The Importance of Site Speed for SEO & Conversion

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson.

All right, well, hello and welcome. I am super excited about today's session. We're going to be talking all about the importance of site speed for SEO and conversion. So as a digital marketing agency serving clients, typically doing websites, SEO, pay-per-click, if you take any of that type of responsibility in your agency, you have to understand the importance of SEO, I mean, of site speed, and you have to understand how to get your client's site speed maximized. And so I'm super excited to have Michael Borgelt and Abdul Qadar with us today BionicWP and 51Blocks. These guys have gone deep on site speed, and they, they work very closely with us and our agency, have had a huge impact on the results we generate for our clients. So what I want to say before I start, just in comments for me, if you've struggled with site speed in your agency whether it's, you know, GTmetrix scores aren't where they need to be, sites taking too long to load, competitors sending reports pointing out that your sites aren't loading fast enough. Give me a 1 or a yes or a yeah, I have. Brad says yes. I know I have in the past. This is important. I'm just going to lay the foundation on why it's important, and then I'm going to let the experts speak to it and kind of how to solve for it. But the reality is site speed impacts your rankings, right? If you're doing SEO and you want your clients to rank, you can have the best on-page optimization, you can have great link building strategy, you can have great authority, but if your site speed isn't where it needs to be, it could really prevent your clients from ranking like they should. The second thing is it absolutely impacts your conversion rates, right? If somebody has to wait for the site to load on mobile or desktop, and it creates an uncomfortable user experience, you're going to lose conversion on the other side of it, right? It's going to hurt your conversion rates. So that impacts your— it impacts your retention, right? Your clients are counting on you to generate the best results, to get them ranked, to drive conversions, to make it rain. And if you're not ranking and you're not converting, they're not going to be getting the results they should. And you're going to have churn, rightfully so, right? And so it impacts your conversion rates. The other place that it— I mean, it impacts your retention rates. The other place that it hurts you is it kind of opens you up, it exposes you to the competition, right? Smart marketers are using GTmetrix, they're using, you know, site speed indicators to go to your clients and say, hey, look, you know, your current provider is not doing a good job. And they can point to a report provided by Google that says your site's loading too slow, right? And you need to potentially either Question your provider or switch providers. Has anybody had a client reach out to you and say, hey, I just got this report from this other company, and it makes you look like you don't know what's going on and you're not paying attention? Give me a yes, 'cause I know we did, right? We were being targeted. Our clients were literally getting emails like this on a daily basis. And it was important. It was something we really, we needed to solve for. Carlos says, not yet. Well, it will, right? And so you want to be able to be the person that says, no, actually you're green on green, your site's loading like extremely fast. Like, it's going to help you with not just the results you provide for your clients, it will also insulate you from the competition. It will insulate you from an easy gotcha that they can point out. So I think this is really important. I'm excited to have these guys on to talk about it. So without further ado, let me stop sharing the screen. Let me introduce our rock stars for the day, Michael and Abdul. Thank you guys so much for coming on.

Yeah, man, thanks for having us. Appreciate it. I'll just kind of say this, there's probably nothing more boring in SEO than site speed, right? Looking at every millisecond or looking at, hey, oh gosh, you got to test this, fix this. So, it's— I'll try to make it somewhat entertaining, but it is a pretty boring topic, but it's something I'm super passionate about. Passionate about being a computer science major. And we actually spun this off of 51Blocks, the agency that, if you guys know Brittany, that she pretty much runs and spun this off to BionicWP that is gonna be just focused on hosting and speed and support for agencies really at the highest level. And that's why it's something that I think is super important for SEO. And I think come May, as we'll explain, is gonna be more important for everybody. So let me just, I'll share my screen here and get started. So I'll try it, like I said, try to keep this somewhat entertaining. I don't know if I'll be able to do that or not, but I'll make random jokes. So here we go, who we are. I'm Michael, I've been in digital marketing for over 10 years. Like I said, computer science major, also refereed college or played college basketball. So when I leave my college basketball team, they'd always say, "Hey, have fun at the nerdery," as I went off to my computer science class. Classes and whatnot. So I would hang out there with those guys and became obsessed with this type of stuff. Abdul, you're here, why don't you say hi? Not as many people know you as I think myself and Brittany.

Hi everyone, so this is me, Abdul. So I have been in digital marketing for 17 years now. I've been working with Cloudways and a lot of other companies. So like Michael said, very focused on hosting, very focused on support, very focused on speed. So I think that's 3 things that we are just focused on, and I'm pretty much focused on the technical side of stuff.

Yeah, so Abdul is in Karachi, Pakistan, and that's where this team resides, so it's roughly midnight there. He does work some long hours and whatnot, but that's— it is what it is. So one thing I always kind of like to say is, you know, like with Brittany or my wife or with Abdul, they all play this game of inception on me where they drop this little idea in my head, and then come, you know, 3 or 4 months later, I'm like, oh, I have this great idea, I wanna do this. And that's kind of what Bionic came up as, and that's what Abdul did in this space with this. But when we think about site speed, we'd like to think about Google, right? And users and Google, they don't wanna wait for pages to load, right? That's like the worst customer experience you could have. Why did everybody, if anybody on this call can remember, going from Yelp— or sorry, not Yelp, but Yahoo or GeoCities, then eventually went to Google. Why? Because the user experience was better. So Google, at the end of the day, is all about the user experience. They're about how quickly the site loads. They measure your bounce rate inside of Google Analytics. I personally believe that does affect rankings. And Google wants fast-loading sites so users can consume content quickly. So like I say, it's all about the user experience for Google. And to that point, Abdul mentioned to me even this morning that Google actually calls this their UX report, right? Because they actually think this much about the actual site speed as being part of this. Some people say speed doesn't matter, and Josh kind of teed it up. Here's just a lot of text to say that it does matter, right? And there's lots of different studies here that show Pinterest reduced wait times by 40%. And they increased search engine traffic and signups by 15%, right? Another company, Cook, reduced average page load times by under a second, so only 850 milliseconds, which increased conversions by 7 seconds, decreased bounce rates by 7, increased pages per session. And that's what we've seen a lot of as we've transitioned. You know, we had roughly 300 sites when we started this platform. Now we have 1,300. In about 10 months. And that's what we've seen is rankings, yes, have moved, and I'll tell a little story about Josh's clients, but it's more of the conversions and the bounce rate goes down and the pages per session go up. That's those metrics we see over and over and over based on page speed. So Performance Modify, they had a 100 millisecond decrease, which worked out to a 1% increase. Like it just shows you how much that is, which yielded, you know, almost $400,000. Furniture Village, same type of thing. Fix some problems, increase conversions by 10%. And then Deloitte actually did this huge test that there's a whole PDF on it recently, that every 0.1 second site speed increases 8% conversions and lead gen. It has different types of categories, your retail customers, your, like, luxury sites, and then your lead gen by 8%. So every 0.1 seconds, you can see an improvement of lead generation. So like when I have conversations with people, they're like, oh, it's fine, it loads in 5 or 6 seconds, that's fine. Well, it's really not fine. Those things actually matter, and those are the things that we can really do to move the meter on that space. So how does Google drive us to make our sites faster? I really think they do two different things, right? They come, they have Google Chrome, which is now capturing Lightspeed whether you like it or not. All Chrome users are using, have to opt in and use LiteSpeed, and they're measuring the sites as they go. So they're doing this automatically. The other thing they do is they go out and tell a bunch of SEOs, this is what's gonna happen, right? They give us the heads up and say, hey, they told us, I think last year, this was gonna come out, and then again in May, or then again in November, they came out again and said, hey, in May, this update's gonna happen. Speeds are gonna be impact, will impact ranking results, right? And even as of yes, 2 days ago, February 16th, I got this article from Search Engine Land that first thing they say, hey, good morning, let's talk about Web Core Vitals. They know it's coming. They know it's here, it's on the doorstep. People still aren't 100% ready for it, right? So I said that word, I said Web Core Vitals. So Web Core what, right? That's kind of how I looked at it when it first started. And what are these things, right? So Web Core Vitals are the specific set of factors Google's considering important in a webpage experience. And it really comes down to these 3 different areas. And Abdul, I'll let you explain kind of these 3 core web vital areas and like tell them to us like you're talking to me, like a 4th grader, right? So not super technical, but like what these 3 things you would— like how you would explain what these 3 things are.

