Unlock the Full Potential of HubSpot with Pixel Compress | Expert Insights with Franco & Kieran

Welcome back to another episode of the Sidekick Strategies Expert Interviews. Hey, I'm your boy, George b. Thomas from Sidekickstrategies.com and today I'm super excited to have a conversation with my friend Franco Valentino and one of his friends and my new friend, that's right, Kieran Allen. But today, we are going to be having a conversation about an app that I truly believe can help Almost every single HubSpot user on the planet.

But.

But first, Franco is the founder of Narrative SEO, a technical SEO consulting company. His guidance gives industry leaders a strategic edge by optimizing their website across organic search channels for an increase in leads, conversions, and sales. Maybe something you guys are looking for out there. Narrative SEO is a partner to international brands like Avis, Liberty Safe, and the Panama Canal. Yes, you heard that right. Franco founded Narrative SEO after working as a network engineer in IT program management with AT&T and IBM. Today, he consults with CEOs and CMOs on industry trends, providing elite insight to increase sales effectiveness from digital marketing platforms and so much more. By the way, brother, how the heck are you doing today?

I'm doing fantastic. I. I did. Did AI write that? Because that was amazing.

No, AI did not write that one. I just Googled you a couple places, I copied and pasted a little bit, and we rock and rolled. Now, of course, I have to throw in here, Kieran, so everybody knows you are the ninja behind the scenes doing some, like, crazy technical stuff, especially around the conversation that we're having today. But how are you doing today?

I'm good, thank you. George, how are you?

I'm doing good. I'm. I'm better now that I'm sitting with YouTube. Because a while back, I had the opportunity to conversate. I had the opportunity to actually purchase an app, and then I had the extreme pleasure of watching what this app did in my portal. And I said, we have to talk about this. We have to do an interview. We need to let the HubSpot ecosystem know. And so that's what we're going to do today. So I'm just going to start with the questions. I'll kind of volley them up. You guys can either both attack the question, one of you can go after it, but we'll just see how it goes. So let's start with the basics, the foundations. What the heck is pixel compression?

So pixel compressed was. Was born out of a need that we had. Kieran and I have worked for together for years, and one of the struggles that we constantly had, especially in SEO, is image compression. Right. This is always the, the thing that slows down your portal. It's what ruins your core web vitals. In many cases, the way that you embed images inside of your portal matters. And people sometimes take RAW camera, you know, right off the camera, 5000 pixel, jam it up into their portal, and then it takes 10 seconds to load a picture, right? And we know that after three seconds or so you lose about 64% of your visitors. So it's literally one of the best things that you can do for your website is to optimize the images within, you know, the, the major CMSs, WordPress, HubSpot, Shopify, et cetera. Each one has a little bit different flavor of image optimization. Right. There's a ton of tools for WordPress, but there was only one. And it's kind of lacking in our opinion, in HubSpot. So as we kind of scratched our heads, you know, Kieran said, hey, I got a great idea. Why don't we build an advanced tool that accounts for multiple image formats, automatically optimizes images when people upload them, and can also optimize historical images, even if they've been previously optimized. But then we give them, give them an option to do JPEGs, the other file formats. You know, PNGs can be lossless and they can be a lot smaller if you, if you use a better routine for them. But the trick was getting it to work natively within HubSpot. So, so that really is where Pixel Compressed was born. You know, we have this, you know, Kieran and I are co founders and we have this new toolkit basically that, that's been doing a really good job. It also has some backup security. But I'll let, I'll let Kieran kind of give you the, you know, sort of the, the overarching process and workflow.

With piscopress, the main issue we saw was the, was the size of images in every single portal. And really from our side, we didn't want anything external. We saw that lots of people were, you know, downloading all of their images, running it through like tinypng or one of those platforms or, or manually doing it. And these are expensive hourly rates that the people are spending on every single developer, you know, or every single, you know, project account manager, you know, they're going through and pulling these images down and uploading them. So obviously with technology and compression tool compression, it's relatively straightforward task, it seems initially to attack. But, you know, we've all, we've all worked in this area before and so from our side, you install the application, it will run through your portal, it will pull all of the images in, take a backup of your images when they start compressing. So we kind of create a hidden file, hidden folder or a private folder in your portal and make a backup before any compression happens. But then we compress the original image and the important thing is it doesn't break the links to the content, so it actually just replaces the images rather than renaming it. And then the backup is stored in a pixel compressed file folder, which you can always reference later on. We didn't want to store any information or pull people's images into our own database because, you know, it's an important privacy piece. And also private images, really the goal here was just to keep it all on their portal and then, you know, just run the compression and that's it really. There's technically, you know, no downside, I'd say, to just compressing images, but that's like.

