Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, Greg Shuey is joined by Jono Alderson, an independent technical SEO consultant, to explore the critical role of website performance in eCommerce success. They dive deep into the tangible impact of site speed on conversion rates and search engine rankings, sharing actionable insights for brands looking to optimize their digital presence. Jono unpacks the common bottlenecks that slow websites down, from image optimization to tracking pixel overload, and provides practical advice on how to improve Core Web Vitals metrics. With fascinating anecdotes and cutting-edge resources, this episode is a must-listen for eCommerce brands striving to deliver superior user experiences and stay competitive in a fast-paced digital landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Site Speed Directly Impacts Revenue: Studies show that even a 100-millisecond improvement in load time can result in significant conversion rate increases, making site speed a direct contributor to bottom-line growth.
- Core Web Vitals Are Essential Benchmarks: Metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID) provide a standardized way to evaluate website performance, and passing these metrics can enhance both user experience and search engine rankings.
- Common Bottlenecks Include Images, Fonts, and Tracking Pixels: Optimizing images with proper formats (e.g., WebP), limiting the use of custom fonts, and auditing unnecessary tracking scripts can drastically improve load times.
- Website Speed and Sustainability: Faster websites consume less energy and have a lower carbon footprint, aligning with corporate social responsibility goals and offering a compelling argument for optimization.
- Competitive Advantage Through Speed: Mid-size brands can outperform slower enterprise competitors by prioritizing site speed and user experience, leveraging agility to gain a crucial edge in the marketplace.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- How does my website’s speed compare to my competitors?
- Am I optimizing images, fonts, and tracking pixels to improve load times?
- Do I understand and regularly evaluate Core Web Vitals metrics for my website?
- Am I balancing design functionality with performance to deliver a fast and engaging user experience?
- Have I considered the environmental impact of my website’s speed and data usage?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Jono Alderson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonoalderson/
Core Web Vitals: https://web.dev/explore/learn-core-web-vitals
PageSpeed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Lighthouse: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview
CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/crux
Squoosh: https://squoosh.app/
WPO Stats: https://wpostats.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:00.984)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I’m Greg Shuey, founder and CEO of Stryde. We’re a niche digital marketing agency that helps eCommerce brands scale their revenue and increase their profit. We created this podcast specifically for you, the direct-to-consumer brands out there who are trying to figure out how to grow their business each and every day. If you want proven strategies to drive more qualified traffic to your website, we’re going to cover that.
If you want to nurture and convert more of that traffic into top line revenue, we’re going to cover that as well. And lastly, if you want to sell more to your customer base and grow your lifetime value, yep, we are going to cover that too. So my hope is each week we’ll provide valuable insights and tangible examples that will help you transform your business. Are you ready? I am. Let’s jump in. My guest today, his name is Jono Alderson.
We’ve gone back and forth on that for a minute this morning. He explained to me all the different ways that people pronounce his name, but I think I nailed it this time. He is an independent technical SEO consultant at Applied Energistics Limited where he helps brands compete on technical SEO, site performance, and structured data. You know, all the behind the scenes things that Google liked to look at these days.
Jono Alderson (01:02.926)
Ha
Jono Alderson (01:09.166)
Beautiful.
Greg Shuey (01:26.958)
So over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we’re going to dive into website performance. I mean, you probably could have guessed that by what he does for work. And we’re going to dissect site speed, how it impacts your website conversion rates, as well as your ability to rank in the search engines. So John, thank you so much for being with us today.
Jono Alderson (01:49.41)
Thanks for having me. This is very exciting. Gonna be a treat.
Greg Shuey (01:52.98)
It is going to be a treat. I love that. So what I typically ask everyone before we get started is if you could just take a few minutes, introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Jono Alderson (02:11.384)
Sure, let’s bore everyone for a minute. So yeah, I’ve got a background in web development. So I started off as a super nerd building websites in my bedroom for small local businesses, like real deep nerd stuff. And I got a bit obsessed about what does good look like. It was a really interesting time in the web, right? That kind of early days of the web where we’re all kind of working out what is this thing and how does it work? And there’s no rule book. There’s no playbook.
Greg Shuey (02:38.488)
Yeah. Nope.
