to the waterfall, what we do is we try to combine all of them, and all of the JavaScripts as well. But sometimes like for some plugins, we have to separate it as well to make sure that we keep working. So it’s a very customized stuff that goes in, it’s not like you turn off or turn on a switch. And it all happens, there has to be a little bit of customization, we have to figure out where the right balances to make sure that the website keeps working with and if its optimal optimized as well. So one of the key weather requests go down is that we try to minify all the CSS and JavaScript files and combine them as well into into single single files. So that really helps us with the request part. So request, when like you said in this one came down from 115 to 16. That knocks off a lot of load time, because some of the some of the scripts sometimes take longer longer to load some of the CFF takes longer to load towards the combine in one place. It’s just one request of going out and get loading everything in one time. So for us, I think that that really helps us in that in the reducing the request type and backing the low payments with
9:02
great. So let’s talk a little bit about the technology stack, you know, like how we’ve minimized things that we’re using to help with load speed as well.
9:10
Just one thing I’d like to mention as well that this website earlier was loaded, I was on a two hosting. So we moved it from a to afflict hosting. So one of the key factors that change is our server stack as well. So we use nginx. And we use the latest version of PHP right now, this will trigger the PHP 7.3. And PHP 7.4 just came out a couple of weeks ago, and we started moving our websites, some of our client websites within PHP 7.4 as well, because for us, it’s very important to keep up with the latest updates. So because I know that PHP seven 4.4 is better in performance. So we’re moving, starting to move on to that as well, making sure that everything keeps working. So for us, we use nginx. We use PHP, the latest versions, and we have edits for server level caching. So that also helps a lot because it is like it really makes a big difference, especially for websites that Non ecommerce like this one. So Redis has a big, big difference I brings into table one for optimization or caching plugins, with the customized plugins that we have, once they do their job of minifying, the minifying all the CSS files, of combining them of removing the render blocking scripts, then it’s up to the Redis. That is part to play a part. And I think it makes a big difference. That’s why we see low times as low as this.
10:24
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think there’s a couple things you mentioned in there like something, you know, I just got a question yesterday about, you know, hey, do you guys build your sights on a certain theme to get these speeds? And the thing is, we can actually use anything. We do do that on. You know, when we build websites, we’ve selected a certain theme that we stripped out a lot of different things, but for clients that obviously when we take on other optimization projects or other hosting clients that they’re not built on our theme, right? And they’re using lots of plugins and all those things are, you know, added up to speed but it doesn’t matter, right. We’re able to optimizer. And I think the next thing you kind of mentioned is PHP versions, we took over, you know, five or six sites from this one client. And I’d say four out of the five have had, you know, PHP versions at 5.4, or something like that. When then when you upgrade, we run into issues, right? And we, as we’re working on the site, try to fix those issues at no additional cost, right? We’re all about trying to get that, that that speed. And that’s where we kind of get into what we talked about truly managed, you know, WordPress hosting is it’s doing those types of things, right, we’re going above and beyond of, hey, go talk to the developer, you need to upgrade the site to versions, you know, 7.4, PHP, or whatever, we’re trying to help do that and convert the files or do things or say, or if it were saying, Hey, can we get an updated version of this premium plugin, and then upgrading that so that we can get it get it to work there. So one of the things the recommendations, so plugins that you you recommend obviously we have our stack, we’re going to use that every time. But for other people that are trying to optimize their websites and do different things, you know, there’s the WP fastest cache. There’s WWDC, there’s all these different types of caching plugins out there Now, which one do you recommend and which And why is that?
12:21
Okay, just one thing I’d like to add on the themes part that I think with us I like clients that I’ve worked with on this stack we are on I think most of them I would say most of the major themes we have covered with all of our clients like we have people using TV we have people using Astra we have ocean WP, we have element or page builder themes. We have all kinds of themes that are on our stack and giving the same performances and even plugins as well. Like I remember we have a client who has I think 96 active plugins on his website that are working. So I think he also sees the same performance wedding and the stack of the optimizations that we do is not dependent. There are certain themes that are well built. They take even better results, they get even better results. But I won’t say that it’s like, it’s very, like we have to use a certain theme to get these results. Yeah. So I think when it comes to the recommendations, like apart from a stack, like to cache plugins that I’ve worked with, and I am very happy with the performance, I think for people like regular people who want to use them, if they are looking for a paid solution, then WP rocket is a very good solution for them. Like if they are looking to go for a paid solution. WP rocket really, really works. And it has some good results, especially on the caching part. And if someone is looking for a few free solution and a solution that we also use for some sites, like kind of in a recipe if WP fastest cache. Yes, that is like one of the easiest ones to set up. And like for someone who’s looking for a few free solution.
13:46
Yeah, I think that’s something to talk about quickly, as well as we have our customized plugin that we use, but we still leverage these other plugins for different items that that were able to because because those plugins are still build better than ours is right? So we’re able to leverage kind of those right? That’s kind of the strategy there. Like you say, it’s not just our hosting platform, it’s it’s always the complete stack. So why don’t you like it’s the plugins, it’s everything added together and sometimes it’s not just our plugin, it’s these these additional plugins that you’re adding to get our results.