I would say, yeah, definitely. Now, there's a couple things, viewers, listeners, that I want you to pay attention to. First of all, it's all in HubSpot. It's all in your portal. It's not necessarily a third party app. It's happening there, which is absolutely amazing. And the other piece is, I have been in your portal, I have probably seen your images. You have done the thing that Franco said that you can't believe that people actually do. Listen, I know it was late on a Friday and you went to Adobe stock and you just decided to get the work done, but knock it off. And now actually this will kind of save you anyway, I know it sounds like you've covered what the major hurdle is that it's solving, but I want to ask that question anyway to give you any type of deeper answer or a different direction. When we think about the major hurdle, whether it's SEO or user experience or the actual person pushing the HubSpot buttons, in your mind, what major hurdle is pixel compressed solving across these different layers?

It's really multiple, right? Because we know understand that, you know, if you're looking at a website in 80 20, as we do in technical SEO, and we've been at it 18 years now, right. Number one is always the lowest hanging fruit is image optimization. But it's really hard to do that because you have to assign your content, your content manager has to sit there with Adobe or another tool that they're paying for Photoshop, and then manually optimize images. Or as Kieran mentioned, go to tiny jpeg, tinypng or another tool to get a smaller image size. But you're still going back and forth in the portal. Do you know how much labor costs that saves your time is much better spent on a content strategy, figuring out how you're going to get more keywords, right, or optimizing other things or user journeys or workflows or CRO than they are in optimizing images. The meat and potatoes of it is you're saving time, which is saving an extraordinary amount of money that you don't realize that you're losing by having to sit there and actually optimize the images. The secondary benefit of that is SEO is getting harder by the day, especially now with, with AI. And one of the best things that you could do for the user journey, forget about the keywords, is when I get on my phone and I want to download your webpage, it should load within about a half a second, maybe a second maximum. If it doesn't, you get a problem, you're losing visitors. So that's the secondary benefit is you're. You're increasing the trust on your website by making it faster. And it can be as simple because again, it's the 80 20. It's the lowest hanging fruit is you have one image that uses a background and that's used on 5,000 pages of your website. So it's not just I saved an average of 30% on my portal by optimizing everything that's not even a JPEG, which Pixelimpress does, but that one image that you had times 5,000 pages is how many reduced seconds of load time it has logarithmic benefits by applying this type of optimization. Also, the average that I mentioned with Pixel Compress of savings includes theme files. So, you know, when you buy a theme, this is something nobody ever thinks about. When you buy a theme, it comes with backgrounds and icons and, you know, transitions and fades. No, those are never optimized. It's rare that a theme developer actually optimizes the image that they're using for the code. If you've already done Image Optimization on JPEGs, the tool won't automatically optimize those for you have to choose historical optimization. In those cases, we're seeing a 60% reduction in image weight across portals, which is again, massive, massive opportunity.

So it's interesting. I actually want to go off the beaten path for a second because we've mentioned kind of JPEG and PNG and I know me personally, I'll do a lot with like webp images, right? So when you install Pixel Compress into your portal. Is there a new way that you should start to think about what images or what file type for the images you want to use to to know that you're actually going to get the best results out of it?

Yeah. So HubSpot does some really good things on the front of the CDN that they use. Like cloudflare. They do have, for example, some resizing in place, like just in time resizing they have in place sort of automatic webp serving. So in a lot of cases they will serve a webp. But there are some caveats to that and under what conditions it can convert them to a webp in a lot of cases. Webps are handled in a lot of scenarios. But still, uploading the dimension is still the biggest problem regardless, beyond any formats. I think we still, obviously the webp format was an incredible movement forward, but the biggest thing we still are seeing and features we want to add in the future are around the width and height of an image. If you're uploading a 4,000 pixel by 4,000 pixel image, then it's gonna be slow regardless, even with compression. Right. So one of the biggest things we always, I'd always say is like your, your dimensions before your format and then obviously, as most people would say, is like, you know, ensuring that you pick the right image type for, you know, for, for the type of image. So like, you know, so if it's a photograph or has any like, significant detail in it, then it's obviously got to be a JPEG versus a png. So webp definitely something to think about. The tool doesn't currently compress WebP, but because HubSpot ultimately does convert the images into WebP, if it decides that that's the best format.

