Breaking Down the Website Jargon with Phil Tester S7E15

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Welcome to the Boostly Podcast. We are in season seven, episode 15. My name is Mark Simpson. I help short stay accommodation owners get more heads on beds and cut down the commission costs at the same time. Today we've got a very special episode. We're going to be talking about websites and we're going to be breaking down the jargon. So it helps you to understand what why your website might not be getting as many direct bookings as you think it should be. Today I've invited on Phil Tester. Now, Phil is a good friend of mine. He has got a BNB called the Laurels BNB which is near Alton Towers in the uk. He has also got a business called Laurels Tech and he has got an extensive background that he will tell you about on our chat. But I've worked with Phil quite a lot over the course of the past year. He does a lot of fantastic work with website design. He does a lot of really good work when it comes to SEO. We recently worked together on an SEO course. He's actually helping the Boostly website with some technical SEO just to make sure that it's more visible on some of the phrases and the keywords that I want to be getting ranked for to mean that Boostly gets more people visible on it, the podcast gets more eyes on it, the YouTube channel gets more eyes on it, the blog gets more eyes on it, but also as well the website design and the book, Direct Map and the Academy. So I'm actually hiring Phil to do that as well. In this episode we're going to talk.

About quite a lot of things.

Like I said, the main aim of this is to sort of break down the jargon and Phil is one of the best people to do so. At the end of it, if you want to reach out to Phil to have a chat about your website, then he lets you know the best way of doing so. And I'll also add all of this into the show notes as well. Quick shout out to the sponsor of the Boostly podcast. Hostfully. Hostfully helps you create stunning digital guidebooks that you can send to your guests before they've even arrived in your property so they can find out more about the local area, how to get checked into your property, WI FI codes, all of the important information that you just leave on that little printed A four piece of paper that you leave on the on the kitchen. This is a fantastic software I use hostfully. A lot of the Boostly Academy members, a lot of the hospitality community members use hostfully and they have got A very special offer for you. You get your first guidebook for free. So go to hostfully.com H-O-S-T-F-U-L l y.com or you can go to boostly.co.uk guidebook to check out a video on how to create your very own guidebook there and then when you upgrade. So if you want to get three or four or five guidebooks for different rooms or different properties, type in Boostly2 the number 2M and you get two months free. So that's the offer that Hostfully are given all Boostly podcast members. All you do go to hostfully.com when you're ready to upgrade Boostly 2M, you get two months free. Without further ado, let's get on with the show right now.

So, Phil, the floor is yours. If you could just let us know your name, where you're from, your BNB and a little bit more about your expertise in all things websites, please, Mark.

Thank you. Greetings everybody. So, yeah, my name is Phil Tester and I run the Laurels Bed and breakfast with my wife Helen. We're just down the road from Alton Towers, so we have a ready made market, which is nice, which is the reason we moved here in the first place. My background essentially is one of engineering. I worked with British Airways and I also did a lot of analytics with British Airways on their booking system. So I've been working with websites for as long as I can remember. A lot of accommodation providers, mostly in the Staffordshire and Derbyshire area. There you go, that's me.

So what made you want to know more about websites in the back end and the servers? Was it purely through working with British Airways or is this more of like a passion that you've now brought into?

Yeah, to be fair, it was a passion that I've had for ages. I've always liked learning stuff. Originally it was just, you know, I got into computers when we had dial up modems and they made that strange ding dong squish noise. And that was when I built my first website and I've essentially been into them ever since. But that was way before I ever thought of buying a B and B. But clearly that, that kind of those, that knowledge and experience falls nicely into what we do currently and is priceless, essentially.

So tell me a little bit more then about from the transition of being B and B owner to then helping local people around you. How did that happen?

Well, I went to a lot when we very first moved here, which was six years ago, I went to the local group of B and B owners which had been formed years and years before, they'd been going, they'd been doing really well as a group. There was quite a big group, Staffordshire accommodation owners, and they'd formed this group and some of the sort of, some of the people that are sort of forward thinking had got into the Internet in its very early days, but they really didn't know what they were doing. So when I went to the first meeting, I started asking questions that they didn't appear to know the answer to.

Yeah.

And that very quickly turned them into saying, well, if you're so clever, then you do it. So I did. And that's essentially where it started from and it basically grew from there.

So off the top of your head, you know how many people that you have helped in the local area now with your.

