Got The Need For Speed?

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello. I'm Michael Costin. You are Arthur Fabik. Am I? In case you didn't know. Thanks for letting me know. And we are the SEO show. I almost started by going and we're live like a lot of podcasts do, but I knew it would throw you.

ARTHUR: So yeah, it always throws me because I always expect you to like say I'm Michael Costin and then go quiet. And I'm supposed to say I'm Arthur Fabik. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But you never do. No. Keep you on your toes. Yeah. Feel that intro went pretty well.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And we are live.

MICHAEL: We're live here in the studio in downtown Parramatta, Australia, downtown getting ready to talk. Don't know if you could hear that drum roll, but we did a drum roll. We are talking site speed optimization today. I think it's called got the need for speed.

ARTHUR: Pretty good title that it is got the need for speed. We've been sitting on this one for a long time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. When we started this show, we did a Google doc, Google spreadsheet. Yes. Where we had all our show topics and this one has just been sitting there and we keep bumping it almost two years now. Yeah. And really you can't have an FCO podcast where you haven't spoken about site speed. Very true. We have spoken about it, but you can't, you need an episode on it.

ARTHUR: Yes. And this is it. This is it. Here we are two years later.

MICHAEL: I'm thinking of Homer Simpson, where he talks about the bus that has to keep its speed above 50 K's an hour and its speed can't drop and it has to speed everywhere. Do you know that quote? I do. Yeah. I think it's called the bus that couldn't slow down. Anyway, let's move on. Classic Simpsons. Let's move on. We don't do many Simpsons references on this podcast, which is a shame.

ARTHUR: No. Well, like a lot of the younger generation don't know him. That's the thing.

MICHAEL: Do you reckon the younger generation are tuning in to the FCO show, by and large?

ARTHUR: Potentially, yeah. More so than they are The Simpsons. Oh, I think. Surely they watch The Simpsons.

MICHAEL: I don't think so. All right. Any of you Gen Zs out there, let us know. Do you watch the Simpsons?

ARTHUR: Definitely not the classics. Right. In my opinion, anyway, the people I've spoken to, they, whenever you try to do a Simpsons quote, it just goes straight over the head.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I find that all the time in my life. I'm quoting Seinfeld and Simpsons and Curb Enthusiasm and Sopranos. Never, very rarely do they land with the people. So I just end up talking nonsense.

ARTHUR: Like, like you are right now.

MICHAEL: Like I am right now, let's move on. We've got sounds going off in here. Let me turn that down. Um, all right. Page speed. I find more than any other. factor in the SEO world, clients seem to come to us at certain stages and obsess over page speed. Like they'll sort of read an article or hear something about page speed being an important ranking factor and that you've got to have this fast site. And then they'll sort of, they'll get the blinkers on and become a bit obsessed with that. Have you noticed that?

ARTHUR: Yeah, no, I have definitely noticed that. I guess further onto that topic that they will have, a lot of the time we'll have a site that's fine, loaded well under two seconds, but we run it through some sort of page speed like tool, like GT metrics or page speed insights. And then for whatever reason, the score would be quite low. Could be because images might be a little bit too big or something to do with JavaScript, whatever. But on face value, the site loads perfectly fine. Faster than their competitors. But they get fixated on the score. And we've had clients in the past that will basically look at that and you would try to explain to them, you know, ignore this, it's fine. Your site's fine, you're ranking well. On face value, do you see your site being slower? No, but these scores have to improve. So they kind of obsess with it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's kind of like Yoast with its traffic light, you know, green, red, green, yellow, red. Yes. Yeah. People want all green, even if it's at their detriment. Yeah. We've had clients want to pause all investment and just put all resources into getting perfect scores and page speed inside. PageSpeed Insight has that like score of a hundred with the green circle. You know, it's very visual and I guess stimulating to get it up as close to that hundred as possible. Yeah, GTMetric's similar.