SVGs are optimized by the tool and sometimes you have, you know, again, you have, for some reason somebody uploaded a repository of production images of equipment or something, and there'll be some SVGs or, you know, some, some resizable images that for and they can tend to be large. Also, the tool accounts for every major image format, save for the webp.

So I love, by the way, how eloquently Kieran basically said, George, you're asking the wrong question. The real question is, is it format or is it size? And what I heard Kieran say is, ladies and gentlemen, you should be focusing on making sure the size of the image is to what it needs to be used for. And then think about what is the best format based on the image that you're supp. Then Franco, I love that your backup to this was. And by the way, we got you covered no matter what file format you cover. Now here's the thing. I want to ask this question and again, we might be dancing in close to some of the other details that we've talked about, but one thing I've learned about us humans is we make time and spend money on what we deem to be important. So why is Pixel Compress important for teams to implement in their integrated app solutions inside of HubSpot?

That's the million dollar question right there. Because again, the labor cost savings in time you have to answer to your customers, right? You have to answer to the marketing team and the sales team and you have content to create and you have workflows and CRO, you have forms to edit, et cetera. So running a manual image compression is sort of corporate insanity these days. Especially if you're using HubSpot. It's a different tool, it's an enterprise level tool, right? You're kind of at a different plane when you're using HubSpot. It makes a lot of sense to optimize efficiently and save not only labor costs, but build the trust when users visit your website, increase the level of trust, which does improve your CRO. It makes no sense to not use an image compression tool whether it's physical compress or not.

Like any compression tool. Do you value your employees? Sanity is another area here. Particular things is that, you know, we know it's the definition of insanity if you continue to resize images across all of your clients, right? So for agencies, if you're looking at your clients and you're thinking, you know, and you're running the same thing over and over again. And we see this with crunch deadlines, you know, where people have, you know, you've got new website to release so you just up late or you know, people are up late trying to push this like last deployment out or you know, or get the last, the final pages complete because there's been some changes in requirements. Those pieces where you kind of, it slips through the net. But then if that set the tone, then updating content in the future, it's going to be the same, right? It's going to be you forget to compress an image because you have to open Photoshop, change the dimensions and then you have to pass it through tinypng, squeeze that extra piece out. So what you don't want to do is have a perfectly built theme, you put all this effort into it and then these huge images bring down the blog posts or any other content on the site. It just undoes a lot of the work that like teams or developers put into it. And content people writing content shouldn't really have to think about that. They should be focusing on their primary job, which is writing good content.

Oh, I love that so much. First of all, let your team focus on what they should be doing. Creating the content to save your team's sanity. Like Kieran, I. That's a like a TKO knockout answer right there. Here's the funny thing too is when I was listening to both of you answered that one, I was like, oh, for the individual organization, yes, of course, this makes sense. And then you said the word agency and I thought about, oh my gosh, the amount of time an agency could save in employee man hours would be crazy. And you know what, we've danced along this question long enough because you've alluded Franco and Kieran since the beginning of like this magical hours that you might pull back in your day and money that actually might still be in your bank account. I'd love for you to just give me some like. And I don't. They might not be real numbers, but some close to numbers that maybe you've toyed around with your head around. What kind of man hours can Pixel compress save your organization? When you really think about it, you know, if a developer is X and they're spending Y time and that's like this, like talk us through that so we can actually put some air quotes, facts around the man hours and money to Pixel Compressor.