Oh yeah, it will be hundreds of people in the local area. So I did a lot of websites for clients. What I did find was a whole load of more, shall I say more elderly BNB owners that had no clue how the Internet worked. And they were being absolutely ripped off by Internet providers and website designers who basically were just interested in separating them from their money. And I was, that really annoyed me. And they were being overcharged, they were being charged for stuff that wasn't being done, they were being charged for stuff that didn't need doing. So I basically wanted to kind of level the playing field.

It's amazing to hear. It's good that there are people like yourself out there that A, know how a hospitality website should be built and B, do it and you know, to help the local area. It's, it's good to see. So when somebody works with you, what does that normally entail? So just so people can get a general idea of what we're going to talk about. So when someone goes, phil, I need your help, what do you generally look to do?

Well, it really depends on what they need help with. I mean, I've helped the local B and B owners and self catering owners with just advice of how they can improve their website, which I do for absolutely no fee whatsoever. Right up to creating brand new websites for them, doing search engine optimization and basically trying to get them online so they do take their own, do take their own online bookings. You'd be amazed the amount of websites owners that didn't even have their own online bookings when I first started working with them. So that was my kind of crusade to try and get them to take their own online bookings because those guys were Used to taking bookings by still literally by check and in the post. Yeah, unless we're talking within the last five or six years, that was still going.

I believe it. I believe it.

Yeah.

That's good. We are going to talk about websites and we're going to talk about your websites. And the aim and the goal of this is to help you get a better understanding to what all that jargon means, what potentially could be slowing down your website, and some nice little tools and plugins that you can be using. But what we wanted to achieve, like I said in the title, is we wanted to break down the jargon. So, Phil, from your conversation with people, when somebody comes to you and goes, a website's running slow, for example, or I'm not getting any bookings and you go in and look at it, where do you find. For those who haven't watched the boosted basic video that you did for us, where do you find. Is the most common area that people's website A might be running slow or B might be losing visitors?

Yeah, I guess that kind of falls into two camps. If people have done the website themselves, then the most common issue that I see is around images. Now, obviously images are fabulous and we need them on the website, but it was the understanding of the size of an image and the impact it had on speed. Essentially, people were uploading four or five megabytes images to so that massive images to their website, which take forever to load. So that was the. That was the biggest thing that I was seeing from people that had built their own websites. The other thing I was seeing from people that had their websites built professionally, apart from the fact they didn't have any search engine optimization whatsoever, was mainly around the technical aspects of either caching or avoiding render blocking. So avoiding code that basically stops and slows down your website loading very, very quickly.

Yeah, we're gonna definitely circle back on render blocking in a second, but I want to just let you know that Phil is like me. When we are chatting, we like to doodle. But Phil. Yeah, you can hear me? Can you hear the pencil?

Sorry.

Every single time. Do not worry. So let's circle back quickly on the first one, which is images. Now, what was the tool you recommended in the boostly basic video that everybody can go and get that's got a WordPress website and download as a plugin that will help smush all big images?

Well, yeah, exactly, you've just said it. So smush is basically my favorite. There are others, but basically smush. So S m U S H is A brilliant plugin which allows you automatically compresses your images as you upload them to your website. The beauty of it is also, it does automatically, it's free, but it also allows you a little option to be able to highlight on your website, just to you, what you. What images are that are either too large or too small. So people have a tendency to whack in massive images that are, say, are a thousand or fifteen hundred pixels wide into a space that actually is only teeny weeny, you know, like the size of an icon or, you know, 50 or 60 or 100 pixels wide. It'll show you that graphically.

Yeah, it's one that's very, very common and it smushes S m U S h. If someone could conf type that in the comment section below. It is a WordPress plugin and we are going to circle back again on WordPress very, very quickly. But it is a really good tool because it does it for you automatically. Now, normally what you need to do if you didn't have this tool is you'd have to do it to every single image and you'd have to do it manually. And when you get pictures done professionally or when you take them off your.

Fancy camera and you put them on.

Your computer, they're not going to be smushed, they're not going to be minimized. There's photographer syndrome in all blaze and glory. And you're just so excited you want to add them to your website. And like Phil and I and, you know, the team that I've got here, when we're making websites, we go in and see them. They range from crazy amounts. You know, it's far, far too big. Like what Phil was saying, it's going to go in there in a not so big size. Let's have a little chat about WordPress because this is something that comes up quite a lot. I spoke about it recently in the webinar that I did, why your website could be killing your direct bookings. And it is a topic that brings up a lot of conversation. So don't worry if you just. And this is why I want to ask you, because it's not just me saying it, it's somebody else that is knowledgeable on this fact is, why do you recommend WordPress websites? Why do you recommend them over Wix, over Squarespace? Promote my place, weebly, you name it. Why do you think WordPress is the preferred choice of so many website designers out there?

It's not an easy question to answer quickly, but I will do My best essentially it is the de facto standard.

Of.

Websites where people can use it to a very high standard but equally it allows you to use it from a beginner's perspective. Websites such as like forbes, newsfeed, use WordPress. I know Mercedes Benz used to use WordPress as their main website. So it is used by, by blue chip companies and mega million pound companies. It's not a back bedroom kind of front end that you just hobbyists want to use. It is a very, very good piece of kit. It is the best for search engine optimization in the way that it gives you the most flexibility for adding the sort of code etc that you need. And lastly, because it's open source, which means that basically anybody can write code for it and the code is available, it's not hidden. There are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of plugins that are absolutely free and won't cost you a penny to add more functionality to your website. So I think those are the main three aspects that I would suggest that it's best for.

And yeah, I mean echoing what you said there and I've asked a lot of people the same question and it's the same answer, open source plugins and Google loves it and I totally get, and I mentioned this in the webinar, why so many people wouldn't go for a WordPress website. Because when you load it up and you're doing it yourself and you get the first thing and you see the first screen and you're not, you wouldn't say you're that gifted when it comes to web design. You're just gonna go what am I looking. It can be a minefield. So this is, and I applaud like people like promote My place and WIX and the Squarespace because they've seen that, they've noticed that and they've gone right, well this is as simple as doing this. And that's why they have stolen a lot of the market share. But if you want your website to do more, if you want to make sure that it's going to attract these direct bookings in the medium to long term, we do recommend a WordPress website. And now you are part of a group and you've got my help, you've got Phil's help and you've got other people's help within this group where you can navigate a WordPress website and you are not alone, you have got the help and support. So if you are with somebody else and you're thinking it might be a time to switch them, you're in the best place render blocking. Now, anybody that has tested their website on one of these websites that's available, website grader, geometrics, tools, pingdom, for example, a lot of times it's coming back and saying one of the areas where your website needs to improve is something called render blocking. What I would love for you on this call, Phil, is to explain this in the most simplistic terms of what happening for you to be getting this on your website when you're getting it checked.

So render blocking, is it easier to do than it is to say essentially rendering is drawing something. So when your, when your screen gets a picture on it, that's basically rendering the picture. So when your website first loads, it will take time to draw that screen. In the olden, the sort of 90s, early 90s, late 80s, when you, if you uploaded a big picture, it would actually draw it one line at a time and you'd see it kind of scrolling down the screen. Now essentially what render blocking means, it's code or an activity that your website is trying to do that is stopping your website from being displayed. I draw on the screen. So essentially what you need to do is to prevent or minimize the amount of stuff that's going on in the background that is slowing down or stopping your website from being drawn on the screen. Because what the person wants to see when they click on your website or the link, they want to see your website immediately or within a few seconds. If they're only seeing a blank screen for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 seconds, then they're likely it's not going to disappear. And it's that code that's stopping it doing that that is blocking the rendering of your screen. So essentially any code or stuff that is preventing the first images or the first drawing of your screen being shown is the problem. That's render blocking code.

So let's come into what a lot of people are thinking. A lot people have done the test and it comes in line with something that I recommend, Reverso. So a lot of people use Reperso now because it is fantastic tool that brings in reviews from TripAdvisor, Facebook and Google and it brings in your 5 out of 5 star reviews and it puts in a really nice presented manner that doesn't look copy and paste and it's good for the social proof. But the flip side is this is a piece of code that has to load on your screen to get it to present. Now is there anything that you can recommend on this? Is there anything you can do to help old repurso load up quicker or do you in fact recommend not to use Reaperso and use something else? What's like you've obviously done some of the checks websites and you've noticed this issue because I've seen you comment on it when we're chatting about these sort of things. What's your recommendation? With tools like Repurso and things like sumo.com etc that have to load the script, is it. Is it a case of. Is the juice worth to squeeze? Is it something that we can do? What's your insight on this?

I think the best thing you can do is, and that's the beauty of a program like GT Metrics is to.

Test.

What you've loaded. Now that sounds complicated and hopefully we'll go through an example of it and show you that it isn't. But rupuso, I've got it on our bed and breakfast website. It does load quite a few lines of code but it does, but they're very, very small and it does it quickly. So I don't see it as an issue. You're much more likely to get it issues with other pieces of code, especially websites that use like a front end builder or any other plugins. What I would always say is if you're adding new bits like that, always go to somewhere like GT Metrics and test it and you will see in black and white what the problem is. Now to mitigate that. So one thing is you'll know is it a problem? Yes or no. Then you can make a choice on whether you want to continue using but you can mitigate all that by using a caching and a program called WP Rocket, something similar, which allows you to essentially defer or delay the loading of that sort of code. So essentially allows your screen to be drawn first and then either loads the code that's a problem simultaneously or afterwards. Yes, that's essentially it.

If you could just walk us through, is there anything else that some of the key things that people do or even they don't even know about when they're coming to design in their website, it could be potentially slowing them. Or even if it could be a case of where you host your website, is there anything that people can look for when they're doing that could potentially be slowing down their site or affecting their site?

Yeah, sure. One of the issues that I come across fairly often is the quality of where people are hosting their website. Now the server that your website is on, they're not all. They're not all born equal. Now if you're on what is called a shared server. That is exactly what it says. Someone's got a company, have got a server, which is basically where your website lives. It's basically a hard drive. It's like a computer. And what they're doing is they are hosting dozens or hundreds or thousands of websites on that server. But what you're doing is you are sharing the resources of that computer, which is why it's called a share, a shared server. Now, essentially what that means is if somebody else has got a problem on their website, it can, it can slow down your website. If there are. If your resources are being used by too many other websites, then you will also have your website slowed down. So the option to that is to go for a vps, which is basically, you're on a server that is dedicated to either your one website, which is very expensive, or only a few websites, which is more expensive than a shared server, but will allow you and your website to operate at maximum efficiency at all times. So it's worth asking your web designer whether you're on a shared server or whether you're on a dedicated or a virtual private server.

If there's people that are watching this and you're going, you know what? I've just had a really busy bank holiday, I've had a really busy Easter. I haven't got time to be faffing around with this, then the obvious answer is outsource it. If you don't want to be doing this, and if you want someone like Phil to look over your website and to go, yep, yep, yep, this is what you need to do. Or even better, Phil will go, I'll go do it for you, then reach out. And Phil, how is the best way for people to reach out to you? And if they need some help with their website or the scores that they.

Are seeing, essentially the easiest way is to just message me on the, on the Facebook page. I think if you want to just send me a message or email me at philauralorrelstech, that's fine. I mean, I've already done this to several people on the Boostly Academy. I'm more than happy just to look at people's websites for them on GTMetrix and suggest changes they can make. And I've always, and I've always said this is one of the things that I always do myself. If you want me to do it for you, the guarantee I give, same as Mark does, if what I do doesn't make a significant difference, then it costs you nothing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if they Say, if Phil is going to spend time and take him away from his business, then, yeah, there'll definitely be a charge, but you know that an expert is looking over it and there will be an improvement, which is, which is great and I love it and I love that we've got more and more people in the academy like Phil. And, you know, I could just go through everybody that's in here that is there to help. And this is what makes I believe the Boostly Academy the best online training source, because it's not just my mouth that you're listening to and there's loads of people in here, just ask questions. The hospitality community is a great place to have a rant and to do all the things, but the Boostly Academy is where you can speak to experts in fields that will give you instant advice and help fix what you need to fix, whether it's websites, whether it's email and copy, whether it's everything. So it's in here.

All right, so again, thank you very much for Phil. If you want to find out more, please go and reach out to him via his email or on the Facebook. Check out the show notes and I will make sure that you have got all the links that you need to get in touch.

Thank you again for tuning in. Please make sure that you rate, review.

And subscribe to the Boostly podcast before you do leave. The more reviews that we get, the higher we go up the ranking. And again, if you want to find out more about Boostly, head to boostly.co.uk to check out more about the book Direct Map, which is a brand new listing site by Boostly, go to boostly.co.uk forward/book directmap. If you want to get a website for your business and double your direct bookings, it's booster.co.uk forward slash website. And if you just want to come and have a chat and follow the daily vlogs, Instagram is probably the best place. Instagram.com forward/boostly UK.