015. How to Speed Up Your Website

My name is Emilio Garcia, and welcome again to the second season of Bountify Live. I'm really, really excited to start this new season with all of you, and what better way to start it than with our guest for today, Tim Laurie. I will let him introduce himself and we will talk today about how to speed up your website. What do we mean by that? Why is that important? And what can you do? Now you will get some actionable tips from Tim to make it happen. So without further ado. Hey, Tim, how are you?

Hey, Emilio. I'm doing well. How are you?

I'm doing great, man. So thank you for joining the show. I'm really happy to start with our first episode with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yeah, sorry, cut out there, Emilio.

Oh, do you hear me now?

Yes, I hear you now.

Oh, I was telling you that. Thank you for joining for this episode, and I really appreciate it. And I would like to let the audience learn a little bit about you.

Yeah, of course. Thank you. Yeah. So my name is Tim Lawre, and I'm the founder of Tip Top Search and Marketing. As a digital agency, we focus primarily on SEO, so search engine optimization, and that's everything from the content creation side through to technical SEO, and part of that being paid speed, which we're going to talk about today. So, again, I'm excited to be here, Emilio, and thanks for the opportunity.

Fantastic, man. So let's start right away with the topic. So today we are going to talk about how to speed up your website. And probably what most people wonder or ask themselves is when they're, you know, maybe asking or talking to professional SEO as you are, they might be worried about other aspects or technical aspect or even just content, and they might overlook the fact that the website needs to be fast. So the first question that I have for you is, why do speed matter?

Yeah, I think for this one, the easiest answer is always to just kind of think through it as the user. So stop thinking about yourself as a marketer for a moment, but think about whenever you jump on your cell phone, jump on your computer, you make that search and you go on a website, and then it takes an age to load or the information is slow to come to you. That really becomes a frustration point for the user. And the slower the site is, the less the user is going to interact with your site. So several studies have been done. Everything from Amazon where they done a study where if they lose like 100 milliseconds on their latency or the load time, it would cost them about 1% a year in revenue. So that's almost a billion dollars they'd lose just by slowing down by like just half a second. And then all their studies, you know, going into how many pages a user will go through on a site and a site that takes about eight seconds to load, if you get, let's say, you know, two or three pages that a user visits. But if you can drop your site speed down to about three seconds, two and a half seconds, they'll probably hit about seven to eight pages. And if you're thinking about trying to get somebody through a funnel or to get them to convert, if they have to go through multiple pages to complete an action each time they have to wait for a screen to load, then that's odds of them bouncing out increases. So that's, that's the big reasons. And then the other one that's kind of silent is that it's a ranking factor or a soft ranking factor for Google as well.

Yeah, I love that answer because I agree with you. Sometimes people, and I don't know that happened to you, but sometimes people will focus on, for example, metadata and other aspects of technical SEO. And obviously those are important. But most users won't even notice.

Right.

If your title tag or your meta description or whatever is not there. Some users will not even notice. Some of them you actually have to kind of use a special tool to look at them. But speed is so visceral. Right. You don't even think about it. But user, as you said, don't wait and do something else. So it's one of those factors where it really matters because it's is looking at the user.

Yeah.

Not certainly at the Google and even.

Beyond SEO, like there's the SEO benefits of having a fast site and page speed, but traffic that comes through direct traffic, that comes through social, through paid, through referral, all of your traffic, no matter where they come from, if they come into a site that is slow, that's going to have a negative impact across all of those channels. So it's not just the traffic that's coming in organically, it's right across the board. It can have an impact on your conversions.

Yeah, I completely agree. Now we know now or we have established why having a fast website is good or important. The next question probably is how do you know if you have a slower fast one? And I guess that you know the easy test that you can just use load your website on your phone or, or your laptop. But I imagine there are some limitations that come with that and something that you can do about it.