14:22
Yes. Okay. I think the biggest difference comes in when a website comes on board I think me and Michael we we go in with a more of a performance side to it. So it’s like, okay, how’s the website will be both I okay, how can we make it perform better? So I think that’s the key. Yeah, because once you have that you’re not by if you’re not, okay, we have to use a certain set of things to get Wi Fi Okay, this website, what are the problems? What are the bottlenecks with the like with this one, if you go to the first you can make with you can go to the page gt metrics
14:53
and on the page speed one.
14:56
Now, when a website comes to us, this is the first thing I see. Okay. See that? It’s doing good on some areas, we can see it’s getting F on the top three areas, which is different parts of parsing of JavaScript, serving scale images and minimize redirects. We know I’m we know, okay, what we have to do for that. And we know Okay, which plugin is our plugin good for that, for starters, but for that way, someone else has done a better job at that. So like to give you an example, like, definitely have JavaScript render blocking JavaScript is one of the biggest hits that people get when it comes to load time, as well as PHP schools. So what we’ve done in our first clients plugin is that we’ve handled that we have a loader that makes sure that the render blocking JavaScript are loaded at the right time. So they don’t become render blocking. They don’t they don’t stop the page from rendering. So they are removed and then loaded at a later stage. So that has given us one of the biggest impact. So now we know that we do it very well. So definitely, that is always there and all all stacks that we use, because we want to get that done. But if there’s something like an example of serving scale images, we know that short pixel guys have done a very good job for that. So why didn’t W. So why should we reinvent lab I should we try doing it on our end when we know that these guys have done a very good job. So they have like in short pixel adaptive images. So that login is somewhat anyone can use and it gives us It gives people a very good results on especially that second point of serving scaled images because that that’s a very big problem with WordPress and as well with with how people know the images that they load a full size image, then upload a full size image to WordPress, while they just want to use a very small thumbnail somewhere. So now WordPress is loading the whole image, which is like three MB for just a small display spawn. So what short pixel does is it makes sure that the big image is not loaded. And it has a CD and has been in built to that. So for us it’s not we’re not like okay, we are taking full use of the ecosystem that we have the rich ecosystem that WordPress has, and if there’s some very good guys who’ve done some very good job, and they’re doing that so we make sure that we use that as well to advantage. So I think idea is that we because we are focusing on performance, we know all this we know which bits plugins to use, what are the problems are and how to fix them. So I think that is the key here. On a whenever we say not truly managing that we’re not like we’re not, we don’t have a single issue that when you when you come in, we’ll just load a few plugins will just load your stack, start a discussion and we go. For us it’s located where the problems are and how we can best remove it.
17:20
I think that leads directly directly into the next point I was going to make, which is optimization. A lot of people think it’s a one time thing. You just do one optimization one time and you forget it. But if you do that, I would challenge those people to go back and check their site and two months and see how they’re doing or even if they’re making changes constantly on their site, even a week later or two weeks later to see how that’s affecting their speeds with with the new things that they’re adding, even though the cash is still working. The stack is working differently. So it’s not as optimized as it may have been previously. I think that’s that’s a you know, one thing that people need to think about is when they when they get optimum Done, it needs to be done. We do a weekly. That’s how our system works. It really optimizes the site every week. So we’re maintaining these scores for a very long time and, or forever, right as, but but do you want to add anything in that space of dual?
18:16
Yep, I think for us, like Michael said, weekly. And also we have kind of a system set in place where starting to give us alerts when pages like, start moving the things we like it from, because what happens is, most of our customers are doing stuff on their website. So they are not performance focused. So once they do something and it hits a performance score, we get an update, we get an alert, okay, this is this website is losing its performance. So we can go back in and do that again, and make sure that everything is fixed. So this is all included in the optimization soon.
18:44
Yeah, I think one other question I get often and unfortunately, we don’t have a screenshot of the before. But one of the things a lot of people talk about is Google Page Speed, right? And how’s that looking? So here is an after result of This Palm Beach plastic surgery and you can see that we have a 92 on mobile and 100. on desktop. Usually desktop is always easier for us to achieve better scores on that mobile. Now we’re usually able to get mid to high 90s. You’re ready 92. But why don’t you talk a little bit about why mobiles more difficult to get higher scores on then let’s say desktop.