So I think there's an even easier way to condense or boil down exactly what you're, what you're asking. So pixel compressed costs $30 a month. So that's like less than half an hour in FTE's time per month versus 10 to 15, maybe 20 hours a month across however many images and pages that you guys are doing now when you already have a mature website again and you have, I don't know, 300 images is our average, maybe 3 to 500 images on a portal. It's a significant amount of time. So the dollar figure would have to be figure out your FTE cost and how many hours and then versus, you know, kind of balance that with the $30 a month fee. Now what about continuing optimization? The tool automatically optimizes when you upload an image. So forevermore, as long as the tool is running in the background, it's going to allow you to revert that image if you need to, because optimization was maybe you previously optimized and The JPEG went in there and it got lossy. You can just roll it back with a button click, right? So again, it saves a massive amount of time for a, for very, very little cost.

I love the way that you answered that, Franco, by the way. And you know what, that's why we have you and Kieran here is because inquiring minds want to know. They've got to know. Once they get educated, they realize that this is a no brainer decision for them to have in their HubSpot portal. What I want to go into next is kind of what exactly happens under the hood. And what I mean by that, Kieran and Franco, is I install this, I know it's not going to be immediate because I am the typical portal. Well, actually I'm probably not the typical, typical portal. I probably have 800 or a thousand images in my portal. But like what happens under the hood, like it starts to do this and, and this might be where you talk about the dashboard and different things like that, but in other words, Kieran, this is your chance to get nerdy brother. What, what, what's happening?

We don't try and overcomplicate it from the front end point of view. We kind of want it to be that in the background tool. So when you install the application, it's going to run a few initial checks. It's going to pull through all the metadata of all the images in your portal. And we only store metadata. So like the file size and sort of path location and pieces like that, we pull through the full list. That initial run maybe takes maybe an hour or so to pull the images because we try and stay really close within HubSpot's API limits. We'll put in the initial list of images, we'll update your dashboard with the number of images we found and then we'll also check to see if there are any images like JPEGs, particularly any lossy images which were historical images in your portal. So before the app was installed, because lots of people have run compression already on their images and what we don't want to do is compress them multiple times if they're already really bad quality. So we give people the option to run it on all of the historical images. So we hold those JPEGs initially and if they say yes, we'll queue those all up for compression too. Once we've done that step, then what will happen is the queued images will start being compressed and yet again that process as well, we kind of throttle it so it doesn't all happen. At once. We don't have set HubSpot with too many requests to upload images again. And so we throttle that over a period of time. It can take a good period, it could take overnight, it could take a few hours, depending on the size of your portal. We're kind of being very careful and respectful of HubSpot servers, essentially. So once that happens, then in your dashboard, you will see the number of images compressed, the files, but the file size beforehand and the file size after. That's really all there is. It's going to give you some that basic report and it's going to run through and just compress your images whilst you're working on the site.

When you're talking about the compression report, when you do install Pixel Compress and it's@app.pixelcompress.com to find it, you go into your connected app section within your Dashboard, left hand menu. There are three sections in there. One of them is going to be your compression report. Obviously there is a billing area and there's a reporting tool. Basically the first screen of the dashboard. Like all tools, we like to go in there, refresh. But as Kieran mentioned, when you install it, it could take overnight to run through the portal because it's assessing each individual image and grabbing metadata very carefully and making a backup of it. That's another thing. Kieran, can you talk about the file name change? If you change the file name of an image, the original image is still stored. It's tokenized, basically.

Yeah. So the big thing here really is we don't want to break anything. That's the goal. Don't break anything. As I say, when we do initially import the images, the file names and all of the content, as I said mentioned previously, we take a backup, we store it in a folder which you can access. You can just like a normal HubSpot folder in the file manager. It's accessible via the file manager. So you can click into there, you can see the original and you can kind of compare if you wanted to make sure that nothing has changed too drastically. But that initial backup is linked into our system. So if you do want to revert it, you can click a button and it will revert that image back to the original. That's one of our, you know, one of the features that's important, that that is still stored in your portal. We don't have the access to that. And if you do update that image, then we will recompress it. We actually store like a checksum of every image as well. So we know when it's changed so we're not needlessly resizing images which haven't been updated. And if they've just been moved, we've added quite a few safeguards in there to ensure that we're not breaking anything. That's really our main goal.

I love that so much. And by the way, I kind of giggled because we all know that no one wants to upscale set HubSpot. I'm just going to throw that out there when you said that like, yep, let's just keep them happy so we can do what we want to do. Also, while you were talking, I literally opened up my pixel compressed dashboard and I'm sitting here looking at it just so everybody can kind of get an idea of some real world metrics. I've got 1,723 total compressed images, by the way, which also I realize that I am a liar because I have a total of 2755 images in my portal. Dang. Okay, I've been doing content for a while, I guess, but there's a total file size of 1.37 gigabytes before. Total file size after is 464.72 megabytes, which is a 67 reduction. Total saved 939.62 megabytes, literally. Ladies and gentlemen, you can look at these numbers. You can see what's happening. You can understand what that means. Franco, when I spit out those numbers, it looked like you wanted to say something, my friend.

I was going to say, and you know what you're doing. You're a pro at this and you still saved almost a gigabyte of space. That's pretty remarkable.

Yeah, it's crazy. All right, so we kind of covered safeguards well. Before I move forward, are there any other safeguards that the user should know that we haven't mentioned?

I will add like, like any big change. We always kind of say, hey, just export all your images. And that's probably a good practice regardless anyway, you know, with Google Drive, storage costs absolutely nothing really or any other service. I always say just always take a backup. Like we work on any platform, your own backup, you know, it's like, even with HubSpot, like HubSpot, yes. They use obviously Amazon services behind the scenes and stuff, and they have backups. But I always, always say, just take a backup from your file system. You can click at the top right, It's a download backup and it will send you a zip file, a bunch of zip files of all your images. And sometimes it's good fun to just to sort them by date and just have a look at what you were doing many years ago on your portal. Because you know you will find odd images in there that you completely forgot about. So it's a walk down memory lane. Like sometimes I would take, you know, take a backup and just store it somewhere. Always like, you know, we saw a backup in your file manager. But as I say, it's always worth taking that back up.

Karen, it's so funny that you mentioned that because I literally was looking at some of the images in my HubSpot portal and thought, you know what? I've always wondered what I'm going to do when I retire. I bet when I retire I can clean up my old images out of this portal. That's what I can do. So here's the thing. I'll ask this question, what do people need to know that we haven't talked about yet?

Words of wisdom, let's see. So if we, if we consider this as a whole, right, because we all have a million jobs to do, right? This is just another one of those, one of those bright spots in your day that could take away a little bit of the pain and agony of sitting there and optimizing images and doing it, doing in a safe way. Especially with a tool as well qualified and well performing as HubSpot.

We know there's lots of in detailed optimizations you can make on a website. We know HubSpot's platform is fantastic at caching, at providing if you follow the standardize and use a good theme in general it's great at providing a really good experience. You visit a HubSpot website, you click around, it loads very quickly. A lot of them do, majority of them do to be honest, and they're optimized very well. But then there are key things like lazy loading which you can do as well. They require code changes, they can be risky sometimes. People sometimes get them wrong. You know, they're lazy, load above the fold. You know, there's many optimizations like that which will help but they're code changes, they require a developer, they require some assistance from, you know, from other people. So one of the quick wins as we say. This is why we built this tool and released it as an app. We were going to keep it to ourselves, you know, for our own clients. But this is, this is one of the areas where it just, it can, it doesn't require code change, it requires an administrator on the HubSpot portal. You install it and then it will just compress your images. It's it's, you know, you don't have to have a subscription for a whole, you know, year. You can, it's one of those areas where it's quick to install and quick to, you know, quick to get results.

I should add to that since we're talking about agencies and just mentioned it again here, we do work with agencies, so there's a good chance if you're, if your website is managed by an agency, first of all, they should have pixelclomppress. If they don't, please let us know. And there are some, there are some discounts that we, that we deliver through agencies as well.

Love that. And let's go ahead and do this as the last question before we head out to our regular scheduled day, give us the multiple ways that we could actually purchase Pixel Compress. Meaning how much does Pixel Compress cost me as a user?

Sure. So it's $30 a month and it's a straight up subscription right at it's a one click install, actually one link install@app.pixel compressed.com that's all you need.

Love it. Love it. Thank you, Franco and Kieran for being here today. What a great episode. Sidekicks, make sure you use the coupon code, by the way, George B. Thomas, to get 5% off of that cost that you just heard about when you go purchase. And that's for the first two years. Franco, Kieran, thanks again for joining us today. And sidekicks, make sure that you're being a happy, helpful, humble human. And we'll see you in the next episode of the Expert Interviews.