Yeah. Again, if you visit your website from your computer, odds are you're visiting a cached version of it. So it's going to load slow or I should say it's going to load quickly because your computer has that cached in, you're frequently going to it. Same thing with other websites. If you frequent them, you're going to have some form of a cache on your computer off that. And that's not really giving you a true benchmark. And again, there's different mile markers along the way of what Google, for the sake of it would see as a page actually completing the load. So it goes from like the, the first content, full paint, which is where there's images, but then like a time to interactive. So it may be that you can see something, but the site is not interactive till later. So to really get like the best gauge of that, there's a few different tools I like to use. There's PageSpeed Insights, which is a tool that Google created themselves. So it's a Google developer tool and you just drop in the URL. So that can be your homepage, it could be a product page, services page, whatever it might be for you. And it will crawl the page and it will give you the breakdown of timing and it'll also give you some actionable notes as to things that you can look at. So that's really helpful if you're wanting to start taking some steps towards improving that. Pingdom is another service, which is great. That one allows you to start choosing different geolocations. So let's say you have a large percentage of your audience that is in Canada. You could select Canada as the location and get a load time for a different country or a different location in the US and that is something else that is going to influence it that people don't really think about by way of, you know, their load time. If they're using a single place or a single server, the page is going to load at a different speed depending where somebody is, versus if you use hosting that has multiple servers and caches that across those your load time is going to be improved across the country. And then the one that I would say is probably most robust and has recently integrated Lighthouse, which is a Google program, is GT Metrics and it will give you what's called a waterfall, which is really helpful. So it will break down the time of every asset that that page has to load. So you can very quickly identify areas of bloat. So you know what image is way too big and it could be reduced down and it'll give you, you know, how that image would look if you reduce the size of it or if you use a tool to again reduce the pixels on it, but without like blurring or distorting. So it's a really helpful tool. So I enjoy using that one as well.

That's fantastic. Thank you for sharing those. And at the end I will put on the chat, you know, a link to your blog post where, yeah, of course, you know, where there's more detail about it. Now the other question that I have for you, you use one or two or three tools, you get a bunch of recommendations. Probably if you haven't done this in a while, how do you act on them? You will cover some of the most common ones. But what would be your recommendation on how to start with what you get from those tools?

Yeah, so I use a few different tools because sometimes the insights vary a little bit. And that's with all tools. You're going to get some things where you have this outliner and you're like, this has got to be wrong. So it's like just checking across all the tools allows you to establish those things that consistently show as problematic areas. So that way you're not just getting one tool's insights. And then really it's down to what gives you the biggest return for the littlest effort is really where you want to start. So if there's something where it's small and easy to do but it has a great impact, that's just that natural area of like, okay, these are easy to do, these are images versus this requires me to get a developer to go in and start stripping out the bloat in the JavaScript or to, you know, reduce the amount of code that's loading. Those are harder and they cost more because you're starting to bring in somebody else to do that. And it might give you a little bit of a bump in load time, but not the same level as hey, we just have massive images that are loading and taking a lot of just bandwidth to load those and if we reduce them or if we change it, we can improve that load time.

Yeah, I agree. I guess will be as you call those that are easy and have some medium or high impact low hanging fruit there. And then you go for the more complex if they have important impacts. The other question that I have for you is I imagine this is a never ending effort, right in terms of you might Never get the 100 or whatever scores you will have there and if you accomplish it, rules Keep changing. So you will have to come back from time to time and retest and you maybe learn new things. You are on a different platform. Whatever is the case, you have to keep improving over time. It's a never ending thing.

Yeah, a site is a living thing. You're always updating it, changing it. You could score that 100, but then you change your hero image on your homepage and then you add another block of content and all of a sudden your score changes. And like all scoring that's out there, it's a suggestion and it's a goal to shoot towards. But getting 100 doesn't mean that all of a sudden your conversions are going to blow through the roof and you're going to rank position number one because your site's really fast. It just means that your site is performing well and healthy and is going to create a better user experience which influences all of those things. But again, just trying to shoot for that perfect 100. There's always that fine line of like hey, if we get an 87, is that just as good versus spending 5 or $10,000 to go in and rewrite a bunch of custom code and script and basically rebuild things to make us get to the hundred. And you have to decide where that threshold is that makes sense for your site and for your business. Some businesses, it really is that big of a thing. So again, I'll mention the likes of like an Amazon or Target or a Walmart or something like that. If you're processing just millions of dollars a day through a site, you want everything to be fast. You don't want that user to have any moment of delay or pause or concern. But if you're selling, you know, a software solution or something that's you know, a nine month or a 12 month user journey before they decide on that and it's very informational heavy and you know, it's not that same urgency to move somebody through a cart, then that doesn't necessarily matter in the same way because those speed changes don't influence it. So it's knowing where and how to use it. But overall you want the site to to be fast because that's going to be the best experience and in turn will give you the best return at the end or the best reward for giving somebody a fast site.