Okay, I'll try to do that. These are complicated things, but I'll try to make them simple. So like Michael said, Core Web Vitals— like Google already had a lot of speed index, a lot of performance things already embedded into their search algorithm. May they're embedding these three, and these three are like where they're focusing most weightage on. Because the first one, which is called Largest Contentful Paint, that in pretty easy terms means how long does it take for major part of your page to load. So like, when does the biggest load— like when you can see 80% of your page has loaded, right? So that's what Largest Contentful Paint is. First Input Delay is that— because that's when, you know, your page becomes interactive. So these things are measuring 3 basic things. Largest Contentful Paint is measuring the speed. First Input Delay is measuring the interactivity. So when does your page become interactive? And Cumulative Layout Shift which is the trickiest of them all and the one that we've seen, you know, a lot of sites struggle with, is the movement of the page after it loads. So how much does the page move once it's loaded? So that's kind of checking out the experience. So these three main— yes.

Yeah, I think that's really helpful. And if you guys have ever visited, I'd even say like your local newspaper website, you see this happen a lot. You see this shift happen with ads because they have ads loading later or that type of stuff. And that's that cumulative shift layout that you're seeing. People are getting much better with it, but it's— I, for some reason, always see it. Like, I used to see it on CNN a lot. Now I don't see it as much. Now I see it on like your local newspapers that are still trying to figure out this stuff. So what's happening in May? I kind of mentioned it. The Web Core Vitals update is going to come out. Google announced the Web Core Vitals update will be making ranking signals in May of '21. There's the article. Back in November 10th, they announced it. That they're gonna do this in combination with the previous UX-related signals. So the green is what you wanna do, and we'll go in and we'll kind of show what Google's report looks like here shortly, but there's green reports is what we mentioned. And that's what, like, Josh came to me and one of the first times I met him, I don't think he believed me that we could do this because I think a lot of people say that they can do this type of stuff, right? They can make things go green on green. That's like GTmetrix, making those two scores show up green, both in A's when GTmetrix had those two things. And when we took over one of Joshua Nelson's sites, we saw it go from— it was stuck at number 9, and he told me it was stuck there for 6 months, and they hadn't really done anything drastically different to the site since we took it over. Jumped up to number 3. Fell back to number 7 and then settled in at number 5. And that's where it kind of sits between 4 and 5 these days. And now nothing happens in a vacuum in SEO. And I'm not gonna sit here and say 100% of the time you guys move to a faster hosting, you're gonna see rankings increase. I do think though, if you're even with your competition and you make this type of change, you are gonna see advantages in this space. So that's what we're seeing there. So how do you check your scores? This is what most people will wanna do. You know, a lot for a long time, People use GTmetrix, we did as well. We've moved away from that because GTmetrix just recently updated their, I'll say, algorithm to use Lighthouse, which is the same platform that Google's using, but they implemented it incorrectly. And we have actually studies and have written them and other people have written them as well about, hey, how does my one day my site show up 100 on your platform and now is 2, right? So they haven't implemented it correctly. So we recommend people always used to go to Google and use that as the site Lightspeed test and to analyze it there, right? That test can take anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds. Once completed, it'll display your report similar to this right here. This is what it'll look like. You'll have two tabs at the top. One is mobile, one is desktop. Those are the ones you want to click on and kind of access that way. Are we bored yet? Because it's about to get really boring. Here we go.

No, this is exciting, Michael. Will they change this in May too, where there's different metrics showing in addition to that, or is it going to stay the same?

Abdul, they've already shown the Web Core Vitals into the platform at Google, so we can already go and test it currently to show that we're going to be okay in May if you're—

They have been showing Web Core Vitals since last year.

Okay, so I think that's why I was—

Patty is asking if there's any chance you could go to presentation mode because it'd be easier to see the screen, and Thomas is asking if you'll be willing to share these slides Yeah, after the session.

Okay, we'll make sure to get somebody.

Oh, here we go. Present, maybe. Oh, there we go.

Look at that. Thanks.

Hey, you know what, I've never done it, interesting, Michael. And I know this is basic stuff, but not all of us have done like a site speed test. Would anybody be willing to volunteer their site and like, or a client's site, and we'll pull it up and just kind of walk you through the process of looking at it?

Yeah. Yep. So we're going to do that, and we're also going to show you how to install a plugin and optimize it. So that's the plan for today that we'll get to that. So, okay, so we'll get into this. So there's two ways to really do this. There's the easy button, which I use, you know, what I used to use when I was doing this prior to meeting Abdul. And then there's the nerd mode, which these are the two personas we always talk about. My persona, who's an agency owner that isn't as technical as somebody like a developer like Abdul, who's the nerd in the room, right? Even though I think I'm a nerd, he's more nerdy than I am. So this is the way— two ways to do it. This is what you do.

You—

the easy button— you install one of these plugins here. There's other plugins, there's a million of them out there. We leverage a number of different plugins in our platform based on the website issues that we have, right? And we will, we'll do this. So what you do is you run a test, you install your optimization plugin, whatever one you prefer. And now I always say let the fun begin, because this is why I don't have hair left. This and dealing with email issues is the two reasons, right? Walt knows what I'm talking about, I think. So, yeah, is, you know, we, you have to go back and forth. You turn on your plugin, you test the, and then you enable a setting, you check the site, make sure it didn't break. Then you go test the scores. Did they get better? Yes. You do it again, set the next setting. Do that over and over and over to get to the speed until it actually breaks the site, because there are some settings that will break the site, right? And that's what you got to watch out for, those types of things. So, um, that's what— it's very tedious, that takes a long time to get there, right? So the other thing is, I think most people, you know, have heard the terminology CDN. I think a lot of people don't understand how they necessarily work. It's a content delivery network. Really what it is is a bunch of servers or machines sitting out across, we'll just say the United States for ease of talk, or the world, that when a client accesses your site, it goes to that CDN and grabs that information instead of coming all the way to the server wherever it's located. Abdul, is that fair explanation for people of what a CDN is? Okay, cool. All right, the nerd mode, my friend, you're up. You get to talk about what—

hey, real quick, so Put 1 in comments if you want to hear this nerd mode piece. 1 in comments. Let's keep it engaging.

All right. Sorry about that.

Lots of nerd mode. We all want nerd mode.

Go for it. I'm happy for that. OK. So I think for the nerd mode, the first thing is that you follow the easy mode. So you follow what Michael said. So those are, I think, the building blocks. Nothing can happen before that. But once you have those things, once you have the plugin installed, once you have it configured, once it's working for you, then there are a lot of things you can do to improve your score further. And these are some of these things that, you know, like removing unnecessary plugins. I think that's like, it's something that even if you're not focused on speed, you should be doing. You shouldn't have any plugins on your website that aren't needed. So removing those plugins, because each plugin has a performance degradation. That happens, then you can use a plugin called Query Monitor. So what that does is it shows you whenever you load a page, like, which queries are being loaded, and it shows you any queries that are taking a lot of time, any queries that are from the database that are running slow. So you can do, you know, you can kind of optimize those queries. This is especially more important if you're using custom themes, if you're using, you know, custom features, custom built-out plugins. It's really important to see if they are taking maybe longer than usual to load. And then one of the biggest effects that I've seen in scores is optimizing of fonts and removing render-blocking scripts. So that's the biggest effect that I've seen on scores, that most of the people now, we use, you know, theme builders like Elementor or Divi, so they pull their fonts from Google. So you hosting those fonts maybe locally, or making sure you have proper rules in place, where— which we call media query rules, to make sure that fonts are being loaded after the page is loaded. Because if the page waits for the fonts to load, fonts are heavy and they slow down the whole page. So making sure they are not render blocking, which Google calls as— and developers call as render blocking. Anything that blocks the rendering of your page should be removed. So the page should come in as soon as possible, and anything that can block rendering, like fonts, like JavaScript, like pixels. They should all be called later. So that's one of the biggest impactful things that I've seen happening on scores. Another thing that should be happening is you should be serving your images via latest, uh, you can say formats, which is WebP. And if you can't serve it— serve them in WebP, then at least have them compressed, have them for the right size, and lazy load all images so they only load when people can see them. So when the, when the page is loaded, it only loads the images above the fold, not those under the fold. So your page—

so like as you scroll, you start to see them populate kind of if you're scrolling very fast, because that's the lazy loading that's happening, right?

Yep. Yep. And it is getting better because now browsers are coming in and supporting it natively. So it will start getting better. You won't feel that, but still that's like, you know, that is one effect of this. Then, like I said, hosting fonts locally. If you can host them directly on a website, and even scripts like JavaScript, like JavaScripts like Google Analytics and these things, they can be hosted locally. Because anytime your page is loading, it sends external requests. It sends requests to different services like Google Fonts, Google Analytics to bring their assets in. It takes time. It's very expensive in terms of load time. So you can host them locally. There are two plugins that I recommend, which is called OMGF and CAOS. Both are on the WordPress repository. So they allow you to kind of bring fonts locally and try bring the Google Analytics file locally as well. Then what happens is, especially if you're using a lot of plugin— a lot of plugins, each plugin gets loaded on every page even if it's not needed. Like you have WooCommerce and all these things, you don't need it on the home page. But still, like, the way WordPress is made, it would load everything from every plugin on every page. So plugins like Perfmatters, which I think was in the last slide as a recommended plugin, helps you control— you can control which scripts you want to load on which page. So it's very important to keep at least your home page very lean. So don't have any scripts loading. Like, if let's say you have a contact form which is only on the Contact Us page, why load its scripts on the home page? So this plugin allows you to control that and remove scripts. That are not needed. And like, uh, with everything you have to run a lot of tests. So you have to retest after each thing that you do, how it's impacting scores, because sometimes scores go up, sometimes scores even go down when you make changes. So it's very important to do a trial and error and make just one change and test it out. Never make the— like, I've learned it the hard way, changing everything and then testing, seeing the whole website broken. So it's important to just do one thing. See if the website is working because these change— the reason they're in nerd mode is not just because they're boring, but also because they can sometimes have difficult— they can have negative effects on the functionality of the site. So it's very important to do one thing and test it out.

Yeah, I think that's the— I mean, we've had sites that have come to us that have had, I don't know, 75 plugins installed, right? And obviously that site must have to be doing a lot if you're having 75 plugins installed. Obviously a lot of them needed deactivated. To Abdul's point, all of that affects performance. We've had people come to us with, I think, 12 different tracking scripts, right? And sometimes they forget they're even— like, somebody had a Yahoo tracking script. I was like, Yahoo has tracking scripts? I didn't even really know they did, right? It was like educational to us, right? So it was kind of what I would say interesting in that space, right, Abdul, as we've kind of gone through this.

—So, uh, Michael, real quick, uh, there's a question here from, from Mike. Is it— he's asking, does this only apply for WordPress sites, or same concepts apply?

Okay, uh, so the easy mode applies only to WordPress websites. The things mentioned in nerd mode, like serving scripts like locally, serving new formats of images, optimizing fonts, these all apply in every website.

Awesome.

Got it. So Don asked, Abdul, do you, do you just focus on the homepage or do you need to do this work on all pages? And every time you add a new page or a new post, you have to additionally optimize the new pages for speed. How do you approach that? Most of the time caching plugins apply to the entire site, correct? As they Abdul, are you with me? Uh-oh.

I think we lost Abdul for a minute here.

There he is. Are you there? Are you back?

Yep, I am. Something just happened.

Yep. That's fine. Did you hear my question about Don? He's asking—

Oh, Don's question.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yes. So can you answer that for him?

No, I think it does work on all pages. All these things work on all pages. But homepages are the most heavy ones, like where they have the most scripts and everything. So if you can fix a lot, a lot of things on your homepage, it kind of starts helping all the other pages as well. But once you have this, the structure in place, any new posts that you do, they might redo the whole optimization and everything, like clear the cache so they— it has to be recached again, but you won't need to do separate kind of setups for each kind of post that you make.

Cool. Great. Okay.

Let's go to the next slide. So another smart question here is, is it better for tracking and speed to put Analytics on directly or to use Google Tag Manager, or does it matter?

Uh, I haven't seen a lot of difference. I have seen Tag Manager being a little more slower compared to just Analytics because it brings in a lot of more assets from Google. To work. So I've seen it be a little slower, but it's not a huge impact. If you, if you can use— if you, if you want— if you don't want to host them locally, you can use any of them.

And then Tom just asked about how long does CDNs take to update? How long after making a change do you wait to test again?

Uh, I think it depends on all— like what CDN you're using, what optimization you're using. For what we do, we've seen them take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. But sometimes they can take longer and, like, you know, they can take—

so sometimes we don't implement the CDN until the end, right? We'll do all of our optimizations on it and then understand that, hey, the recommendation to add a CDN will be addressed when we add that. So that's kind of so that we're able to go through the testing phase quicker and then add the CDN at the end, right, Abdul?

Yep, because CDNs, you know, then you have an external service So they sometimes can take more time to clear up. Okay, cool.

I think the one thing, and this is something I've learned over time, is that optimizations can't just be done one time. And this is where it becomes pretty strenuous. If you leave your site for 3 to 6 months, you're going to start to see scores fall apart. We recommend re-optimizing these every week, right? Personally, we check every site we have every day for site speed. So if it's not, if it's below 90 on desktop, we proactively go and fix it, right? Wow. So that's kind of what you need to do so that you're always staying on top of it. And then the other thing is keeping the core theme plugins all up to date, right? And we all know that these things happen quite often, so it's important to do that. Obviously, you gotta worry about the core updates, wait until it gets stable. To do that type of thing. And like I said, check it at least once a week and then go back and optimize if you see the scores start to fall.

So you guys do it daily, but you'd recommend not going more than a week without testing site speed?

I think you start— we started off doing it weekly and then we noticed our clients noticed it before we did, right? So then we moved it to every 3 days and then we realized, well, hey, there's still too many sites that we would need to optimize inside of the 1,300 that we have. I'd say roughly 10% every day need to be reoptimized. Wow. Right? So that's more than, or maybe not, maybe 5%. So maybe like 30 to 60 every day get reoptimized because of either changes to the site or whatever has happened has happened, right? And that's the approach we take with it. I think if you did it weekly, your clients, Like we deal with agency owners, so I think they're much more in tune with it. I think clients, unless it's like somebody said the word molasses on GoHighLevel stuff, if it's acting like that, then yes, they're going to know, right? So there's lots of tools to check it. Well, not daily. There's ways to check downtime daily or every couple of minutes. We built our own script internally to check it daily.

That's, I guess, So Al's saying, how big a team does it take to site optimize daily? How many people at your end are dedicated to this task?

So we have roughly 25 people on the entire platform. I'd say half of those people do this work. So they're optimizing sites, adding support tickets, doing that type of stuff. So there's, you know, like I said, 30 or 40 sites every day. So that's 1 or 2 people every day doing this type of work to make sure the speeds stay up, or if they run into issues, addressing those, talking to clients about, hey, like sometimes deferring scripts makes the page load weird. Like they don't wanna have to wait for users to interact, right? And that's one of the things Google wants you to do is wait for a user to interact to do things. Well, some people don't like that. So then that's gonna hit their scores. So there's conversations that happen back and forth around that as well.

So suffice it to say, if you're just like loading a site up, optimizing it with a plugin, and then just set it and forget it, there's gonna be degradation of load speed, which is gonna potentially hurt SEO results, which is gonna potentially impact conversion. You're not gonna keep those high load speeds without proactively—

That's what I believe, and that's what I've seen. right? And before I built this solution, that's what I saw. And that's why I got so frustrated because I would spend this money to go get these sites fixed. And then, you know, 2 months later the site would be at 60 or 50 or 40. And I'm like, okay, what is going on? Like, why is— well, you made changes, you added additional script, you did different things. Now, if a site's very, very, very static, it's probably gonna keep their scores much longer and they're a much smaller business. But if they have dynamic content, if they're, you know, a checkout WooCommerce type of thing, you're going to want this type of stuff and monitor it because this is the stuff that we have. Somebody that sells wedding sparklers, they move to this platform and we saw this move per meter significantly in regards to checkout. As soon as we implemented this, I think something like 30 to 44% increase in dollars after she moved. So like, that's real dollars. That's why this stuff matters at that, especially the WooCommerce, and then we think about, okay, what does one more lead mean for our clients? Well, you start to get down, hey, what's the lifetime value of a customer? How often do they close it? All those conversations, all those things start to matter. So—

Just one thing I'd like to add here. Like Michael said, like, you know, when you make changes, stuff like that, as you keep the, you do it once, the speed goes— starts going lower. One reason of that is because Lighthouse, the algorithm that Google uses, gets updated around 3 to 4 times a week. Lighthouse gets updated 3 to 4 times a week. So even if you're not doing something, Google's team is doing something to change how it's calculating scores, how it's, you know, implementing new things. So those start coming into effect as well. So you have to make sure that you're keeping in front of them. That's—

yeah, good point. Hey, Chris is asking— Chris Hunter is saying, quick question on desktop versus mobile on page speed optimization. Why not optimize for mobile since Google is mobile-first indexing?

All of the things that we've mentioned so far in easy mode or nerd mode, both things, they will impact both Google, like desktop and mobile. So they're not like desktop-focused. But they'll affect both of them. But yes, mobile is a little difficult to, you know, kind of the— Google's allowance of variance is much lower on mobile. So that's why, you know, you see, we see that even if we have a desktop at like 99, we can take a mobile site up to maybe 90, not like, you know, 99 same as a desktop. And that's because like Google allows less variance in mobile scores. But all the things that we've suggested so far impact both of them. Awesome.

Good questions, guys. Keep the questions coming. You know, the questions you have that you ask, everyone benefits from. So Jason and guys, Al, thanks for posting.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Means I haven't put people to sleep yet with this stuff, so I appreciate the questions. Keep them coming. So, um, you guys can see these are different testing tools. Number of them tell you different things, right? We almost always use Google PageSpeed to to document what we're monitoring. And that's the number one thing we look at. Then we look at some other things through that. But as you know, there's a million of these out there you can go and use and look at. Abdul, somebody's asking the best optimized image plugin, which one would you recommend for that? 'Cause that's actually a huge thing you gotta deal with, right? Is when you get the one that says, oh, this image, because your web developer created the image this big, right? And now you gotta compress it to fit in the size. Obviously it's best to create the images the same size, But you guys can, you know, we can talk about the optimization of that.

So I just sent the name in chat as well. It's ShortPixel AI. That's which AI stands for Adaptive Images. So that's the most recommended one, uh, which, you know, I've seen having really good performance. And it also optimizes all the images on the fly, so they do it on their CDN, so there's no, you know, load on your servers, on your hosting as well. and you, like, I'll ask, like, you can— can you take it off? You, like, these adaptive images tool, you can't because they kind of pick up from your CDN to serve images as well, and your optimization will keep optimizing the images. Cool, awesome.

Let me see.

So Jason was asking, you guys, you're checking site speed on a daily basis and then making adjustments based on that if the site speed starts to fall Are you checking with all of those tools or did you just say just Google PageSpeed is the main one you focus on? If you're winning there, you're usually winning across the others as well.