ARTHUR: It grades it A to F. And it's the same, like green, orange, red. And I understand like if your site is slow and it loads slow, then a hundred percent. But it's weird to me that people will obviously go on their site, see it load quickly, But obsess over it. Yeah. It's like they don't believe what they're seeing. I don't know. It's weird.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, um, the other thing I guess I would say is page speed. I don't believe it is as big a ranking factor as people think.

ARTHUR: Probably not. No.

MICHAEL: Like there's plenty of pretty average loading pages that rank well. There's plenty of fast sites that don't rank well in the same space often. Um, so it, it, it is a ranking factor in that, you know, um, it's not a good thing to have a slow site and if it's super slow, you're probably going to hurt your chances, but you don't need to have blink of an eye loads. No. It's definitely a conversion factor.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, Google is not going to penalize you if your site is 0.2 milliseconds slower than the next competitor. But if your site takes 10 seconds to load, then it's a different story. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I would say three, four seconds is probably fine.

ARTHUR: I just say that based on- Wait up, one, two, three, four.

MICHAEL: No, that would- Fully loaded.

ARTHUR: I'm saying fully loaded. Fully loaded perhaps, but I get impatient if a site takes a little bit longer than, you know, two to three seconds to load. Most sites load fine, but occasionally you'll land on something that takes a while. So start hitting the refresh and start checking your internet connection

MICHAEL: Yep, bounce back to the search results. That's where the conversion factor is, which is, in my opinion, a more, I guess, important reason to have site speed is that a fast site generally is going to convert better. If people can click around, find what they want, check out easily if you're selling online or submit a lead form rather than sitting around waiting. People are exactly what you just said. They're impatient. They're conditioned to have, you know, a reasonable response time. And then anything beyond that, it's out of there usually. So look, that's a good reason to do it. Don't obsess over getting perfect scores on the page. Testing tools is our mantra. Just use the site. Does it load fast? Is it good to use? And great. You're good. You're good to go. which is what we're gonna cover. How do you get there? Did you have something you wanted to add before we move on?

ARTHUR: Oh no, I was just counting to four in my head to see. Was it hard work? No, no, no. I was just thinking, no, because I am trying to figure out at what point would I say a site is slow?

MICHAEL: You want to see something, maybe a logo load, the hero banner and stuff, but like all of the other stuff doesn't, for me, I'm going to give it a few, depends how into it I am as well.

ARTHUR: One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three, I would probably be like,

MICHAEL: Wow. You're very impatient. Yeah. I get definitely give it four seconds. Okay. That's my motto in life.

ARTHUR: I'm not very good. That was lame. I'm going to, I'm going to actually time it and I'm going to play around with some sites later and see, just be more conscious about it to see and come back to you with what, I guess, how many seconds do I think is too long?

MICHAEL: Okay. Well, we will wait with bated breath until you come back to us on that, but let's move on. Let's chat. What you need to do to tick the page speed box, so to speak, we're going to do it through the lens of WordPress, which also includes WooCommerce for e-commerce people. And then Shopify is going to cover most of the web, the web. Yeah. Let's go WordPress. Take your benchmarks. That would be both platforms as well. Take your benchmarks. So although we've just sat there and said GT metrics and PageSpeed Insights, don't get obsessed with them. They are where you start. So we use GT metrics, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, webpagetest.org. Not so much anymore.

ARTHUR: Cause you get the waterfall view in GT metrics now. But back in the day, I would use it a lot.

MICHAEL: Yeah, but I would say use at least three of them, run your site through it, make sure you pick a server, a location where your actual users are, and just take down those scores.

ARTHUR: And I would go as far as to say, prioritize mobile over desktop. Yes, agreed. Obviously do both, but always focus on mobile because everything's mobile first these days.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So record those results in a spreadsheet, you know, the site, the date, the scores that matter. So screenshots. Yeah. If you're super keen, keep, keep the screenshots. Um, each tool has different metrics, but you're going to want to be recording things like, you know, time to fully loaded time to first bite, um, all that stuff, what it's actual score out of a hundred or ABCD, whatever it gives you. Uh, keep all of that there. because you can't improve what you don't measure. Right. We love that saying.

ARTHUR: I think the other thing is with these tools, they let you know what's slowing your site down as well. Yeah. So that's important. Yeah. Take a note of all that. And those will be ultimately the things you'll need to work on to push those scores up.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And a lot of the stuff we'll cover here is going to address pretty much the main things. Like some of those tools will start to give really complex recommendations or things that, you know, you've got to involve a developer and you're trying to figure out bang for buck. What we're going to give you here will probably address most of the key things that make your site load slow. And at the end, you're going to have a fast site. You're going to have a totally serviceable converting site that is fine from an SEO point of view. Exciting. Excited? Very. Let's chat hosting. I reckon this is your biggest bang for buck lever that you can pull.

ARTHUR: Definitely. I think any site that is slow, it's probably often down to the hosting. Yeah. Being on some sort of really cheap shared host plan where there's like 300 other sites all hosted on the same server, slowing everything down.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So normally it would be a business maybe early on. They might read an article, there's an affiliate link to Bluehost or something like that. And they just buy it, you know, cheap five bucks a month. Yeah, you're on shared cPanel host, it's going to be slow and you can't do much because it's a shared host, you can't do much in terms of modifications to the server or to even the code to improve that speed. So to try and speed it up, I've got a couple of things here, you know, in cPanel you can update PHP to the latest version. and turn on content compression, but you can't always do that even on a lot of these cheap hosts. Really a cheap host is a stepping stone to a good host. Definitely. If you're a real business, you want a good host.

ARTHUR: I agree. Yeah. A lot of people can be a bit stingy with the hosting as well, which I find funny because a good host doesn't cost the earth. It's, I don't know, maybe 20, $30 a month compared to five. Yeah. If you're a legitimate business, it's a very small price to pay for what is essentially like you're the face of your business.

MICHAEL: Let's come up with an analogy. It's like you have a brick and mortar store and then you put the door. Yeah. Or the cheapest lighting possible. Yeah. To save like, you've got like really crappy lights to save a little bit on the running costs. Yeah. But it looks terrible in there.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's not a very good analogy.

MICHAEL: I reckon that's come on. Give us, give us one better.

ARTHUR: Um, Oh, It's like getting a Ferrari and putting in the cheapest petrol and driving it very slowly. I don't know. Yeah. It's like putting E10 in your Ferrari. Yeah. So you've got your Ferrari, which is your website, you know, your pride and joy, and then the petrol is your hosting.

MICHAEL: Yep. Okay.

ARTHUR: Trying to decide. Probably not the best analogy, but yeah, that'll do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. One or the other. You get the point. Yeah. So we recommend using, so if you're on WordPress, so with, Shopify, you can't change your host. So forget it if you're on Shopify. With WordPress, we've always spoken about Kinsta on here. Another one, I'm just going to say another name, Flywheel or WP Engine perhaps. One of those WordPress focus hosts, they're going to be more expensive than five bucks a month, but the difference is going to be night and day alone. So if you go do your benchmark tests on, you know, those page speed tools and it's a bloody horror show, you'll probably find by migrating to a new host already, when you run those tests again, the impact will be massive. Yeah. And you might not need to go on and do the rest of this.

ARTHUR: It comes with all the bells and whistles and great support that you probably wouldn't be getting for four or $5 a month.

MICHAEL: Yep. Backups. Yep. Okay. Um, staging environments, all that stuff. So you can set your DNS to them through Amazon or very good and pretty cheap at the end of the day. CDN as well, so a lot of those hosts will have CDNs as part of them, so Kinsta has a CDN So that's a content delivery network and what that does is serve up files from a server closest to your user So if you're just a local service business, you don't need one But if you're an e-com business, maybe selling all across Australia, maybe you want like a CDN location in Perth, be a little bit quicker, probably not even totally necessary.

ARTHUR: Probably not in Australia. Yeah. Maybe if you have like New Zealand.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific. Yeah. Yep. Definitely. And yeah, so that's just going to serve the content from server very close to them much faster than if it serves from wherever your site is hosted. Cloudflare, if you don't use a host that has a CDN, Cloudflare you can use for free normally and then it costs not 20 bucks, something like that a month. MaxCDN is another one I've used in the past. They're all very similar at the end of the day. I would recommend picking out, if you're going to change hosts, just pick a host that has a CDN. If you need a CDN, you know, if you have traffic coming from all over the place. A big one is also going to be images. This is where I see people go wrong often. Oh man. Like a marketing manager will have a hero banner. That's eight megabytes. Crazy. So pretty easy to fix that. Get in the habit when you're using Photoshop and saving your images. Let's say you're saving JPEG. Instead of like 12 from the setting, bring it down to seven. Maybe that's going to make your file size drop from eight megabytes to 800 kilobytes.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And you won't notice any drop in quality a lot of the time, especially for the sizes that you're using for regular, like what it is a full HD image. When you're reducing it to that quality, you won't notice it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then again, down on a mobile device, when it's even smaller, what we find is a lot of people just don't give any consideration to that whatsoever. And that makes your site coming back to your point about mobile at the start. If someone's on like cell network, they're not on wifi on their mobile and they're having to download eight megabyte files. Oh, it's going to slow it down. Slow it down. Yeah. So getting the habit of a saving files as small as possible, And then B, if you're on WordPress, have a tool on there that compresses images automatically as you upload them to your media library. So we use short pixel, shortpixel.io. That's the address when I last checked it out.

ARTHUR: It's probably the same.

MICHAEL: I would hope so. They might've got .com, might've forked out for it. That would just sit there and do a lot of the compressing for you as the images go up.

ARTHUR: So you just upload it and then it will just compress it as you upload the files.

MICHAEL: Correct. So you don't have to think about it. So if you can't be bothered trying to compress the save file small, does it, does it change it from like a JPEG to a web P can do?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yeah. I don't like web P files.

MICHAEL: Well, I'll tell you what's annoying is when you try to download. That's it.

ARTHUR: That's the only reason I don't like them because it doesn't open up with any, like natively doesn't open up with any programs. I feel like more and more websites using web P because obviously they're trying to compress. Yes. So it's weird, isn't it? Yeah.

MICHAEL: But you can't even edit it. Yeah. Well you can, I find like often when you try to download from Google images, their web P files, you have to open the image in like a new tab and get to like the PNG version of it and save that.

ARTHUR: I just opened it in Photoshop and save it as a, or export it as a PNG. But it's weird. It's yeah. A very common file format that has like little support in the way of like editing.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yep. Be that as it may, you can use short pixel and other tools like it to apply that stuff server side. So a good flow would be to save your files as small as possible. Yeah. Then also have short pixel on the site and see if it gets a little bit more squeeze out of the file size.

ARTHUR: There's also tiny JPEG. And then what's Google's one? Squoosh? Smush? Smush or Squoosh, one of the two. Yeah. Where you upload your file, your image file, and then it will compress it. And you can select the quality, resize it, and it's got like a slider that you can kind of see the before and after.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I use tinypng.com where you just upload it and it compresses it and you download it and it tells you how much smaller it made it. You don't get to.

ARTHUR: Well, I guess with the Google one, you can see how the quality is reduced, but with tiny PNG from memory, you can upload like. 10 or more images at once and then download it as a zip file. So it was really handy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. For those manual quick like compress. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Quick compress. Like if someone doesn't want to or doesn't know plugins or wants to just upload the lowest. file size they can, it's a great way to do it. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Let's say you get sent a image by your designer and it's massive. Chuck it in there. Sometimes it'll save like 80%, 90%.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Like I've done images that have gone from like two or three megabytes all the way down to like 150 kilobytes or 200. Yeah. And then if you go one step further and then use an optimization tool, like the ones you were talking about, it could even reduce it even more. Yep.

MICHAEL: And I would say right there, so your fast host and short pixel use and keeping the images small. That is, if you did nothing else, your site's probably going to be faster than others in your space and tick the boxes that you need to.

ARTHUR: Yeah, those are the main things really that slur.

MICHAEL: Caching is another thing, I guess, which again, you use something like Kinsta. I've got a cache. They have it built in. If you don't use Kinsta, we'll see other like I'm sure Flywheel has one, WP Engine definitely does. Yeah. You use those WordPress focus hosts, caching is done. Yeah.

ARTHUR: So really, that's all you need a lot of the time.

MICHAEL: Right there is all you need. Yeah. 100%. And then don't go installing like when you're on those hosts, things like W3 Total Cache or Rocket Cache, WP Rocket. WP Rocket. Yeah. You don't need that stuff when you're using a WordPress host that's all set up for it. Because it'll conflict. Yeah. A lot of the time and can cause problems. Yeah. And I would say you're going to be, that right there is need for speed is addressed. Isn't it? Should we stop or should we keep going? Well, I had a couple of things. I had a couple of things on WordPress. I was joking. I know, I know. But, um, a couple of plugins that we always use. The first one is called perf matters, P E R F matters or one word. It gets rid of things like emojis in the backend of WordPress, disables the password strength counter, which can slow the site down, disables Google Maps API. So a lot of themes will have that built in by default. Even if you're not using Google Maps, it's sort of connected and slowing the site down. It can just, there's a whole bunch of like little hacky nerdy things. A lot of them might not even necessarily always understand what they are. So for example, what's one here? Disabling XMLRPC, disabling queries. Yep, Heartbeat API. So Heartbeat is WordPress using constant calls all the time that slow your site down, server requests. So disabling that, and it makes no impact to your site or the way you use it in the vast majority of cases, and it will help you speed things up. So check that out. What I would say when you're playing around with tools like that is do it on staging. Well, yeah, make a backup. Yeah, don't do it on your live site, make a backup before you go willy-nilly applying it and just turning off these things and seeing what it does to your site. The other one on the list here is auto-optimize. So it's a bit of a tricky one, that word. A-U-T, auto-optimize. Auto-optimize. Auto-optimize. Auto-optimize with a Z. So it basically gets all of your JavaScript and CSS Combines it like minifies it so it removes spaces from it all and I just jam packs it So it looks like a big ball of code that you can't read Then compresses those file sizes. So all your JavaScript is in one file or your CSS is in another and Minified compressed so that it loads quicker. It will also defer stuff to load later on the page so these are types of recommendations that a lot of these page tools like GT Metrics will say yeah defer JavaScript load time. You're like well how the hell do I do that? Well you use Autoptimize. You don't even need to use a developer to do all this. It will lazy load images. That's another thing that these tools will recommend. So that's where like, as you scroll, the images load rather than all of the images loading as soon as you land on the page. Speeds up load time. This plugin does that for you without you having to lift a finger. Maybe you do have to lift a finger. You got to click the mouse a little bit.

ARTHUR: So there is finger lifting, but not much. I think as well, like with the previous point, do it on staging and have a backup because sometimes these tools can, if you're starting to do things like minifying JavaScript and CSS, it can break stuff. A hundred percent. So I've done it in the past where I've installed a plugin similar to this or might have even been this plugin. ran it and then the site broke. Yeah. And I was scrambling to get a developer to fix it. Yeah. Cause it's easy to click a button. Very hard to undo sometimes.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So we have preached the mantra of using staging and backups many, many, many times on this show. That's another reason why you should really, they're the things that I wanted to go. Anything else you wanted to cover on the WordPress side of things?

ARTHUR: No.

ARTHUR: Cool. I think, no, I'm, I'm looking at the list again, refreshing my memory.

MICHAEL: Look, that's, that's like, unless for, I would say for 95, 99% of cases.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: This is plenty, plenty. You should be getting good scores with this. And this is like a day's work at most. Really? Yeah, really. So the last step would of course be to go back to your PageSpeed Insights, GT metrics and the like, run those tests again, see how you've improved. Yep.

ARTHUR: And tick it off your list and move on. Yep. And if the score doesn't improve that much, your site still loads quickly, don't stress.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Don't pause everything and hire an army of developers to make your site load fast because it's already loaded fast. With Shopify, So because they do the hosting and CDN and caching and all that stuff, you don't have control over it. You're sort of, you're locked into their little ecosystem. So the things that you can do on Shopify, of course, compressing images. They have different versions of ShortPixels. Yeah, so they have CrushPix or ImageOptimizer. Believe you probably, you'd have to pay for them. You have to pay for ShortPixels as well. You have to pay for everything on Shopify.

ARTHUR: Every plugin is like a cost.

MICHAEL: Yeah, a subscription. Yes. The ultimate subscription ecosystem in there. Basically, yeah. But, you know, if you are uploading a lot of images, product images all the time, it's probably good just to have it there because more so than like on a lead gen site, an e-com site, if it's faster loading has a direct correlation to more revenue. Definitely, yeah. Have one of them in or again, save your files small, use tiny PNG before uploading. You should also add all your tracking code using GTM. So just the one GTM call and all your code tracking codes in GTM. The other note I had here, what do you think about this one? Using sliders?

ARTHUR: Yeah. Um, it probably doesn't bother me as much as it bothers you.

MICHAEL: Um, so for, for people listening sliders, like a hero banner image slider. Yeah. I said, don't use them.

ARTHUR: I think, I think I understand why e-com sites like using it. If they have specific product ranges or things that they want to push, they want to front and center on the homepage. They'll use a slider. Yes. I'm very much against videos, but. Sliders I can deal with on an e-com site. I agree there's certain sites that shouldn't use sliders, but if you're trying to promote or push certain things, if you've got sales.

MICHAEL: But my argument is, your site loads, the first slide loads, people see that. If they're a bit slow to scroll, they might see the second one, but they don't sit there watching every slide.

ARTHUR: You know what, like I'll use maybe JB Hi-Fi as an example. Sometimes I'll go on there on the homepage that they've got a slider, obviously. And- Do they have one? I believe so, yeah. I hope. No, they do. So they've got like 20% of computing gaming computers and it changes every two to three seconds. But sometimes if I'm looking for a specific product, it will slide through and I'll notice something. And they often have deals sometimes that interests me. So like going a bit off topic here, but like they'll have 500 to $600 off when you sign up to a Telstra plan, which reduces the price of a phone. And then I start looking at phones and then that's how I eventually ended up getting my Samsung phone was because I saw it on the slider. So in this case, I don't necessarily think it's bad. Do you not agree?

MICHAEL: I do not agree. My argument, is most people just sort of come in, move around, look for what they're looking for. And I see some sites that will have like six slides there. They've got six. Yeah, there you go. Huge images. Yeah. So as we were talking, I just jumped on the iconic, no slider. Footlocker, no slider. Harvey Norman, have a slider, but with two things in it. What I see often is- Go to JB Hi-Fi.

ARTHUR: All right, I'm going to get a JB Hi-Fi. They're on Shopify, so.

MICHAEL: My argument is the images and maybe JB do a better job of it. I would never sit here and scroll through this slider personally.

ARTHUR: I'm not scrolling through it, but like they've obviously put some thought as to what they want to promote. Yes. Whatever they want to promote the most is the first slide, second slide.

MICHAEL: 20% off is the first. Yeah. That's a good see what the, what the iconic have is like a new arrivals section. Yeah. Click into that and they have a safe day. So they have tiles on the page. Yeah. I find that's better. And then Footlocker have a big hero banner and then they have tiles that they call out because that you can see sliders is counting on the person sitting there. This is not so much a speed thing, but it's a conversion thing in my opinion, that sitting there and either engaging with the slide to make it move, to check things out, or happening to just sit there and watch it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. In their defence, it's probably like three seconds between slides.

MICHAEL: Hey, you were saying three seconds, you're bouncing off a site. I said four. Yep. I said four. Oh, okay. So they've got it finely tuned. Yeah. This one's quite quick.

ARTHUR: It's quite quick and it's quite small. It doesn't take up a lot of screen real estate. And I don't think the image sizes would be a problem. I don't think it would slow it down too much. But I do agree with you that most sites probably don't need it. No, they don't. And they probably definitely don't need one that takes up the whole screen.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And like with three megabyte images in it. Yeah.

ARTHUR: All right.

MICHAEL: Weren't expecting that, were you? Yeah. I thought you'd be team anti-slider all the way.

ARTHUR: I am team anti-slider. No, you're not. I understand the purpose of it on e-com sites. Right. Okay.

MICHAEL: Right. The last little things we had on Shopify. Theme. With your theme, you can disable features you don't use. Some themes have useless things like sliders, you know, you can disable them. Controversial. They have fonts as well. So if you're using fonts, maybe use system fonts. So the fonts that are installed on most computers by default, other types of fonts, you have to call externally like Google fonts, download them, that can slow things down. So pick a lightweight theme that's not got lots of bloat junk built into it. And then with those apps, so we spoke about CrushPix or ImageOptimizer before, there's plenty of other apps you can use for all sorts of different things on Shopify. Just trying to keep a lid on how many of them you use, limit them as much as possible. And then also limit third-party JavaScript calls. So let's say there's a tool FOMO, where it shows you recent sales and it has to make an external call to load that all the time. Having all sorts of stuff like that on your site can slow it down big time. That's really all we, you know, on the Shopify, there's only so much you can do because it's a wall ecosystem. And it's fine. And it's fine. So it's, it's on you and your practices. Basically. Yeah. Keeping your images small, getting rid of sliders and reducing the number of apps you use. The other thing is there's a plugin I haven't used, but Arthur's used called booster. Yes. Page speed optimizer. Yeah. That supposedly speeds up a Shopify site. I believe it does it by prefetching. So by prefetching, I mean, when you load a page, it will figure out what the next page is that people most likely click through or most often click through to, and it will load that page in the background so that when the user inevitably clicks to go to it, it loads really quickly because it's already preloaded at all. It might do other stuff, but that's something that might be worth trying. It has quite good reviews. Arthur has used it on a site and he said it was quicker. I don't know that it was very scientific testing that you did, but.

ARTHUR: Oh, look, it was a while back. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. It did. I remember, I can't remember if it was this tool exactly. I'm pretty sure it was Booster. Yeah. And it did improve the page load speeds. Yeah. But I'm trying to think that how would So if you're running this tool and you're trying to use like GT metrics or whatever page speed insights, that's not going to improve your scores because if the whole concept of this is that preloads pages that it assumes someone might go to their initial page is still going to load slowly in the, like in the tool, right? Yeah. So really it's, it's improving the paid speed, but not the score.

MICHAEL: Yep. Um, I guess coming back to the start, like we don't necessarily, don't get too fixated on those page speed scores. If this tool makes a site load quicker, it's not cheap for people. Does it have a cost? I was wondering where the costs were.

ARTHUR: I don't think this is the tool I used. If I'm on one, this isn't free. This isn't free. Are you looking at booster, booster theme.com?

MICHAEL: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You got to go to the Shopify app store. Right. Booster page speed optimizer. Oh. So the way it's prefetching the pages is if you mouse over a page in the menu, it starts preloading that page automatically. Right. It says if you tap it on mobile, it preloads it, but that's bloody clicking a link. And it's free. Allegedly. I'm sure there'll be upsells or something going on with it. That's rare.

ARTHUR: Considering everything is a subscription on Shopify.

MICHAEL: This won't be free.

ARTHUR: And it's super useful and it looks like it's really good. So.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's probably free to get started and then you get up to unlock everything, but it's worth again, testing with your site, see how it goes. Yes. And it will help the actual speed experience for your end user, which is what really matters. Not so much those nice green scores in the page speed tools. But this is pretty much all we had on the topic of speed optimization. This is going to be the most bang for your buck for the vast majority of websites out there. So spend a little bit of time on your staging environment, having a play around with this stuff and until next week, happy SEOing. Happy SEOing.

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