Very well, yeah, I completely agree and agree with you. This is just like any other kind of effort on website like ux. Depending on the size of the website or what's at stake, you either just follow best practices, right, cover 90% of the things that you got to do and let the other 10 around because they will require a lot of effort or you are Amazon or Google and then you cover more ground just because it has a higher, higher impact. Now in your blog post you discussed around 11 things. I guess there can be more, but will be the more impactful ones that you can do to speed up your website. And I would like to go through them if you're okay with that or if you want to pick some of them, that's also good. So tell us some of the things that you find most of the time that people can do on their own or with the help of an expert like you to improve their speed.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, there's some that are going to be, we can talk a lot more on and other ones that are just kind of quick to hit on. So yeah, we can kind of work down. And I would say that again, like 11 is just, we're scratching the surface and that's one of those things where each site can have so much and some sites are like, I have not even seen this issue surface before as to why I was doing that. But I think one of the ones that you want to consider which is critical for any site now and really for the last number of years is responsive images because your user is no longer just coming in from a standard sized desktop. So if you're trying to load a huge desktop image that's, you know, in there for somebody that's on a 27 inch monitor and that's the only file that you're serving up and they're on their iPhone with a 6 inch screen, then it's going to take much longer and it just doesn't make sense. So you can go in and you can specify in the the HTML or the CSS to pull images based upon the size of the device a user is using. So then it's only going to load up the image that is right for the size of device. And that's something that as a developer is working through and doing the site and even some sites will, will do some of that lifting for you. But again, it just depends on the CMS and how you've done things. But making sure that you're serving up the right images for the device types is one of those just first kind of like, hey, are we doing that? If not, then let's go ahead and fix it because we don't need this billboard sized image loading for every nuance of screen size that's out there.

So yeah, this is very similar to what big telecommunications company do with video. Right. That they. If you are watching video on a very small device, there's no point in serving you a 4k version of it.

Yeah, you wouldn't notice 720p or 480 or something like that. It's like it's not the same when you're viewing on a 6 inch screen as a 30 inch monitor or whatever you're using. So. Yes. Yeah, love it. So that would be the first one. The next thing I would say is, you know, look at your image formats. So there's what's, what's called next gen formats that are out there, but you also have to be careful with that because not all formats load across all browser types. So this is the one where I say like we want to look at your formats, but we also want to be wise in what we're looking at. If all of your traffic is coming or primarily coming off a specific browser and you changed a format that's not supported, then that's not going to help you. So usually larger files you're going to want to stick with like a PNG for high quality images, jpeg, you can definitely get a much lower size. Or a gif. Gif, gif. I always like you can go either way. I keep thinking of like the motion one, but anything that's animated, you want to use that, but you have less colors and it seems kind of obvious, but sometimes there's just random file types that are in there. Images that are way too large for the formats, like a JPEG that has a massive file size and you can use tools like Lossless or Lossly which reduce that and they still keep the integrity of the image. But you could go from being, you know, 400 kilobytes down to 30 kilobytes and that is a significant reduction when you're loading that with 10 other images across your homepage. Once you start taking that across multiple images and that's where the big consideration is and that's also where it impacts this on the design of your site. If it's a really image heavy site, then this becomes even more vital. If there's less images, less assets to load, then some of these things, they're not as life or death, let's say, because it's, you know, not as many things to load.

Yeah, I agree. I went down personally that road over time. Right. I discover that there are nuances. For example, for PNG and what is the other one that I confused? I get jpg, right? Yeah.

There's JPG and jpeg, but they're both JPEG of sorts.

But as you said, this is another opportunity and as you say, probably the biggest, the biggest opportunity is the, the largest image that you have considering what you are going to do. Also responsive, right? It's got to consider that because usually, especially if you get those photos from stock, you know, websites and all that, usually they have this massive image.