19:24
I think there’s certain factors to this reason being that because WordPress is kind of in various places have a lot of overhead to it. And even with when you’re using a CMS, they have a lot of overhead. And still, we are starting to become a very mobile first kind of a thing. But most of the developers, especially teams that we’re using are not made for that are not mobile first. So there are a lot of overhead already there. And once you bring into the mobile when you bring it to mobile, Google is also a little more little less forgiving comes to the schools and say okay, what kind of because you have a lot of request going on. You have it Big JavaScript that have to load, which are which are mainly needed for desktop, but still are loading on mobile as well. So that kind of hits the score a little bit. So it’s always difficult, especially on the CMS side to get hungry, but we have seen hundred scores as well. Like we have seen 9800 on mobile as well. But then because there’s so many variables here of what kind of interactivity that develop has built in, or the team is using, what kind of ciders they’re using, what kind of other widgets they’re using on the page that make it very, very difficult, especially on mobile when it comes to that bringing the highest high 9899. But we still see them. I think, maybe I think more than 50% of the websites we do we still see adverts on mobile as well. 98 on mobile. Yeah. Someone’s we do go below that like 1992. But I think there are a lot of the lot of the stuff that has is happening on the website that is not very mobile friendly.
20:53
Yeah. And that happens when we run into those things. I think one of the other big questions we get and since we’re both in the digital marketing space, Quite often is, you know, how does this affect rankings and traffic and things like that. And what I’ve mentioned before is we’ve seen an increase of, you know, traffic, but with conversions as well, we’ve seen an increase between 18 and 40% increase in conversions. For this client, we’ve just launched this, so we can’t show the results. But going forward, eventually, we’re going to want to we will start showing the results in analytics of those conversion rates moving forward. And maybe we’ll do with one of those that we’ve done previously, I’m thinking of an e commerce client where we saw an 1818 or 19% increase, as soon as we added the speed optimization to it that her e commerce conversions went up significantly. Also, when we did it to 51 blocks, we saw us jump up from number eight, for white label SEO to number five. We’re currently number five with that ranking. I’m not sure it’s 100% related to this, but this is the biggest thing that we’ve done. And we know I think everyone can sit here and agree that sites Speed is a ranking factor considering that Google’s coming out letting us know that, you know, if you have a slow what it loading website, there’s going to be warnings about that they’re going to tag those with with certain things is, you know, we’ve seen those things come out in the last three or four months discussing that. If there was anything else you kind of want to talk about before we wrap up?
22:21
No, I think I think the main idea here is to focus on performance. Because many people think that when they’re working with a developer, the developer has made their website, they assume that it will be performing well. But like I said, most of the developers, they do a very, very good job when it comes to making a good, nice looking websites. But they’re not very much focused on the performance side, they don’t have the right skill set. So that sounds like something I gave the developers they really do a very good job when it comes to making website. But I think that the skill sets and the stack that we’ve developed for the performance side, I think that’s a very good complementing factor. And that’s what I think we see that a lot of developers a lot of agencies work with us, because they want to they make the websites, but they know that we do That their skills aren’t making the websites good working well, and they work with us for the performance side. So I think that for us, we are more of a complementing thing that we make sure that we perform fast. And I think that’s because it’s offer focus. I think it’s one of the reasons that we are just focused on that, and making sure that the website perform for us. And another thing I just like to add here, because we do get some questions on how can you do it, do it on other hosting platforms, because we do get it a lot as well, like people don’t want to move for things. So I think we have done that we have gotten good results. But I would say it’s we get maximum results when it comes to our hosting. But we can get a very decent scores way decent. No, thanks. One other whole thing that comes as well.
23:40
Yeah, and I think that’s that’s a good point is, you know, one of the just just to quickly say one of the services we offer is is doing this type of hosting on other solutions. Just like Abdul said, we may or may not be able to achieve the same results as if it is on our stack, but that is an option and we know moving websites of hosting is not fun. We just did this with all of our clients to get it to the new technology stack that we launched, and it’s part of the reason why I have no hair left. So there’s the have no way.
24:10
He has no voice, right? So,
24:12
um, yeah, that’s the, you know, the I think overall, we’d love to help anybody that needs to help. We’re very passionate about this. This is where our passion lies in doing optimizations for WordPress websites and getting them loading very fast and to increase traffic and conversions. You know, if you’re ever interested, please reach out to us at the WP help or 51 blocks will definitely be back with another. Actually I do I should ask you are you comfortable with doing another one of these?
24:41
Yeah, I think I enjoyed it. I just like to add one point, I think which we missed out is gonna be on lighting. Michael, you might like to add on that is the showing of the results. Was that showing the? Yeah, I think that’s if you’d like to add some Yeah.
24:53
So one of the things we will do is will show the results for you prior to you move in your home. We have a staging site, we’ll just take a copy of your version of WordPress, but on our stage and you can see the results before you buy to try before you buy type of thing. And actually we’re offering if we can’t get your sights on gt metrics into the 90s, we give you a $25 gift card to Amazon just for trial. That’s how confident we are on this. We have not run into it yet on the over 100 sites. We’ve done the sun, everyone has been in 100 or over 100 on gt metrics. So anything yeah, so anything else that do are we I think I think that wraps it up,
25:35
and I think he’ll be back soon with another
25:38
great I hope for hopefully Abdul doesn’t know this yet. But But hopefully we’ll be doing these once a week. And we’ll be showing results of for for the from the crazy optimizer and we’ll get into more details on different sites and things like that. Once again, I’m Michael and this is a dual you. Nice to meet you guys. And we’ll be back thanks you Bye
25:58
bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai