This week, Clint discusses the results for the test on How many Images o page best helps with ranking. While we only have one test for this week as we are waiting for the results to settle for a couple of our tests, this week’s webinar is still chock-full of content as Clint talks about Page Speed Optimization. Clint has been doing Page Speed Optimization for quite some time. In fact, he’s one of the first providers of the service.
In this webinar, he talks about his insights on Page Speed Optimization, his thoughts on what to use and not to use, and things to look out for. This is a must watch.
December 6, 2020 Weekly Dossier
Transcription Below:
I'm starting 23 minutes late because GoToWebinar won't jacked up and I appreciate those of you that stuck around and were patient with it. So, to get around the time and be useful of your time I'm going to fly through this. I had this open before and I had to close the old thing because GoToWebinar... But we're going to go through and try to not be as flustered as I feel right now.
First, the SIA test request. Some of the requests that have come in so far again with the GMBs. I think that's where we last left off last week.
Here's another one.
When I cite sources for an article – so, when you're writing an article any cite sources? Where are the best places to do it and can we test that?
That's actually a good idea. I know that we've done or have seen some evidence that wikipedia it was actually hurting but I guess it would be a pretty good idea that balance --where do we find our sources and are they going to work for inbound and outbound links? The problem becomes the sources that you're citing ie they're going to be with different power, different authority and all that stuff.
I think this will end up being more of a real-world test than a scientific single variable or even all in ~ leader board just so that I can teach you guys that process of where should you find your resources. Then, what writing format should you use because different disciplines require different writing formats.
Does AdWords help with rankings?
I think we've done that test before. I'll look and review it but I remember that conversation and I think we've had that. A lot of people have that conversation over and over again.
Does it make a difference to have the page open in a new tab or keep it on the same page?
That's good. To me, that sounds like a question versus a test but it also has an opportunity for a test. So, I think what you might be testing there is bounce rate and Google. So, the bounce rate would be a lot lower because you're keeping your pages open by opening them up in your other links and the two other pages. So, that'll be an interesting test.
Now, this one is testing the different types of link versus where they are: footer, blogroll, menu, etc. Comments and forms, etc.
If you're testing the quality of the links you're also testing the quality of the sites that you put those links on. So, how do you measure that quantifiably? Let's say a footer link, a site wide footer link. Ted's run a lot of those and they're ranking his site but the sites he putting it on might be of decent quality or less quality than what I would do. The same goes with the blog rolls, text menu, comments forms is it's a little harder to measure where I should and shouldn't get backlinks from.
Then, you're playing with pagerank or like in the example here: da, pa, TrustFlow or domain rank regardless of the metrics you want, right? So, that'll be a little help I think that this is from the estonian. I guess that's his name. If you write that out a little bit better and try to articulate a little bit better what you're looking for or what you would like to test or if you want to run that test yourself that'll be awesome.
Now, let's see.
How many links are going out from the page you have a backlink from?
The short link power. That would be a good test too like in 1 versus a 100 versus 180. If you look for a WordPress install and all the mess. It's got an error then you can get up in the 200s is that affecting? Which ones count, which ones don't know? That would be an interesting test. So, I'll add that to ryan's list and see if they have an idea of how to implement and check that out.
Let me break out the questions here so I can see those a little bit better. So, those are the new tests so far. Again, if you would like to see a test or something retested – even if you're looking through the SIA website and you find a particular test you think it should be retested put it in this form so we know what is what and then we'll workout. As Dori said, they've tested the location of the backlink. So, footer versus in content and etc. and that one was a contextual one.
I think, for these requests which to me it sounds really good you just have to work out how you are going to – what is the judge, what are the variables that you're going to use to say this is the quality of this link versus the quality of that site? Another variable you're looking forward... Let's say we use da. Does Google going to look at just because both sites have a da, does Google consider those the same level of backlink or the same level of site for that manner?
That's a big unknown that I don't know that we could test. If there is a method or a way to test that it might be beyond me but we'll certainly bang that around in our heads and see what goes on.
The next one is the Q&A forms. I told you guys every week I will hit this qa and I will go through and we'll answer all the questions and we'll clear it out. No one's taking advantage of it this week. Don't leave opportunities to ask questions. Don't allow them to go unanswered so ask him in here. Obviously, you have a slack group to ask key questions as well.
You can get more almost real-time stuff but this allows for a more thought-out opportunity and thought-out question and maybe even the chance for me to bust out the whiteboard or open some websites and stuff and knock that out.
Tests, we only have one. There's two more tests that are like done but we're waiting for the testers and then the group and the Ryan's team are all waiting for that to settle down a little bit. Unless we would have three but one is good.
This is a test 381 is how many images on a page boost or help the ranking? The idea behind this is none of the images are optimized. You'll just put on the page. The file name is there obviously but the rest of that stuff is all wiped out. The pages aren't optimized for keywords or they're all optimized for the same thing. 10 different pages, 990 words each and then they just have a different amount of images on each page.
The test setup, in case you want to try this yourself as simple as 1 through 10. You can probably go a lot farther if you wanted to but 1 through 10 seems like a good number to me. Then, this is the example. They just put it in between the paragraphs. Put the images in between the paragraphs and then you let it sit and see what happens.
At the beginning of the test you can see it shuffled around. It's 2, 6, 4, 10, 7 and then all of a sudden it dropped number 8. Kicked in, it dropped out and then it came right back again. For the purposes of this test the 8 is a good factor for images or is a good image count.
Here's a couple questions that this could bring in to you. First is you can implement this by just putting 8 images on there or I would probably recommend duplicating the exact test setup that they have here and then start implementing optimizations for the images. So, keyword specific file names, keyword specific exif data, etc. In there and duplicate it and see if you get the same result. If all of them are all optimized for the keyword and then is that 8 still the numbers?
Now we might be onto something here and then that'd be worthwhile to put 8 images into your pieces of content or look at that as it as a thing.
Another build off of this test that we can look at too is is it images in the content or is it images total on the website? If the website is a blank WordPress install, for example, and the page is not the only image would probably be on a testing site would be what maybe some background or something like that. So, that could technically be one image and now we have 9 versus 8. So, look at that too.
If I put images or a slider or something like that do those count in this number two? There's definitely some build-off you can do on this test. I think if you're doing some link building and stuff there's probably safe bet to just go with 8 and you can optimize those and use 8 images off of your target site and do some image backlink building if you want to or set some exifs stuff and hope that the platforms that you're posting on don't strip the exif data. I will tell you that most people – most sites strip the exif data unless you're specifically sharing photos like flickr or something like that. Those sites strip the exif data.
Again, this test is a cool test because it gives us a starting point to open up some other test ideas for sure. Right off the bat there I spotted three so I'm sure you guys can come up with some more and what this means and how we can implement it better especially since image SEO is a big thing.
Jesper pointed out is in Firefox she can inspect how many images are on a given page. You probably can use tools or you can use the inspects function or whatever. So, again, I bet this test was a great idea. It's a great setup and it opens an opportunity for you. There's 4 or 5 more tests out of this one alone just as I sit here so check this out, look at it, duplicate it and then start tinkering with it.
As Dori pointed out, the 990 words with 8 images makes it 8% density for images which is a good formula to use when you're building your tests. To me, because I'm a simple guy, I would just duplicate exactly what they did. I put 990 words on there and start messing around with these.
Here's another example. 990 words I got 8 images and I only optimize one for the keyword. Will that still win? So, 7 unoptimized images and 1 optimized image. Will that win or play with the numbers? Does one optimized image work better than 8 unoptimized images. Check that out and you can play around with those bounces and find that magic number. It'll take a little bit of time to pull it off.
Again, this one was run over months I think hunter said and is right up. So, after months of watching. This is definitely a long-term play but probably some worthwhile to check out.
Jesper pointed out something here is it's very cool. It seems strange at 8 images is number one but one image is number 4 and that's not a big difference. I wonder how strong the rankings ~ for the image number is. I think if you look at this it's 8, 6, 9. So, 9 maybe too much. 10, it started... It went... This one started number one, right?
Now, it's all the way down to number one. It's already down to the bottom then it moves around here. You see 10, 7, 1. It's really hard to look at these and say, "Hey, is there a too many? Is there not enough?", and if it is an image count issue why is 8 here, 9 here and 10s here. You think they would be clustered a little bit closer together. It would be almost cooler to wait and see if this washes out somewhere. It goes 8, 10, 9, 7 and then backwards.
That would be cool to see but there's no discernible pattern as to volume. Again, that's why we do testing though so it opens up all these more other questions for us and it expands us in our mind and our thought process and are we wasting our time. So, that would be cool to see.
As I've said, we only have the one test. Our goal is...and Dori, she's like, "Are you crazy?" but our goal would be... In a perfect world we have the 5 to 8, leaning more towards the 5 for each week but we're not going to rush the quality of the testing to meet the number of the testing. Sometimes you're just going to have one.
With that being said, since I'm on a page speed optimization kick I wanted to give you my insights on a page speed optimization, give you some thoughts about what to use and what not to use and some things to look out for, etc.
One thing I will tell you is I've done page speed optimization for quite some time. I was one of the first providers of a service that did this for people. I started promoting that in the local client, take over that Facebook group under the "My Hourly Geek" brand name which I was partnered with Mark on that for a while. Since I started that up until now myself and my team we've optimized well over a thousand pages or a thousand websites. Well over.
I'm coming to you not from a I'm not hating on a tool or I'm not endorsing tools. I'm coming to you from an experience of someone who's seen a thousand websites, thousand different setups, thousand different hosting things and these are all the patterns that I can now allow us to take a person's website, be able to open it up, figure out what host it is and know what tools and which buttons to push to optimize it and make it a lot faster.
With that I'm going to start off by saying this is Google's page speed insights. This should be as close as you get to ever use it this thing. It is a dog turd. They've updated it and they've added it and they renamed it and they're using the lighthouse now and make you feel special about it but a turd is a turd. You still polish a turd it still is going to be a turd and that's the way I feel about this.
This testing tool. It doesn't allow you to...
1) Google has it set up and then it blasts you and downgrades your website if you're using Google properties. So, what should that tell me as a Google person? First is if my own testing tool is telling me that my own stuff is jacked up I should probably fix my own stuff before I tell other people to fix theirs. So there's that one.
2)You can't optimize or change your locations. So, Dori's in California, Carolyn's in austin, I'm in yuma Arizona and we are all going to get different test results because of proximity to the server. Dori will get different testing results from California than Carolyn will. If my server sitting in ~ because of distance and this testing tool doesn't take that into account. Nobody knows where this server is or are they using all their servers. They don't identify which data center that they're running your particular test item.
You're basing that on one of probably the biggest unknowns that should be known, which is the proximity to your target audience. So, if I am targeting everyone in Arizona I should not be using a testing server in virginia. I should find what is significantly closer.
For most services that's going to be la or somewhere in dallas. It's a little bit closer, right? Or I'll show you one where you can actually move it to your own server and test from your own locations which is even cooler. So, at the end of the day don't use this.
There is lightspeed. A lot of people when I tell them don't use this they tell me, "oh, lighthouse?" I'm sorry, that's what it is called. You go in here and you can turn on LightHouse and do these audits thing and you can see significantly better but again you're looking at... The location is just you, your location, and you can throttle it for these or you can not. So, desktop versus mobile and then when you optimize your website based off of those numbers that you see in the browser you're optimizing it for yourself.
How can you mess with that a little bit? Put proxies in your browser with different locations and such like that. But still, it's still pulling towards you that distance, the physical distance you can't fake. You have to have a server. If you're testing for la you have to have a server in la. I can't get an la proxy. You can fake that around a little bit but it is what it is.
So, the quality of the tool might be bad, might be just fine but because you're optimizing for fake numbers I think you're just wasting your time. There's better stuff out there.
Pingdom is another one. This one I used to use all the time and then they started removing some of the servers and get it a lot of resources. It can be a pain but you're stuck with east or west coast in the us, london and these two are new. This one is new. Australia was always there and south paulo's new.
The difference between this tool is the number you get is what your user see which is not a bad number to be optimizing by because you're determining how fast or how well people can interact with your website and that's what this number shows you. So, this one is a good one but not one that I would depend on unless I'm just trying to show it off for the user and be done with it being quick test because it's a real simple result.
GTMetrics. I liked GTMetrics. It has the waterfalls you can play with the advanced and stuff especially after you login you can change a lot of the information in here. Let me do that. I have an account here. You can change a lot of this stuff. So, there's dallas, hong kong china, dubai. You can click around in here and you do that but you see you're limited to the locations. Different browsers, it's ok. Then, you can throw it out based off of these suppose the device you want to do.
Typically, I do LTE or 4G when I'm looking at mobile. I don't do 3G because if they can't afford another phone they're probably not my target market anyway or a more ~ but just my own personal bias. You can create videos. You can do this adblock stuff if you want to. Then, there's some more stuff in there for developers and if you want to you can mess around with the IP advanced features and stuff. Not too bad.
My biggest gripe for this and why I tell people not to use this one is because the speed that you end up with at the end of the day... If any of you guys use it I'm not going to rant it because it take some time. But if any of you use this you get a score and then it tells you what your final page speed is. Typically, for most people, it's going to be pretty high because that is the full load time of your page versus the partial of the time. I want to run this one just because I can show all these things that we're talking about.
You really want to worry about time to first byte, start to render and then full load time and then the number of resources. Those are what gets you where you're going. That information is in here but if you get your clients hooked on this and you're always reporting this and they're only looking at that full load time but you know that start render and all that other stuff is all kicked in that is a big deal and it can cause a headache for you.
Again, if you're a developer, you understand the number you're looking at is not the actual number that is the page is useful, it doesn't affect SEO and it doesn't affect users and you're just trying to do some more tweaks and stuff then go for it – GTMetrics. But for the most part I would pass on this one too. Especially, if you're talking about clients and clients reporting.
His is the one I like and it's a webpagetest.org. I'm going to open another page here just so you can look at the home page. The benefit I like is 1) those are all the servers. All these servers have this here. You can get as close as you want for the most part to pretty much any client. If we're doing national we always use texas and then we can move around and play with it if we want to. Another cool thing is this testing tool is open source.
There's a book on Amazon about how to use this. How do you use the entire thing and then how to pull the source code off of github and put it on your own server. So, if you're in Arizona like I am or California like Dori you can buy another server or put it on your normal server if you want to and run that... And you're only working with Arizona clients or California clients or wherever and then I could put that up have an Arizona server in phoenix because it's pretty central state and then all my clients I can just test off of that.
If my clients are only running and searching for Arizona customers why do I care if the site is slow for someone in Maryland or Virginia or down in Florida. I don't care because my client base is inside of Arizona and that's the beauty of it. Especially with local and particularly with local because the relevance Google's not showing Florida businesses inside Arizona, right?
Well, if they are there's probably or something wrong with competition and stuff like that but Google's not showing Florida businesses. They're showing Arizona businesses. So, if you are the fastest Arizona business when compared all things, other things being equal you'll win that battle. That is the the number one reason I love this so much because I can pretty much optimized for anywhere. I get clients from Europe, I get clients from Australia, etc. And I can test that out.
Melbourne's missing on here. They deleted the Melbourne server. I put just Sydney but I think they're having some host issues and internet accessibility issues and stuff there to try to let everyone be on the internet for free and slowed everyone down or some craziness like that. I'm not sure that whole madness but for the most part you could pretty much test for anywhere and see what is going on with the website.
On top of that, all different types of browsers. So, browse Opera, Chrome if you're looking through your analytics and everyone's using firefox. How fast am I on firefox because I want to know that. Then, you can play around with connections more. Cable versus DSL. Again, I use 4G or LTE for my mobile. I'm not really messing around with 3G as on average. Again, target market. I know my audience. Somebody who can or who is choosing to use a 3G connection, for example, maybe financially they just can't do it.
I'm leveraging that if you can't afford a faster phone you can't afford to pay me $10,000 a month to do your SEO. I have to make some assumptions. Could be ignorant. Maybe the person just wants to use a flip phone whatever but I have to make some adjustment or assumptions when I'm deciding what I'm going to test on and 4G and LTE is the average right now so that's why I stick with those.
Then, I use cable all the time for desktop. It just works out and it's good. DSL, I think – I'm not sure how many people are using DSL. I've always been connected to cable so that's least of my preference.
Then, you leave this turned on: first view and repeat view. If you don't know the difference just go to a website for the first time that's the first view. Your browser now pulls in all the browser cache data, all the cache data out the servers etc and then the repeat view is the one that ends up faster. So you want to make sure both those processes are working and that your cache is working and you do that by using that and testing that – repeat view and here's what you end up with.
Again, here's the repeat view. The server's responding. My cache is working, is a little bit faster. It's not significant but it's a little bit faster and you can see that everything is broken down in the results here. I only had it set to one test. You can change this and run three and compare them one against the other and if you want to again first view, repeat view and then it'll pop and there's a little bit more as you want.
I always worry about first bite. I want to make sure the first bite is always below one second. Start render, I always want that below Google standard of three seconds. Typically, I'm shooting for under two seconds especially for our services just a social value but at ~ 1.5, i.think. You really just nitpicking at that point and you can see the difference here fully loaded my website is fully visible and fully usable but not fully loaded in 7 seconds.
So, under the ~ complete 117 requests in 7 seconds. Google's not using that. This is pretty much normal across the bow. To get anything less... So, a less fully loaded time, a less request is taking off features, taking off slider, is taking off images, taking off all those conversion elements that you think you're pretty and stuff you eliminate all those and that's how you reduce that that right there but you're also sacrificing things. All those conversion elements that I'm talking about them. The grade ~ just nice and handy to have as a...i look at it as is it an a, is it an f?
The rest of it I really don't care. Then, you can mess around and click inside of here and play with these waterfalls and stuff. If you're a developer knock yourself out. If you're not then you really don't need this or you can... Typically, what I like to look for is stuff that's like if this one was shot away across and solid I would look at and see why is that messed up. In this case, this is a CloudFlare thing.
So, definitely play with this tool. You can learn a lot. Again, there is a book. It's really simple. It's not technical. They tell you how to use this tool and step up your game with page speed optimization and page speed monitoring. And that's webpagetest.org.
So many plugins that we found, that we use or have used on sites and client sites and the optimization one is autoptimize. This one's pretty simple. A lot of people pass this around for... If you're looking for something really fast and you don't want to break a lot of things this is good because there's literally like 4 or 5 buttons. You activate it, click some checkboxes and then let it handle it by itself.
The minification on here is pretty good. Some of my developers like using this in conjunction with WP Rocket and using just a minimization features of autoptimize with WP Rocket. I don't like doing that. I'm don't like adding two different plugins to do the same thing and then I don't find... To me I don't find that the difference in speed improvements to be worthwhile to add another plugin. But it's still doing good and it's always maintained so this is a good option.
This one pretty much all sites do really well with Breeze. This one is designed for ease and simplicity. You install it. There's 4 or 5 checkbox on one screen and then the next tab there's two more you check. I turn it on and then it just works. This one was pretty good as well. There are a few little quirks and stuff to it. It will break sites. The minification will break sites and stuff and if it does and you can't use Breeze because you're missing out on the ability to optimize profile which most people won't do anyway but you will end up finding.
If it breaks, then you have to turn off minification. But for the most part this one do it really well for pretty much everyone. This is our go-to and it's really just a matter of knowing which boxes to click and run.
This one is Swift Performance. It's one of the newer paid version or paid plugins in the page speed optimization game. We put this on sites. I like it. It's just a little bit of getting used to it and stuff. That was the bear for us and it's paid. So, we can't use this on...
Like here. I can get the developer we can get paying for the developer and put that on everyone sites but if we do that and we close it, let's say we stop paying for the regular updates then the people who paid us won't get the access to the updates anymore. That's something that we don't.. We don't want to force our clients into that. But this works out as a good tool if you want to play with stuff.
Apples to oranges, WP Rocket I found better. Got better performance than Swift Performance but that's since I've used it last time. I'm not sure when the last updates they put out on it. That's been my experience.
And as I've said, this is probably my favorite all in one plug-in right here is WP Rocket. If you're on siteground, liquidweb or those host WP Rocket works perfect. You click on most of the default stuff and you can knock it out pretty much on any website you'll be all set. One caveat is don't turn on the built-in CloudFlare functionality and don't add the CloudFlare plugins to your website.
It just slows down websites and that's not a just a WP Rocket thing. That's all CloudFlare integrations. Don't turn them on. They just slow down websites. I don't know why. It's just what they do so if we're going to use CloudFlare make sure that you optimize it inside of the CloudFlare dashboard and that's pretty easy as well.
This one comes with page letting, pre-caching, cache pre-loading, etc. This is really handy. I use that, in particular cache pre loading in conjunction with another plug-in and I'll show it to you. It's called Flying Pages. I have only told this now to you guys and I've told my mastermind about Flying Pages.
You're going to be a step apart. It is a free plugin right now and what this does is it takes advantage of prefetch and pre-render. The downside is if you code it in yourself prefetch and pre-render it does all of those pages that are linked from your page.
This works out of hover. I don't know if you can see my mouse but if I hover over his name and assuming that that plugin was on now it's downloading that page into my browser. So, when I click on it it is instantaneous or pretty darn near instantaneous. I think I'm logged into my website. Let me try incognito. You see how fast the site is.
I'm going to click through here just to get over it and then I'll hover over this. Now, a fine page is doing is in the background. It's just saying, "oh, you might be interested in that link, right? And I'm going to go back up and read it and then I open a page up and look, it's almost instantaneous. Everything that I could have downloaded outside of a script it did.
Most of that stuff was on my website but again you saw the video popping all that and then now it's in the cache. So, it's the same result. So, that's what Flying Pages does. Hover over it, give it a little bit and boom! Instant. All that other stuff you saw there that was all instant. So, as a user now you're getting around my website a lot faster and that's one of the values of Flying Pages.
You can see how the caching is working and everything's going. The user experience here is really good and that's what's going to boost my SEO stuff up.
Because it's so hard to say it's time to first byte testing I think we've tested that Dori. You can remind me if I'm wrong but we've tested time to first byte. We've tested the start render. We've tested some other stuff and it's a little inclusive. We know that page speed is a factor but is it really that much when compared to...
If you have a slow website you drop all the usability factors. Is the usability and the engagement click-through, all those numbers that are all affected because of your website is slows is that more...? This is really cool since we found this and this guy developed it. His website here: wpspeedmatters.com and he developed this when he came up with it.
He's got another one called flying images that does lazy loading of images as well if you don't like the way WP Rocket or some of the other ones are handling lazy loading check that one out as well. It's really cool.
Don't tell anyone about this one. Flying Pages is awesome. He's not selling it so I'm not hurting his pocketbook. So, keep this one on under wraps. This is what sets us apart from other page speed services. No one else is using this plug-in. I'm sure that most people don't even know about it. Check it out.
This one is my favorite and pretty much everyone else hates it and the reason is it is so technical. Every option, ~, widgets requires a checkbox, a dial window etc. However, if you learn how to do W3 Total Cache you can kill all those other plugins that that I showed you, with exception of Flying Pages. I think one day maybe they'll put prefetch, pre-render into W3 Total Cache but for the most part all those other ones you won't need and you can beat. I can be on any host I can beat the page speed optimization from any host regardless of the plug-in you use with my settings from W3 Total Cache.
However, that came with a lot of experience, a lot of breaking websites, etc. To get to that level. That's the downside of W3 Total Cache. It requires you to know, thinking in a developer perspective what those buttons and widgets are going to do. This is by far my favorite but it's also by far the hardest. Most people hate it because as soon as you turn on a minification that breaks everything because it's not like a friendly minification like the other paid program options that I showed you.
It goes full minification and it breaks pretty much everything. So, you gotta be prepared for that. They have systems in place to figure out what to minify, what not and etc. But once you get that down and you're doing really good with it I think you'll be very happy and very proud of yourself that you can do this and setup W3 Total Cache. So, at a minimum, learn this so you learn all the functions of page speed optimization and some things to go around through it and knock that out.
Now, when I talk about a host I'm going to show you the two that I recommend. I am pretty much always been steady with recommending WPX hosting. What it is is they have setups on the cloud like Amazon, etc. And they've optimized their settings further for WordPress. It's really good if you have a smaller website, etc. Definitely something that you should check out for...
Again, if you have smaller websites you're not going to push a bunch in a lot of traffic to and you just want a nice, simple, cheap host WPX hosting you can't go wrong. One downside I have with this and I'm sure and I've heard they've changed that model but they used to go into your website, into the backend and change your settings and do all that stuff trying to be helpful and that pissed me off to no end and I canceled my account immediately. But I've been told by people who sign that they no longer do that.
I have my own dedicated server now so I don't need to go back to that. I can host thousands of websites on my server and I'm not too worried about but this is still a good option and their support is live. Break something there's somebody live there and find it and help you fix it.
Same with Liquid Web. I use a dedicated host server here. It cost me a lot. Not showing off but it does, to be honest. It cost me a lot. I got a three hundred and something dollars server over here. To me, I'm not only paying for the server and the speed. You see my site responds really well.
This is the one I got but ~ in Arizona. The site moves really fast. The server moves really fast. All the stuff at the backend is flying and really fast and the chat support is phenomenal. In the last week, I've used this thing like three times a day and they're always there, they're always going to answer your questions and it's really really good support. And it's not, "Oh, let's play 101 questions.
Show them what your problem is. They say, "Ok, I see your problem. Be right back." and then they come back and say hit refresh and your site's working again. To me, this is the one of the stand-alones is buying it, a really good
host.
There are some cheaper packages on here if you guys are looking to save money and stuff but again if you want to be in a position where you can do like Terry Samuels. All his clients, he's hosting all their websites and that's a nice residual income for them. If you want to do that or if you're looking for your business and a new host, a new hosting solution that can take care of 99% of your dev issues, if something breaks, etc. Then check out Liquid Web. It's definitely worth it.
There was one other thing I wanted to share with you guys and then I can't remember right now because it's all gone. So, do we have any questions? If not I think we can call it a close. I'll look through here. No, I don't see any questions. Cool. So, hopefully, again I've been on a page speed kick this week.
I saw a lot of people complaining about GT Metrics and their ranking or not their rankings but their speed and all that stuff and then having to go through and have the same arguments etc about which testing tools you use and stuff. So, I thought that was a good opportunity to show you this.
A couple other points. If your host is a shared host you're by definition just going to have less quality and less server resources so you're always going to fight with. So, don't dig too far into the weeds on the shared host because there's a lot of stuff in that backend that the server nerds have set up that you just don't know you can optimize for. As long as your site is loading under three seconds you're good.
Next is if you have access to it so or you can see it or you have a plug-in that says you have a PHP version older than 7.x, like PHP 5s, I've seen a lot of hosts and servers that are still running PHP 5. It's time to upgrade. Upgrade and have your server guys just send them an email and tell them to upgrade to PHP 7.
I've done it to countless sites and it hasn't broken plugins like it used to like you update from 5.5 to 5.6 and all your plugins break. PHP 7 is a lot more stable and you don't have that issue plus if you're running both plugins that are running 5.5, 5.6 you got another issue. It's a security because those are really hackable.
So, good hosts. Don't expect too much if you're paying for a shared. Update to PHP 7 and then use one of the tools that I showed you right there and you're pretty much set. You don't really need too many, too much help beyond that. There are some other things – image optimization and stuff like that too but I won't go over that in this webinar.
Again, I know I started a little bit late. 26 minutes late to be exact. Thanks. That's a technical issue. I apologize for that. Hopefully, it doesn't happen again but it's technology so I'm sure it will. I hope you got something from it, great information and it was worth your time regardless and thank you for coming and I'll see you next week.