Oh, is it like 6 megabytes or something like that? Yes, and I've seen that numerous times where a HERO image on the site is several megs in size and straight away that's something where it's like we don't need that. We're not trying to print this image so we don't need to load it in print resolution. It's different for viewing on a screen. So you can drastically reduce the file size down to make it much more functionable and load much faster.

Yeah, so I love that one. So the next one will be compressing, right?

Yeah, compressing that kind of. I'd mentioned lossless and lossly is options, but there's other compression sites so you can compress your PNGs. The big thing to always watch for is that you don't compromise the integrity of the image. So you don't want to compress it to where you lose the quality of it because then you might have a grainy image or colors start to get lost. So Compressor IO, JPEGmini, they're pretty reliable sites that you can load it in and it'll still keep the integrity of your image, but they will reduce that file size down. And again, this isn't something that you need to do for every blog that you post. If you're putting a HERO image for that, just save it out at a decent file size. Don't go over 100 or 200 kilobytes in file size for your hero. Um, this is more like your homepage, your product, your service, about us, things like that, where it might be more image intensive pages. This is where you want to apply some of these practices.

Yeah, agree. That's awesome. So what would you consider the next important thing then?

Oh man. There's a lot around images and I think maybe we finish images. There's like one more thought on that and then I think we can kind of move into that and there's not. The importance is going to be based upon an individual site as to where the issues lie for that site and again how it's hosted and what they're doing. But another thing you can do with your images is called lazy loading. But for this one you want to be very careful in how you do it. You don't want your content to lazy load because if Google can't see your content or if it's hidden behind anything, that's going to hurt your rankings. But if you have, you know, a single image left right on a page as you're moving down, you can have that set to lazy load. So as the user gets towards that section of the site, then it's going to lazy load the images. Basically they'll load up right before the user gets there. Which means that at the very first load of the page, Google is not trying to load everything in that one turn, I'm saying Google, but essentially the hosting and everything else that's involved with that. It's not just Google, there's several other parties in that process involved in the loading part. So they're not having to load the whole thing at one time. And especially if you have a really long page, this is one that's, that's helpful for that.

Yeah, I agree. And we can pack this kind of like section on. Because images represent a big portion in size heights of your website, the general idea is make sure that you guess something that accommodates for the frame or the viewport of the user. Make sure that you're using the largest that you need, but not more than that. And if you can compress them as much as possible without losing quality, I think that sums it up on terms of images. The next couple of tips that you have, I think they revolve around how and where you get your files.

Yes. Yeah. So the first one would be then using a cdn. So CDN is a content delivery network. So this is servers that are able to serve up your content from different locations. So it's not just again relying on, you know, one server in your mom's basement. And I'm kind of joking with that, but not joking. We don't want to have, you know, a self hosted site. It's using the right hosting and again a CDN network and sites like Shopify and things like that, they, they come with a built in cdn. So straight away, if you have an E Commerce with tens of thousands of products, all of those images are not being hosted in one place. They're able to pull off the CDN that's closest to the user. So it's got a nice fast load time and it all pulls together seamlessly. So if you have an opportunity to use that and again it depends on the goals of the site. That's a great way to just take some of that extra weight off your website and not trying to natively load everything or have everything just in one, one place to pull from. But again, depends on the site and the goals. And sometimes it's achievable, sometimes it's not on the platform that somebody's on.

Yeah. And yeah, the theory behind is pretty easy, right? Is that instead of depending on one place that can fail, that can lag, have multiple options and also allow the user to get the version that is the closest or the fastest from related to the network. So that's fantastic. Now that's, you know, having multiple, kind of like having multiple copies. But at the end of the day you have one place where you host your website.

Yeah, yeah, you, you choose your, your host for that and this is where you want to choose a reliable option. Cheaper is not better and it doesn't also mean that most expensive is better. You have to really shop around and depending on, you know, the CMS or the content management system you're using, there are ones that are, you know, preferential for them, like WP Engine for the sake of it is a great place to host a WordPress site. And then the other consideration that you want to have is do you want dedicated hosting or shared hosting? If you're a small site, shared hosting may well be sufficient enough for you. And if you are a large site and generating a lot of revenue, then dedicated hosting is probably going to be a better solution. You'll have basically the hosting server space dedicated to you and it can handle much more bandwidth, it can handle more traffic loads better, and you're not also influenced by all their sites that are on your hosting. And this is kind of verging off a little bit, but there's a recent study done that depending on the sites that are on the shared hosting space with you, it can even influence your ranking. So if you're hosted on servers that are also hosting, let's just say shady sites or sites that have been using black hat practices, things like that.

That.

Can penalize that hosting. And if your site's in there, you'll not know if it is. But, but that can have an influence or an effect on you, which is another reason to go with a really reliable good hosting provider. And when the time is right to consider something like dedicated hosting for your site. And then there's other ones, there's Pantheon, there's Kinsta Godaddy of course exists out there, but I wouldn't, you know, you might buy your domain from them, but quickly move to another hosting environment would be a suggestion. Just because they're kind of the, the be all to everyone. So they're, they're hosting everything from somebody's personal blog through to, you know, smaller businesses, things like that. It's usually people that are on the entry level to the web versus larger, more established brands that choose very specific ones that they can tailor to their hosting needs. And then the other factor is if your traffic isn't just coming from the U.S. you want to make sure whoever you choose for your hosting is also a reliable partner in other countries. Because there's no point having blazing fast hosting in the US but then somebody in the UK goes to load your site and it takes an age because it has to basically do the call all the way over to Texas and wait for that call to come back. And um, you know, they may not notice, but it could be a few extra seconds or you know, take it from 4 seconds to 10 seconds for load time. So again, choosing a provider that has the hosting in the areas that your site needs to perform best in.

Yeah, I love that. And you, I guess that that's something that you grow into, right? Probably at the beginning you start with something small, you have a small amount of traffic and you probably can't or, or won't invest a lot of that. But just be mindful that as you grow and speed becomes important, you need to migrate to dedicated offers, better providers, more reliable ones. So you don't forget, I would say.

Like if you have WordPress, like WP Engine is a great starting place. And again from like a development and a hosting space, it's just really nice. And their prices, they're more on the premium end, but they're, they're providing you with a service that is much better in the long run. And really it's a, like their uptime is great and then it's also a very protected environment. So they'll be watching for like malware and trojans and spam and other things that can come into your site because they want to keep their environments clean. So if there's something weird going on, they'll notify you as well. So sometimes it can be a real favor of a site because you may not know your site's being attacked, but all of a sudden you get a ping from them saying like, hey, you have something on your site that doesn't look right. You've got, you know, 10 days to get that resolved or we're going to have to Move it off the hosting space. So again, it's got more to it than just, you know, hey, my site is hosted through this and that's up there. And it cost me, you know, $9 a month or something like that. You know, stay, stay more in the. Not enterprise, but business level hosting if you, if you want to have a better experience and a more protected site as well.

Yeah, fantastic. Now the next one I, I like, it's very specific to one, you know, hosting so. Or not hosting solution, but WordPress.

Yeah.

Don't overload side with plugins. I have seen this many, many times.

Oh, man. And you know, there's so many good ones out there, but I heard somebody tell me once, and the best way to think about it is each one of those plugins represents another developer in your website. So if you have 20 development teams that don't talk to each other trying to get things to work on the back of your website, then naturally it's just not going to be a fast load. And that's the reality of it. It's like if you have, you know, a plugin for this one functionality that you use once a month and then a plugin for this, those are all going to load every time you load the site. So really, you need to scale it down to what are the essentials, what are the things that a plugin makes sense to do. So in WordPress, the popular one would be Yoast for, you know, SEO. So, okay, that makes sense. I want to, you know, use this for my titles, my meta descriptions. It's helpful for me to just do some of those things. But if you're using that, you may decide that, okay, well, I don't need to put another SEO plugin on top of that that, you know, checks for X, Y and Z. I'm just, I'm going to go without that and trust that Yoast can do all of it. Or, you know, if I need to add something to the head of my site, oh, I'm going to just download a plugin, ask your developer to take 5 minutes, drop it in the code for you. If you can't do it yourself, and save the plugin from just lying there, then for the rest of time just kind of rotting away in the background. And each plugin is also another opportunity for vulnerableness to your site, because as plugins age, then there can be hacks and things that come in through plugins. And if you're not constantly updating your WordPress and updating your plugins, then you start becoming at risk for other things beyond just like the page speed. So again, I would say keep it to a core offering of what you really need. Don't just do it because it looks fun or it gives a fancy feature. If you can hard code something in instead, it's going to be better for the long term.

Yeah. And the other thing that I have seen a lot of times, and this will let us move nicely into the next and to the next one into the next step, is having dedicated plugins for every single web analytic tool that is out there. Right. One for Facebook, one for. One for Google Analytics, another one for Google Ads. So you start having this bunch of plugins trying to match all the analytics. When you can do some, you can do better with one, maybe one tool, which I guess is going to be the next suggestion.

Yeah, it's using Google Tag Manager. So each one of those analytic tools, and even beyond that, like if you use like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, every time you use some kind of tool that requires you to put in a tag into the head of your site or into the body of your site, that is script, it has to load and that is going to load across every page and each one of those are going to conflict with each other to fire first. So that's going to slow things down. Whereas if you use Google Tag Manager, you're then having those tags fire in a more automated process. So they're all going to load up and they're all going to do their job, but it's happening through one piece of script versus 2, 3, 4, 5, or who knows, maybe even more, depending on all of the tools that you have in there. So it's really simple, it's free to use and you're just going to take all of your different tags and you're just going to put them into essentially a workspace within Tag Manager. So you're just going to create a profile for each of those in there and you can have all of those different things assigned to your site. And if you ever need to go in and change something, remove something, you can do it all through Tag Manager without having to go in and out of the site and dig through code and pull things out and add things in. It just makes life much easier. And again, it just stops that competing for load time that happens with firing numerous tags at once.

Yeah, no, no. And here I will add from my point of view, of course, is that beyond speed, which obviously is really, really important, it gives the user and even experts that you work with a common workspace where you can define permissions, sync, see who have changed what, define general rules in one place. Something that becomes really hard when you have a lot of them, a lot of analytics and you can even. Sometimes you want things to work for a little while like hotjar and then doesn't make sense anymore. You pause it, then you don't delete it, but then it's not triggering and helping you to keep the website as fast as possible, but at the same time as usable as possible. So I think it's a great recommendation. Solves many, many problems.

Those simple ones like it really what it takes 10, 20 minutes to set the thing up for the first time. Like, it's not, it's not one of those tasks where like you're going to spend hours working on this. Like you can do it relatively quickly and you just want to make sure that as you do it, you're putting in all the right tags and not keeping all tags in because you don't want to have them duplicates. You got to, you got to have a little bit of knowledge around it. But again, it's not on that list of difficulty for return, it's fairly easy and for a good return of what it does for you as a site. So, yeah, I put that high up the list. If you're just looking for something quick to do and you haven't done that yet, fantastic.

Now I like the next one. I think this one is more about for, probably for older websites, I have gone through a lot of changes, especially related to their URL. So and this one, I, I don't see it as often.

Right.

As, you know, it's not as common, but when you see it, usually it's a bad, you know, it's something very convoluted.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's watching or reducing your redirects. So as a natural part of a site's life and progression, you're going to add new pages, you're going to kill pages, you're going to redirect a page to somewhere new. But you want to do this in the cleanest possible way and do it in a way that makes sense. So every time you change something, you don't want to just constantly change a URL because then you start forming redirect chains. And Google will follow those to an extent. But once you get to about 4 or 5 redirects on a specific thing, Google then stops following it. You've lost all the equity. And every redirect that loads slows your page time down. So if you had an old site and you redirected from HTTP to HTTPs and then you decided to strip out your W's and then you had ASPX on the end of your URL and you lost the aspx. And each time you do that, you just keep doing a redirect and you don't ever go in and fix your internal links. So from your navigation you're linking to HTTP www.islashservices.aspx and that page then goes through 4, 5, 6 iterations of the URL to load that. Then internally you're just linking to a bunch of redirected pages and that's going to slow your site down, it's going to hurt your ranking. So you want to be really careful in how you make your redirects, how you keep track of what you've done and, and then making sure that internally you're always updating the link directly to the new page. Google will follow the old ones from the search engine and over time it will drop the old ones off as it discovers the new ones. But if you keep making it have to go through the old one to rediscover the new one, then you're going to lose them. So you need the redirect in place. But once it's in place, then link directly in the internal part of your site to the new URL and then the other part is eventually going through and cleaning out redirects. So don't keep those just in a, in an archive. If it's been five years since you had the HTTP version of your site, or since you had a ASPX or some other random string or numbers on your URL, you don't need those now if that's not what ranking. So let's just clean that out and just do a direct one to one redirect and that's going to be the best for you. But I have seen some sites that have just got out of control. Just years of building on and changing and products changing and just stacking of these lures. And for every page on the site you're going through 6, 7, 8 redirects to get the final page to load. And I've had a few where it actually goes into a loop that the page will never load. It just gets like, it can't load it up, it just gets lost in the redirects. And at that stage it's like you, you've got some major issues to start working right.

The analogy in the real world for that one will be to kind of like keep forwarding you know, all email addresses or mailing addresses being in many homes over a course of five, 30 years and just forwarding each other, it's just update your internals, right?

Yeah. Piece of mail is going to get lost. It's like, you know, the USPS is only so good and by the fourth time they've moved it to another mailbox somewhere and get another like, oh, we got to move it. It's, it's going to get lost. And the same thing happens with Google. They just, they get in there, they get bogged down, they don't know what to rank and they get lost after so many. And then also just that load time because everything keeps reloading each time it hits a redirect.

So yeah, now most of, most of what the ones that we have talked about are very visible to the, not just the visitor, but especially to the person that is in charge of those changes. I mean end user or the, they're responsible for hosting for a small business or probably the IT guy for one. This one, I think it's more technical.

Yes, sure.

And I have just learning about it a little bit but I would love to, you know, to tell us why this important.

Yeah, so one of the things that you will almost always find if you use one of those tools that we mentioned at the very beginning. So if you use Google Page Insights, if you use GT Metrics, they're more than likely always going to bring up your CSS and your JavaScript and there's the, the being able to look at that and know when that you need to actually take action on it. And that's where that return on investment is. But the JavaScript and the CSS are essentially the code on the back end that loads for every page and Google sees this code along with all of the live text, the images, everything else that all loads up. And many times you can have bloat in that code so you have unnecessary lines of code. Especially if you use a out of the box WordPress theme that carries, you know, all these different themes and templates and other ways of doing it and that's just all living in the code. All of that loads. You may only be using one specific version or look, but you're loading assets that you don't even need for your site. They're just in the background of the code and Google or the crawlers are going through and just having to digest all of that. Or you may have a JavaScript widget or section on the site, but your code is not as clean as it could be. Or you've coded it up. But the reality is it could probably be reduced by two or three lines. There's different methods. There's what's called tree shaking your JavaScript, you basically go into your JavaScript tree and shake all the bad stuff out of it. Developer notes. That's another thing that I've seen where developers keep notes in the code and Google's not going to show those, but again, it's reading all of that stuff and if you have three or four developers in your team working on the site and they're leaving notes in there for each other of like, hey, updated this and this date, removed this, done this, that all goes into that just bloat that's in the back end. It's like keep a note somewhere else.

Once it's live and that will be loaded on the website. Right. Even if it's not needed.

Am I correct? It's not visual. Nobody's going to see it on the front end. But I've seen it before where like, I've seen conversations between developers load in the code where you have like 20 or 30 lines of conversation that have loaded back and forth between changes and it's just left in there because Google won't show that. But it still has to crawl through all that. And based on how you put it in the code, it knows that it's a note and not an actual piece of code to load. But it's still something to slow it down. But more so again, the bloat in the JavaScript, the CSS being mindful of the content management system you're using, also putting things in JavaScript when you could maybe write it in CSS. JavaScript is more intensive for the load. It's harder for Google to render and process and rank. It's getting better. But CSS is typically cleaner and can be done in less lines. Even your HTML may making sure it's clean and that you're not bringing large strings of code. Like if you copy and paste something into a blog and then take a look at the, I guess like the text view of it versus the actual visual view, you'll find there's all this other stuff that maybe pulled from a Microsoft Word document into the blog. So it's bringing in character styles, it's bringing in font sizes, it's bringing in color of the font, it's bringing in all these other things that you.

I go crazy about that. Yeah, I do it all the time on our cms, in this case hops. But I always go to the they call it source.

Yeah, exactly. It's the source code and just paragraph.

That's all that I need and everything else.

Yeah, you want to use clean HTML because that's just another area where you're just putting more clutter in there. And that's really what it boils down to. Like the minifying and the cleaning up is you're reducing the clutter. The more clutter there is in your life or anything, it bogs you down. So the same with the site. The more clutter there's there, it just bogs it down.

That's the minimalist of you talking there.

Exactly.

Your life. I agree, I agree.

All right.

And the last one, I, I really like this one because it's the, the one for me that is the most, the more forward looking. Right. Yeah. We have been talking for, for some time now. Video a few years ago was coming now is definitely here and now it's going to become a common place for every website. And so I really like some of the views that you have on this one about why not necessarily hosting it directly on the website.

Yeah, you want to use external hosting just like images. Video has basically, you know, a lot to it. And if you load a raw native video onto your website and want to just have it hosted on your site, that could be tens or hundreds of megabytes depending on how long this is. If this is a, you know, 25 minute instructional video that is going to kill your page, like trying to load that. Whereas putting it on services like YouTube, Vimeo, Wista, they're, they're doing all the heavy lifting and you're going to use an iframe to host it on your site, it's going to have the same benefits. People can go to your site, they can view the video, but your page does not have to load. All that comes with just natively hosting the video. And that's one of those ones, I've had that back and forth before with clients where it's like, should we just, you know, start hosting our own videos on here because we don't want people to click off onto something on YouTube or to go somewhere else. And by far hosting on YouTube, the benefits far outweigh the negatives. It's, you know, you can control some of that stuff if you want to have, you know, additional videos show up afterwards. And especially with Vimeo and Vista, you have even further control over making sure that you don't have ads or competing videos or things showing up. But the plus side is if you create content and you put it onto YouTube and then you host that video from YouTube on your website. Then you have essentially the opportunity to rank your piece of content from your site. But you also have the opportunity to rank the video in the result page as well. Because Google being Google will favor content that they host and have on YouTube. So you have the opportunity to get the click a couple of different ways and that's a plus as well. But again that's going outside of the speed element to more of like the trying to take as much of the result page as possible, which should always be added benefit.

Yeah, and I have seen it even in platforms are not like hosting WordPress websites. Some of those CMSs actually their video solution is hosted in a company or a service that is dedicated to video. So I haven't seen it that way. But now I agree more and more with this view that you have because it has the speed element on top of that, especially if you're hosting on YouTube then you get the benefit of the impression the actual view and exposure on search.

You know, I have one client that's kind of veering off a little bit, but beyond that it's also started generating revenue for them. So hosting that on YouTube, they're getting the traffic to their site, they're not seeing a shortage in that, but they're also seeing traffic to the YouTube one because people start their search natively in YouTube as well. So it's another search engine. So if somebody searches a topic and you show up for that and the revenue that they're generating from their videos basically is allowing them to then take that and dump it back into creating more videos. So it starts becoming a self funding thing. It took a while at the start to build that up. And they have a lot of great, you know, how to type videos that are now on there and get traffic. But they're getting a check each month off the ads that play before the videos and the other things which then they just take back and use that to get things to make their next video even better. So it's, it becomes a really cool cycle once you get to that stage. It takes time and it's not something that happens for everyone but in the right spaces then that's an added benefit beyond even, you know, hey, we have it on our site and we get the engagement there. We're getting engagement in YouTube, we're getting referral traffic and we're getting revenue from YouTube for having it there.

Yeah, well, I cannot believe it, to be honest. I thought that we were going to go beyond the one hour mark. But we did it, Tim, the 11 topics right away. And I think everybody's gonna get a ton of valuable tips that they can implement today without doubt. So thank you for joining the show this time and for everybody that is either watching or in the future listen and subscribe. Follow us like us, so we can reach out to more people that might be interested on these topics. It's been a pleasure. And Tim, as always, thank you for joining.

Thanks so much, Emilio. I appreciate it.