Yeah, so I go to the teacher is what I kind of say, right? Right. The one that's going to be the ruler of this is Google and that's what they're using. So I go use that tool. We sometimes leverage the other one to see other impacts that we can make. But like right now, our tool that we've built only monitors desktop. We've recently talked about we're gonna implement mobile and desktop. So when mobile drops below 80, we're gonna jump in and fix it, right? So this tool is a— Abdul jokes he's gonna sell the tool just himself, right? Just because it's a pretty powerful tool that does this stuff now, that monitors all of these sites and whatnot and flags them and does different things. But that's what we're doing. So eventually, and then our idea is then to raise the threshold, right? So you get to 80, then you're gonna go, okay, what can we do to get to 85 on every one? Everybody and continue to move those things up without breaking the site, right? That's— and it's always this balance between marketing and speed, right? Oh, now the site doesn't load instant, the fonts look weird, and then they get refreshed, right? And people don't like that. Okay, cool. No problem. Your scores will dip because of this. You fine with that? Yep, we're fine with that. Cool. And now they just know that that's how it works. And then we flag it, we don't continue to check it within that range anymore. More.

So yeah, it is a delicate dance, isn't it? I mean, you could make a site load really fast, but the images are pixelated, and that— yeah, and you got to balance that. Yep.

Also, all of the tools that Michael mentioned on the previous slide, all of them use Google— use Lighthouse as their measuring tool, because Lighthouse is what Google made to run all the tests on. So they all use Lighthouse, so they are using the same kind of algorithm. What they do is just add stuff on top of them. And that's where you like, they move away from it. So like GTmetrix uses Lighthouse underlying, but then they kind of add their own algorithms on top of it, which sometimes they don't do it correctly, right? So then this, the measurement is not correct as well. Cool.

All right, Abdul, why don't you share your screen? Hopefully your internet holds up because I know it's been a little laggy, but we'll see what happens here. that— so Abdul, we got a dummy site. He's going to show you how to install a plugin, how to go through like one iteration of this. Obviously, if we ask them to do like, hey, optimize this every time, we'd be here for the next— and people would fall asleep at that time. So let's show them how to—

We're going to get a live cooking demo of how to properly optimize for Site Suite, if I understood what you guys are going to do next, right?

Correct. Yes. And then if somebody wants us to do it on their site, we can try to do that.

One in comments, if you're eager to look behind the curtain, behind the WP install and kind of see, yeah, how this actually is done. All right, cool.

Okay, so I'll be using WP Rocket. So the idea is just to kind of show like people like how to install it, how to activate it, and some of the key settings that they have to do. So I, I'm kind of explaining Michael's easy mode here.

So yeah, yeah, but I'll say this, this is the cool thing about going through this is like when I was doing it for myself, I was like, am I even doing this through the right process, right? And I think that's what's cool here. No, but it doesn't matter what tool you use or whatever. You see somebody that's optimized over 1,000 sites do this process and you're like, wow, it really is this trial and error and do this back and forth where I didn't— I was like, gosh, there's gotta be a smarter way. Well, sometimes there's not just a smarter way to do it. You have to go through it to get there. So Abdul, go ahead.

Awesome. Yep. Yep. So I just wanted to show you, like, if you search for cache, in WordPress, there's approximately 3,900 plugins that come in. And these are just plugins that are in WordPress repository. These are— they don't include any of the premium plugins, any of the paid plugins, right? So there are so many plugins and so many different ways you can do this. So any plugin that you use, the underlying ideology remains the same, that it is trial and error, right? So I'll just upload one of our plugins.

So while he does that, I used to use WP Fastest Cache for the longest time, had the paid version as well. Then I used WP Rocket for a long time, had the paid version of that as well. And they all have their pluses and minuses. Some integrate more of that image compression, different things like that. Some of them don't. It's kind of like, do you want one thing that does something really good or do you want something that does everything across? Obviously everyone's heard of, you know, the W3C and, you know, those types of caching plugins as well.

So. Okay. So this is the WP Rocket dashboard. I think someone else asked like which is one of the best plugins for image optimization. So Imagify is one of those that are owned by WP Rocket. So this one is directly integrated in WP Rocket if you want to use it for image optimization, because WP Rocket in itself doesn't do that, right? So you can use a plugin like Imagify for that. So this is the dashboard. The first page that you have to go to, like the basic settings, are in the cache because What you make— there are things which improve your score which take like, you know, minification of images and things like that. I'll go to— but cache is the most important because cache means that once someone visits your page, your server kind of keeps a copy of it. So the next time it just sends that copy, it doesn't do all of the computation to make that page. So it just gives them a copy of that page. So you enable caching on— because you need a cache for mobile as well. You can select if you want to have a different cache for while. It's fine if you don't need that. This is the important one where sometimes we have had clients who've done changes and then they come back after a few hours and say, oh, I still can't see my change, because that's what we call the cache lifespan of how long do you want to keep the cache. Normally it should be as long as you can keep it, right? We keep it at 24 hours on our end, so cache is there for 24 hours and then it's refreshed if you know, if someone doesn't clear the cache. So you can manually clear the cache, but this is for automated stuff. So why do you want it so long? Why do you want it 24 hours instead of 1 hour? Because what happens is like, if, if you— cache is what keeps the load of the server and what serves the page fast, right? And if you kind of clear the cache every hour, so then if you have a lot of traffic, then the people that come in after the cache was cleared, and then it has to re-optimize itself, recache everything. So then they'll be getting a slower version of the page. You know, the page would be slower for them. There would be more load on your server as well. So then whoever you're hosting with might have problems with that as well, that you're putting too much load on the server. Got it.

So like, for example, we had one site that got 900 connections a second during this thing that was happening in the United States this last, uh, spring, and that server was able to handle it because of the cache was serving things up like this and being very efficient with Yeah, so this is basically just, just to give you some nerdy stuff.

This is a cache that we call on-site, but then there's on-server caching as well. So that depends on whoever you're hosting with. They might have cache on the server, which is even faster.

Okay, so do you have a recommendation, obviously other than us, who has caching on the server that you agree with?

Uh, I think any of the managed hosting providers, they do, they do have caching, but definitely everyone has a different setup. So companies like WP Engine, they all have them, but they have different types of setups.

Do you guys cache in the server or do you cache on the site? I'm just curious.

At BionicWP, we do, we do both. So we cache first on the site and then we cache it on the server, so you take making use of both. Awesome.

Okay, so one guy asked, can you, can you set up cache to run in the middle of the night? So if you say 24 hours, hey, I want to refresh it at midnight when there's less traffic, can you do that?

Uh, this basically, uh, this counts 24 hours from the first time it was cached. So it's not like a time that you can put in on when the cache is. It's like if a page that's not cached is visited right now, it would expire in 24 hours. So it's By page. It's not by site, it's by page. Got it. Then the scores basically happen here where they say, you know, file optimization. So here is where the trial and error has to start, right? So I would always suggest just turn one option on, save the changes, test the website, right? You test the website that is everything fine, is everything loading fine, then you turn on the next one. Because what happens is if you turn on a lot of things, and 80% of the sites that I've worked with, if they— we turn all of these things on, they will break, right? This is like from my experience, they will break if you turn all of these things on. So it becomes really hard to then turn off everything, and then you'll need to do that anyways, like one. So I always suggest do one, one thing at a time. Test it, test your different pages, especially if you have custom stuff, especially if you have, you know, WooCommerce or using any e-commerce plugins. They are more they're more sensitive to these things. So always test it out. So this is the same thing that I was mentioning in the nerd mode, combining Google Font Files, reducing HTTP. So just to explain you what, what minification on all three items— HTML, CSS, and JavaScript— whenever we write code, we have a lot of, you know, empty spaces that are there that developers put in to make the code look nice and the code readable. Systems don't need that, servers don't need that. So when you click on minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, what WP Rocket will do is remove all these things, remove all the comments, remove all the line breaks, remove all the, you know, things that we don't need to make the size come down. So always kind of do one thing at a time, you know, like see, they also have a warning here, like this could break things as soon as I click on CSS file.

That always makes you feel good when you're doing that, right?

So, yep. So it's like, you know, it's always important to, you know, kind of— I think they'll have it on here. They have it.

So it's literally you check a box, you save it, you go test it, you go look at it. Cool. Next, move back, back and forth. So some people are asking a little about Cloudflare. And so somebody said, hey, we're looking to use an APO or Cloudflare, right? So you want to talk a little bit about that?

Yep. I think APO is really good. And I've seen really good performance on that. But the thing is, it only does, I would say, the caching part here. All of these things you have to do anyways because you have to do— it doesn't do optimization like minification of scripts and stuff like that, like lazy loading of images. But what they do is they cache your page on their network of servers. So let's say if some— your site is hosted in New York but someone from LA visits it, they don't— then what they do is the first time someone visits it, they store it on the LA servers for 24 hours. So then the next person who visits from there will just, you know, get, uh, will just get the page served directly from their server in LA. So the traffic doesn't have to come to your server. So it's really good caching and it's really fast. It really reduces the time to first byte. It really reduces the load on the servers, but it's only doing the caching part. It's not doing any of the minification, any of the optimization of the code part of the site spot. It's just helping in cache. So it does help in the load time. It won't help in, you know, other things. Yeah, cool.

And then lazy load, that's where you do those things and you continue to do the same process for each of these things, right? Like you're going to reduce the bloat in the database, you're going to, you know, eventually install your, your CDN stuff like that, right?

Yeah, so you have all those things like database, CDN, add-ons they also integrate with Cloudflare. So then the caching, like if you clear cache on WP Rocket, it clears it directly on Cloudflare as well. So that's the reason these things are there, because Cloudflare does a lot of good things, but they're more focused on speed of, you know, serving the cache and everything. Yep. So it's all trial and error after each and everything. And then there's this advanced rules as well, because one thing that happens a lot is that when you are doing aggressive caching, aggressive optimization some scripts won't work, right? Like, we've seen different scripts not working with different types of optimizations. So you can then, you know, remove those cache, remove, you know, let's— you don't want to kind of— I think they have it here, they have— yep. So you can cache different query strings, you can like never cache these user agents, never cache these cookies, never cache these URLs. The idea is, you know, to remove pages from caching.

Cool. All right. So more than happy to walk, you know, through more of that. But I think right now that, that kind of hits that. If I can share again here, see if I can figure out where that is. Share. Oops, not that one. Oh boy, trying to find— okay, can you guys see my screen now? We see it. Great, awesome. Okay, so just quickly, but then we'll get into this a little bit because this will get into some things you want to look for as well. So this is what we do, right? We do We do daily site speed monitoring. We do different site optimizations. Not every other site optimization is the same. Oops, I said contain. It's container-based resources, which is, I think, the next biggest thing people need to think about is where they're hosting, right? So I saw somebody talk about Google's cloud platform. So we tested 46 different platforms before we went with Google, right? But we didn't just go with Google. We went with Google's gCPC2 instances. Which is the same network or same instances that Google uses for YouTube and their other platforms, right? Tesla uses it, Dropbox uses it, those guys use that instance because that's the instance you wanna be using, it's the fastest one that we've found after we did a bunch of load testing on different things. So, well, you know, you might just pick a hosting provider, you've gotta think about how the setup is created, right? Container-based, we found to be the best because then you're not stealing resources from other sites. Right? You're not sharing resources with a noisy neighbor or any of those things that may occur, right? And that's why we set it up for that. We also think maybe at some point Google will give a little preferential treatment to their own servers, right? Google loves to, loves to do things like that, so that's why we kind of did that as well. The malware scanning, you got to make sure you have that. Our scanning is actually deeper than Security, so you got to think about that platform, what that looks like, how you're going to get alerted. Those types of things. We have 3 different layers of firewalls, um, and then we also have something that's unlimited edits where you get— you guys can send in edits to our platform, we'll make the edits for you as if we're you. We'll even do it white-labeled, uh, as well. So, um, but I want to definitely want to make sure we have 24/7 support on our chat. If you guys ever have questions, come in there and ask. We really try to have WordPress engineers as the first line of defense. So you're not having to— like, I call GoDaddy, I have to move up 3 levels before somebody knows their platform as well as I do, right, when I used to go call them. So that's kind of how that works. But more than happy to talk or discuss any other questions that people may have about their setup or however it's currently working for them. Yeah, I'm sure there's follow-up questions.

I think what I'll say about this is we all know site speed's important. You can see right behind me, I've got the SEO logo. My agency, Plumbing and HVAC SEO, that's what we do. We set up websites, we try our best to get them ranked, and we try to get our clients the best results possible. And we were at it for years. We went from Amazon Web Services to WP Engine to Liquid Web, hosting. And in home services, there are big companies like Scorpion that have big sales forces that they'll literally just run like site speed reports on the clients every single day and just trying to flag them just to create some sense of, "Oh man, you know, that company you're with sucks, right? You need to come hire us." And, you know, we've been doing level 10 meeting, like I'm big with EOS. And so, mastermind members know we're on a deep dive right now in terms of implementing EOS for our agencies. We know EOS, you're meeting on a weekly basis and you're meeting on a quarterly basis to solve the biggest challenges and problems in the company. And our EOS for like several quarters straight, one of our top rocks was get to green on green on GTmetrix. I know you're saying not to look at GTmetrix and it's more important on Google, but for us it was GTmetrix 'cause everybody was pointing out Like, your sites are like, they're not green on green, they're yellow. They're like getting Cs and Ds. And we're like, what are we gonna do? And we switched servers, we cached our images, we tried everything. And then Michael, who's in the 7-Figure Agency Mastermind, said, I've got the solution, right? I've done this and I've got this whole hosting thing I'm doing. How long ago was that now? Like going on maybe a year and a half?

Yeah, yeah, almost exactly a year, year and a half ago, I think. And then I think you thought I was crazy 'cause I was like every other guy.

Yeah, I'm like, yeah, you went like, the consultant we spent $5,000 to try and solve our site speed, and he gave us some plugins and it didn't do anything. I was like, all right, Michael, yeah, that sounds good. I'm glad you're working on that. And eventually I was like, all right, Michael, take one of my sites, and if you can help us optimize it, let's give it a whirl. I think we gave you access to one of our top clients. You did whatever it is that you did there in the background, and the site immediately went from like a D to an A. And I was like, okay, that sounds pretty good. And we switched like 4 or 5 of our other sites over and they all went to A's, they all went to green on greens. And obviously before too long it was like, okay, we're switching the whole thing over to BionicWP, which I think was the WP Help. That's what you called it, you kind of switched names.

Yeah, yeah. So that's why you got stumbled upon it. Sorry about that. Yeah.

And It's been a game changer, right? I mean, it's no longer a concern for us. Our sites are green on green. We have A's. They load extremely fast on desktop and on mobile. We get compliments from clients and from consultants of our clients saying, wow, your client sites look great, they're ranking extremely well, and they load fast. Like, what are you, what are you doing? It makes us more sticky with our client base. And yeah, you could probably figure it out on your own. Yeah, you could probably set up a tech stack. I've got a COO in our company and he was deep dived into this. We just could not solve for it. And for a very incremental per client cost, WP Engine can solve this problem and really insulate you from this issue within your agency. So I can't give you guys a high enough stamp of approval for the impact you've had on our agency.

Thanks. Yeah, and that's what, you know, we— that's like, I actually for a while offered anybody $100 if they— if we couldn't make their site speed, because I think out of the 1,300 we've moved, I think there's been 2 that we've run into that I've been like, oh, what happened on that one? And one was because of custom PHP coding, right? And another one was, uh, I think the guy was trying to get my $100, right? So he was— he already super optimized the site, and it was like, hey, based on when I tested it, when he tested it, it was like you'd flip back and forth who's faster, right? Because, you know, it's not always the same scores always come back at the same time. So Out of 1,300 sites, we have a pretty good track record. I'm pretty confident we can always help no matter what platform or theme or not. I mean, it's gotta be on WordPress, what theme you're using, if you have videos, if you don't, all those types of things. Abdul, there was a question about which platform or which theme you recommend.

Yeah. Yep. I think Chris asked that. So I think we've worked with almost every theme now. By 1,300 websites, we've kind of worked with everyone. We have found— I would say I'll name the one that I found more difficult, and that's I think Divi that I found more difficult to work with. Apart from that, like, you know, Elementor, everything else is really good. With Divi, the problem is not like, you know, because they have their own optimization, because they also focus on optimizations. So what always, you know, when you have different optimizations running, there are things that you need to do. So with Divi, we have to kind of, you know, go and turn off their optimization, completely turn off their kind of how they're doing their optimization and let just let us handle the optimization part. But I think even with them also, we've never had a problem of getting the scores. It just, you know, it takes a little longer than others. But yeah, we've seen Elementor. We use, I think, like Michael said, I think in 51Blocks we use Elementor. So any, any Any that we've used, Astra as well. So any works. So the question about migrations. Migrations.

Yeah, talk about migrations. I'll answer that real quick. Migrations. Yeah, 100% for free, right? That's included in the platform. One thing I kind of mentioned is one of the things I got super frustrated with and somebody joked about it and said, "Hey, GoDaddy actually helps." Yeah, exactly. The statement I got to that literally would make my blood boil is every time one of these guys would say, "Hey, go talk to your developer." Hey, go talk to your developer. And that's— we call those curse words in Bionic because we want to solve the problem. And if it really is a developer issue, we're going to point to the line of code that you need to go and fix, right? Not just, oh, it's a developer issue. No, that's not how it works. We actually identify, oh, we tried this, we did this. OK, it's this line of code that's causing it. Hey, with videos, it's this. Can we serve the video locally instead of through Vimeo or whatever it might be to help the page load speed faster? Yes, cool. Can we do that for you? Yes, we do that. We, our whole goal is to, you gotta remember, I run an agency and that's like Abdul came from the hosting world and I think he learned a lot about how agencies wanna work with a hosting company. And it's not the support hosting companies were giving. And that's the difference. We've closed that gap. That's why we offer the unlimited edits. That's why we do those types of things because people and agencies need this service and that's why we built it. So, yeah, the migrations, anything like that, we're always going to go over the top to do it. Like we had somebody in the 7 Figure Agency, Josh, I told you, complained— I was— had complained that it was affecting his SEO team or something. The layout of GoHighLevel forms, actually. We're like, cool, you have 60 sites with us. What we're going to do is check the site every day, 3 different elements. We're going to check on it for 30 days. And we just did that to confirm that it wasn't a caching issue for all of his 60 sites. And we did that for 30 days for him, no additional charge, just because that's what you need to do to make sure that you have a stable platform, in my opinion. So, um, yeah, I was just gonna—

I was just gonna interject, you know, Roger, it's interesting you mentioned migrations. Obviously, if you've got 10, 50, 100 sites, that's a concern. And I was like, Yeah, I don't know, like, I guess we'll start this going forward. But the fear was it was gonna take forever, everything was gonna break when they tried to migrate it and there were gonna be all kinds of issues. And, you know, to my knowledge, it was very, very, very smooth. Like we got them the details, their team ran with it and it was a very quick transition and had a very powerful impact.

And then, uh, one of your people you recommended to us had 220 sites in multi-site, right? So if you guys know WordPress, the capability to do multi-site, it's one of the worst things you can do if you actually want to scale your, your thing, right? You don't want to do it that way. We pulled all of his sites out of multi-site and had them all as single installs, and his performance went through the roof for all of his clients. And that's like no additional cost. That's part of us finding the right solution for his platform.

Good stuff.

Cool.

Any other questions? This is— I got it.

I got a question, guys. It's actually Andy. I'm not, not Mike, but I'm using Mike's Zoom. We— one of the things that we're— we actually build with Divi right now, and Divi is not— it's not the best. We've had a lot invested into it just simply because it's fast to build sites, build really nice design sites. But we are looking at switching over to a new theme and investing into, you know, our development process there. And one of the things that we did run into, we reached out to Divi, we asked them, what is your roadmap around Core Web Vitals? And they really didn't have anything. And I've heard similar criticisms of Elementor as well too. So one of the things that we're looking at is potentially switching to Oxygen or going right over to Gutenberg and starting to develop through that process. What are you guys doing in terms of, you know, planning ahead for the Core Web Vitals and what themes you're building with?

Abdul, I'll let you kind of talk first and then I'll chime in.

Yep. One, like two words, Oxygen is really— I think it's more than two words, but yeah, Oxygen is really good. Right, I've seen it really good in terms of performance. It does have some issues, you know, because of its security and how it's kind of made. It does have some issues that we run into when we're optimizing it, but I've always seen like the results are worth it once we, you know, kind of get them because they stick much longer with Oxygen. I have not seen Oxygen sites lose scores that easily that other builders have. But yes, definitely it's a very different kind of a page builder compared to Elementor and Divi and Astra, it's pretty different than that. And I think, yeah, Michael.

Yeah, I mean, we've built things on Elementor. I think I've looked at Oxygen as well, and having the conversation with Abdul, it's been a toss-up if we're moving off of it or not. It's something we've used right now. I think one thing we always kind of look at is, well, I'm always looking for the next thing and trying to identify what that's going to be to make things, things better. We haven't really run into— like, people are like, well, what about video? What about themes? Other than Divi, which was the one you're on, that's the only one we've had real big issues with, but doesn't mean that you're not able to overcome them as well, which we have been able to overcome. It just takes a little bit more effort. So does that answer your question?

Uh, yeah, yeah, kind of. I mean, there's there's a lot of talk, right, in the development world about these themes being compliant with Web Core Vitals, right? And with Elementor and with Divi, you know, they both do not have a roadmap to make sure that their themes are going to perform well with it, right? So, you know, one of the things that triggered this too was I think WP Rocket actually built their whole site in Gutenberg. And so that's one of the things that we're looking at too is potentially switching over to working in there. So it's, yeah, I mean, it, it's difficult to decide what to do next, right, for, for building and compliance with it, because it is going to be a big factor, right?

So yeah. But just one thing I'd like to add here, like, apart from themes, like, the three main elements of Core Web Vitals, they also depend a lot on how you design and develop the website, right? Because you can have moving, like, you can have moving spaces the theme can be very good, but if you have things moving around, it won't score good on CLS, right? So it also comes down to like what type of sites you kind of make and, you know, what types of, you know, like sliders and things like that. I, I see them going away in a sense because CLS really gets an impact when you have sliders on the page, you know. So things like that, I think it's more on how the design part will change compared to, you know, just on the page builders itself.

Good question. Hey, so there's another question here from Al that I think would be, would be good to address. He's asking about video optimization on the site. Do you recommend YouTube hosting the video or putting it on Wistia? Does that make any difference just as it relates to video on the client site?

Yep, I think in most cases I've seen, you know, local video work better because when you're hosting it locally, you don't have to load a lot of external scripts. But sometimes if you have a lot of videos on the page, it then helps putting them, you know, maybe on Vimeo, maybe on YouTube, uh, Wistia as well. I've seen Vimeo perform better than YouTube, to be honest, like in, in terms of— because it loads less external scripts compared to how many YouTube loads, so it's a little faster. But if you have just maybe one video on the page or something, then hosting it locally is better.

Awesome. Now hopefully that helps. Amy says the nugget about not using multi-site and creating individual sites was a gem, probably worth the price of admission. So Amy, glad that helped. Any other questions? You have two SiteSpeed ninjas on the call ready to answer any questions. We want to hang on it and see if there's any other questions. If not, Abdul, Michael, thank you very much for unpacking this for us. Thanks for not just talking about your service, but also showing us, and if you want to do it on your own, this would be kind of an approach that would work, and kind of unpacking the different elements. Um, let's see, Chris is asking, are there any plugins to definitely stay away from, like bad news plugins that you guys have on a list or anything like that?

Uh, we don't have such a list, but one thing that I always look for in plugins is when were they last updated? Because there are like maybe 100,000 plugins on the WordPress repo, and a lot of them were updated like 1 year ago, 2 years ago, never. Because that— it's just bad practice to go with those plugins that are not updated, that are not maintained. They will just cause more problems as, as WordPress kind of becomes more stricter. And with PHP 8 that has come out, which is much more strict, so it'll just become more and more problems if your plugins are not updated. Or maintained.

So, so would you say more than 6 months without an update, try and find a replacement plugin, um, or just if it looks like it's not being updated proactively, don't bother with it?

Yep. Like, if the, if the plugin is not maintained by the developer who developed it, right, and they're not updating it as WordPress kind of updates itself, so it will, it's very, it will very soon become a security risk because that's where the exploits come in.

Yeah, no doubt. I was asking for sliders. Do they slow down slides? Don't bother with sliders.

Yeah, like, I, I see them going away, but like everyone else, this is my opinion. I see them, you know, going away with CLS coming in. They look nice, but, uh, being on the other side of optimization, they always create trouble for us, so Yeah, it's good if you don't have it.

I don't really believe sliders really help with conversion either. Our data shows a static image is easier for someone to comprehend. And so while it looks cool and your client will probably, hey, I like the way that looks, from a user perspective, having a static image is going to convert better for them than having these images sliding across the top. Yeah, that's a great point, Joshua Nelson.

I used to talk about this all the time when sliders came out because the SEO Conversions, that really is where it applies in my opinion, because you're distracting people from the call to action that you actually want them to take by showing them another image through the slider.

So yeah, 100%. Steve's asking if you guys work only in the US or international as well. UK.

So it's, it's international. Anywhere Google has a data center is where we can spin up a data center, which is part of the reason we went with them because of their ability to have, you know, data centers all throughout the United States, UK, Australia, Europe, all that.

So good stuff. Any follow-up questions, post them in here. Um, Michael and Abdul are both 7 Figure Agency Mastermind members, so, you know, join the 7 Figure Agency group. You can ask follow-up questions in there. Um, there's a hard way and easy way to do everything. Right? Hard way and an easy way. Like you could easily say, I'm gonna get my own hosting, I'm going to figure out how to put in, you know, whatever plugins are gonna optimize this thing, I'm gonna put a full-time person that's gonna check all my clients' sites every single day, right? And that is probably possible, but it is absolutely the hard way, right? And if you're not a hosting company and you don't have like robust IT, you know, people on your team, you're gonna struggle with it, right? We struggled with it and we have hundreds of clients, right? And the easy way would be to find somebody that does this, right? That has this baked in, it's their core competency. And I think WP Help is the easy way for site speed, right? These guys are great. I use them, I've referred them to a number of our top agency members. That have used them and gotten good results. They make me look good every time, which makes me very happy. There's no affiliate situation here. I'm not getting paid to, you know, to plug them. But the reality is, as an agency, you need fast hosting for your clients, you need reliable hosting for your clients, you need good support, and you need— you need to get your clients results, right? And site speed is critical to that. Um, and so, you know, check them out. It's bionicwp.com. I put it in comments a couple of times. The pricing is very, very affordable and it will make you look good. It will make you stand out in the marketplace. So thank you guys for sharing. If we have any other questions or any other final thoughts, Michael or Abdul, let's do it.

No, I mean, I think the only thing is if you're considering moving somewhere, we're definitely happy to talk to you about the pros and cons of them. I've investigated everybody out there. I know every issue with WP Engine, I know what's great about them. Same thing, you know, like with Google, with Vultr, with SiteGround, all those areas. If anybody wants to talk, this is my passion, I love it, as nerdy as that sounds. And same with Abdul, we're very, very much happy to help anybody pick the right solution, even if it's not with us, tell you what the pros and cons can be, so.

Awesome, lots of thank yous, people appreciate the session, good stuff. Thank you guys so much for sharing. And for those of you that joined us, thanks for joining us. And we'll talk to you guys again soon. Thank you. All right, thanks. Thank you. Talk to you later, guys.