Jono Alderson (02:40.526)
There’s no growth packing isn’t a thing for another decade or so. And I’m sat there going, okay, this local Baker is expecting this website to sell. have no idea if anyone’s ever going to visit it. I don’t know what Google’s looking for. Barely aware of the concept of SEO. And I’m sat there with a page full of code saying, is it better or worse if I do it this way or that way? And what is this? What are these alt attribute things? And what is a search? How does all of this work? And I found I was ended up doing technical SEO.
before it was even really a thing I was aware of, before it was really a thing that anyone was aware of. And then, yeah, from there, I fell into agency world. I learned about business and budgets and politics and retainers and all that lovely fun that I’m sure everyone’s really filled with. And then I fell from there into tool vendors and did a bunch of stuff with big data and machine learning stuff before it was trendy. And then just kind of ended up in the right place at the right time a lot. I ended up consulting for a couple of big agencies.
Greg Shuey (03:24.942)
Yep.
Jono Alderson (03:38.558)
Worked with a whole bunch of really interesting big brands and big clients as well as kind of funded startups and smaller more agile people. Interesting to see both ends of that scale. And then alongside of that got deeply into the world of analytics. So if we’re going to do and sell all this stuff, how do you measure it? How do you prove value? So tagging, tracking pixels, but also reporting dashboards, storytelling, kind of convincing the C-suite, all of those kinds of things. And then alongside that, a whole bunch of public speaking across all sorts of topics.
Greg Shuey (03:47.267)
Sure.
Jono Alderson (04:07.882)
And my latest obsession is web performance and site speed for a bunch of reasons. One is, unironically, I think it moves faster than a lot of the rest of the web, which is great fun. Like every day there’s something new. And two is I think it’s super important and super unutilized. There were so many brands who have a slow website, where if they had a slightly faster website, they would do a lot better and their competitors aren’t on it, they’re not on it. So.
Yeah, there’s a huge opportunity here that nobody’s really grabbing it seems. Yeah, me and a nutshell. yeah. And now I quit my job. I’m an independent consultant. I’m doing my own thing. I’m helping companies fix and do all this sort of stuff, whether it’s technical SEO, site speed, structured data, making their websites bigger, better, faster, stronger, and unpicking some of the whys behind why it’s not. Nobody sets out to build a bad or a slow website. Yeah, every website is bad and slow. So it’s starting to work out. Is it a process problem? Is it an education problem? Is it a budget problem?
Greg Shuey (04:39.31)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (04:59.192)
You
Jono Alderson (05:04.31)
and unpicking some of that and then really getting into the weeds of what’s going on and what do need to fix. Yeah, super fun.
Greg Shuey (05:10.414)
That’s awesome. I love that you touch on how, you know, it’s necessary to be able to compete. And I think it’s incredibly important for brands that are kind of, I mean, it’s important for everyone, but like midsize brands, because you’ve got your large enterprise brands and they move so slow. And I think it’s a huge opportunity for kind of these midsize brands to come in and really optimize and get a leg up.
Jono Alderson (05:16.91)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (05:31.118)
Yes.
Greg Shuey (05:39.542)
on these enterprise brands because they can’t move as fast, right? So.
Jono Alderson (05:43.83)
No, and they’ve all got legacy platforms, right? They built their websites 20 years ago and they’ve piled on more and more junk since they’ve never started from a clean house. Yeah, definitely. Yep. yeah.
Greg Shuey (05:51.406)
and it’s a mess. Yep. I love it. Cool. Well, you ready to jump in?
Jono Alderson (05:57.269)
Yeah, let’s go.
Greg Shuey (05:58.712)
Let’s go. All right, let’s start with the easy one first. can you walk us through, let’s pretend, you know, we’ve got folks listening who have never done any site speed before. Why is this critical for brands, both in terms of conversion, as well as search engine optimization?
Jono Alderson (06:00.366)
you
Jono Alderson (06:19.918)
Sure, so let’s start with the easiest bit, which is conversion and the money. There are a whole bunch of studies, and the significant ones date back as far as about 2012 now, which show time and time again that every millisecond that you shave off the time it takes to get your page in front of somebody turns into money. And yeah, there are loads of these studies and they all say the same thing. So the big one in 2012 was from Bing and they said that shaving off 100 milliseconds
in the total time it takes for page to load. It generated them 0.6 % extra revenue, I think, which doesn’t sound like a huge percentage. But when you think about every single visitor, yeah, that’s huge. And the easy rebuttal for this is I’m not Bing. I’m not a search engine. My website isn’t a search engine. But then you start to see these studies from other brands. You see Vodafone increasing add to carts by 20 % for shaving 1.6 seconds off in 2018, I think.
Greg Shuey (07:04.619)
Er.
Jono Alderson (07:17.134)
We saw eBay saying in 2019 that 100 milliseconds gave them half a percentage increase in add to cart rates. And we start seeing more and more of these to be saying the same thing where people are either artificially introducing delays and saying, what’s the impact? Or they’re finding ways to speed up and they’re testing it and they’re seeing that it really impacts conversion. And this is super interesting, I find, because 100 milliseconds isn’t even a perceptible amount of time. It takes you
Greg Shuey (07:35.309)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (07:45.454)
200 milliseconds to blink I think so we’re talking about infinitesimal amounts of time and it’s not that you’re sat there thinking I’m annoyed that this is loading slowly like if it’s got to that stage you already screwed it’s the Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that there are sites still do like eight seconds and we’ve it down to five. Yeah, it’s lovely It’s those milliseconds are important because you’re competing not just against your competitors different prices, but also for subconscious attention
Greg Shuey (07:50.796)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (07:56.962)
You’re already done. Yep.
Jono Alderson (08:11.874)
You’re competing against somebody thinking, I wonder what’s for dinner tonight or what’s on Netflix or what’s happening outside my window. And in those moments when users are in the midst of a task and they’re going, okay, I’m adding this thing to my car and clicking the checkout and going through this process. If you lose them for that split second there, you increase the chance that they get distracted. get buyers regret remorse. They go and open another tab, which they see a Facebook advert on.
for competitor because they’re remarketing, cetera. And all of those tiny little cracks in that process that you put so much effort into build and those funnels you’ve designed, those milliseconds really open those up. So yeah, it’s profoundly important. So that’s part of it. Yeah, and the research really, and you wouldn’t believe it right, 100 millisecond, half the time it takes to blink, but you’re losing like half a percentage of potential revenue, it’s insane. So when we look at the kind of the…
Greg Shuey (08:45.518)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:51.81)
Hmm. That’s fascinating. Millisecond.
Jono Alderson (09:07.246)
The details of performance optimization. Quite often, IT people and developers will say, oh, it’s only 300 milliseconds. It’s only 500 milliseconds. Yeah, that’s money. That’s money being left on the table. So it’s a big deal. Yeah, I think the other interesting part, if you zoom out a bit, I think it’s reasonable to say that everything is becoming more commodified. The conventional USPs are easier and easier to disrupt. It doesn’t matter if you’re cheaper or faster or closer. All of those things are
Greg Shuey (09:20.481)
Interesting.
Jono Alderson (09:36.69)
easily flipped overnight. So you’re increasingly competing against anyone who can spin up a business in an hour with AI tooling. You increasingly competing against Google, Amazon, Shien, Temu, whatever. And the quality of your user experience is one of the main things that’s going to differentiate you in that crowded marketplace. how are you going to win brand preference and influence brand recall and stand out when people are considering evaluating, et cetera. Because if you don’t do that, you’re fighting in a race to the bottom.
on probably just on price and are you open or is your thing in stock and maybe even in that case speed might be even more important because people are looking for a frictionless and to can’t convert immediately this is a commodified purchase moment so being the fastest and the best of that is also important so yeah of course all of this super important and then as of 2017 2018 i forget and google announces that it’s a ranking factor officially
Okay, fast website ranks higher gets more traffic pleases more people all of these things become Reinforcing and you get a flywheel effect when you get this right where you zoom ahead of competitors. Yeah, all of this feels like a no-brainer
Greg Shuey (10:43.062)
Yeah, I like it. Awesome. are there specific metrics out there that brands should be looking at on a regular basis and and how can they be monitoring those and be able to get really good insights to take action against?
Jono Alderson (11:02.796)
Yeah, there definitely are no answers to these, which is nice because until about 2016, there weren’t. And one of the reasons why a lot of enterprise and larger sites are still slow is because they were built and managed and designed in a period of the internet where it was really hard to quantify this. So if I ask how fast is this website, it’s a super complex thing to answer, both technically and conceptually. Right. So a web page is made of lots of moving parts. If it if all the images, if the page loads instantly, but the images take five minutes to load.
Greg Shuey (11:16.92)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (11:32.846)
Was that fast? Or if the images load, but none of the text does. And then the adverts come in a minute later and everything. All of these things are super hard to quantify and to benchmark against competitors. And also hard to say, we went from bad to good over time. Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics, which landed a few years ago, solve all of that. They’re like a definitive, formal way of categorizing how fast is this page. And there’s
three or four of them, and they evolve over time. So there’s a continual effort to say, can we think of better ways to measure what speed looks like? So for example, at the moment, we have one of the core of Vitals metrics is largest content for paint, which is how many milliseconds does it take to draw the biggest thing on the screen? Which makes sense, right? That’s your hero banner, it’s your main product image, it’s whatever the champion thing is. And the quicker you can get that in front of the user, the faster that page is going to feel.
Now what’s really interesting about that is two things. One is those metrics evolve over time, technically. So they’re continually re-evaluating how do we measure this so that things like, I don’t know, you’ve got a big cookie banner in front of your product here. Is that the largest content for paint? Tricky. So those metrics constantly change. But also the barrier for passing the success threshold is normalized against the rest of the web. So as your competitors sort their house out, get their acting gear and speed up their websites,
your website becomes comparatively slower over time because the definitions have changed, the thresholds have changed and your competitors and the rest of the web and consumer expectations increase. So there’s all sorts of moving parts here. But the nice thing is we do now have a kind of reasonably stable way of understanding is this page fast enough. One other thought that’s really useful to understand that which most people gloss over is there’s two different flavors of these metrics. If you’re using some of the testing tools which we’ll mention in passing, I think like
Greg Shuey (13:01.642)
Interesting. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (13:13.379)
Got it.
Jono Alderson (13:25.186)
Google’s Lighthouse Suite or PageSpeed Insights, they’ll give you two types of results. There’s lab data, which is we have tested your page in isolation and we’ve run a whole bunch of tests on it and we think this is how fast it is and we think this is where the bottlenecks. That’s super useful for handing to developers and for testing. But what you really want to be looking at is their real user metrics, which is anyone on a Chrome browser and various other flavors, every visit they do to any website gets piped back to a warehouse of Google.
and they aggregate that over time. So you can start to see actually for real users in the wild, how are they experiencing this? And you get a nice breakdown and percentile grouping. And what you tend to find in that is really interesting stuff like, our logged in user area on our website is really dragging down the average, or we get tons of users from Australia and it takes 20 seconds for their homepage to load and that’s dragging down our averages. And you can start to fix that. But the real sweet spot is you can see competitor data. So if you Google,
Greg Shuey (13:54.765)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (14:24.758)
what’s the name of it now? Critical moment. I’ve forgotten what it’s called. Google’s Crux warehouse, C-R-U-X. You can go and see dashboards for how are your competitors doing, any domain, any page as well if it’s got enough traffic, over time. So you can benchmark against them, which is really nice for getting executive buy-in for, OK, we know our thing is slow, we know it sucks. Can we please, please have budget to make it better? Our competitors are not only faster than us, they’re getting faster over time. That sort of stuff makes a really compelling argument. So yeah, really, really nice.
Greg Shuey (14:37.304)
Huh.
Greg Shuey (14:54.072)
That’s awesome. Those are some great resources. We’ll make sure to link them in the show notes for sure. So as you’ve worked with a lot of different brands, what are some of those common site speed bottlenecks that you see on brands’ websites? And then how can they address those and take care of those?
Jono Alderson (14:58.328)
Awesome.
Jono Alderson (15:10.851)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (15:16.778)
Yeah, so for a super technical muddy topic, there are typically three really simple things that go wrong. And one is images. And this this this shouldn’t be overly complex, right? Like, when you when you pick your image, don’t just upload the 20 megabyte photo from your camera. Fine. Make sure it’s the right format. So JPEGs are bad. PNGs are good. WebPs are better. AVIF is sometimes better, but like
Greg Shuey (15:23.928)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (15:43.406)
This is all fairly well established, fairly well documented stuff. Just pick the right format for the image. And then the HTML markup you choose to put the image on the page really matches well. So you might have less control over this if you’re using a third party platform or you’re not got access to code level stuff, et cetera. But you really wanna make sure that either the platform you’re using or the code you’re having written really considers that you don’t need just one version of an image.
I need to consider is the user on a mobile phone with a smaller screen. Does that screen have a higher pixel density than an average desktop screen, et cetera? And you might want four or five versions of every image and to be making sure that you’re serving the right size and optimal format to that user for that image. And this is all super basic. Yeah, it will need to set up the architecture for it, but it’s all super best practice. It’s all super well documented. All the moving parts are really well defined. I should reference web.dev.
Greg Shuey (16:27.64)
That’s a lot of work.
Jono Alderson (16:39.966)
really, really good resource, mostly written by the Google performance team folks, but it’s like, it’s the definitive resource and like, how do you build a good website? How do you make it fast? And they’ve got pages of documentation that start from introductions to concepts, right down to hand this to your developer when you shout at them because your page is slow and walks them all the way through it. So yeah, yeah, yeah. And in theory, you want your system to do this automatically, right? You just want to upload the image you want on your page and have it all do it magically. Some platforms will do that.
Like the right combination of WordPress plugins, for example, or Shopify extensions will sort that reasonably well for you. But if you’re not on those platforms, or if you’ve got a more complex setup, you might have to do some work architecturally. So yeah, right image at the right size and the right shape with the right markup. That’s the big one, every single website. Next biggest issue is fonts. Fonts are complex and expensive and slow. And there’s a really interesting trade off with your design team says that you need eight different fonts in 12 different weights.
You’re going to be making your visitors wait for four seconds and there’s no way around that. So there’s an interesting trade-off. Fonts can be fast. It’s a lot of work like you go into the, do I mark this up? How do I include it in the page? How do I edit the actual font itself to remove characters I’m not using on this page? There’s loads you can do, but it gets quite complicated. The easiest thing you can do is just load fewer fonts and don’t load them from Google Fonts. So many sites use Google Fonts or Typekit or similar services.
Greg Shuey (17:40.205)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (17:48.942)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (17:56.056)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (18:05.96)
A, don’t do that because it’s probably illegal depending on which country you’re in. And in Germany, some companies have been sued recently. Serving European customers, definitely don’t use Google Fonts because you’re leaking. Yeah, this is huge because you’re leaking IP addresses to a US server without user consent. Which has always been true, but now it’s starting to go into the spotlight. And there’s definitely companies who’ve been sued for using Google Fonts. It’s the same conversation that everyone’s having about Google Analytics.
Greg Shuey (18:18.488)
What?
Greg Shuey (18:25.55)
pop.
Jono Alderson (18:35.822)
but they’ve missed the bigger picture that it’s exactly the same mechanisms. And it’s also faster not to load it from Google Fonts. If you serve the font yourself from your own domain, you’re not then having to do a kind of whole third party request response thing much faster. So yeah, fonts are the next one. And then the third one, oops, sorry. It’s exactly what people would want, right? Yeah, well, the same as Google Analytics. One of the really silly things, if you run these speed tests in things like Lighthouse or a web page with insights,
Greg Shuey (18:50.956)
You would think loading Google fonts would be more Google friendly.
Jono Alderson (19:04.3)
One of the things it will always complain about and say, you’ve got an error, you’ve got an error. It will say, this piece of JavaScript needs better caching headers. And you’re like, but that’s Google Analytics. That’s Google Tech Manager. That’s not mine, that’s yours. Yeah, really helpful. I wish the teams there would solve it out because it’s such an easy fix, but yeah, frustrating. So on that, that’s the other thing that goes wrong is tracking is you’ve got 18 different tracking pixels running. I know that’s necessary.
Greg Shuey (19:08.524)
is your script.
What?
Greg Shuey (19:22.008)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (19:30.402)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (19:33.902)
quote-unquote in many cases, but so few people audit how that’s set up. So you’ll end up with this page is running two different copies of Google Tag Manager. And for some reason, there’s a Facebook tracking pixel still hard coded in the footer of the page. know, like just tied it. You’ve got a tag management system, use it. Or if you don’t really micromanage your tagging structure, but make sure you understand what is firing on this page. Is it efficient? Does it really need to fire whilst the page is loading or can it wait till the page is done?
Greg Shuey (19:52.163)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (20:02.816)
all sorts of considerations there and just audit and look at what you’re doing and how you’re learning it and make sure that that’s sensible. Those are the three big things and they tend to be caused by one of two things. The first is the platform you’re on. So some platforms are inherently faster or slower out the door. So things like WordPress, I’m a big WordPress nerd and it can be either the fastest or slowest thing in the world, depending on how it’s set up. So you can make it lightning fast, but not if you’re running
Greg Shuey (20:26.58)
Yes it can.
Jono Alderson (20:32.526)
60 plugins and an outdated theme and a whole bunch of other moving parts. So really looking at the trade-offs on how does my functionality work and do I really need a carousel on the homepage that’s going to take a second and a half to load or is the cost of that second and a half more than I’m making from showing lots of sliding banners and you can test the AB test this stuff, right? You can strip stuff out and run tests with different kit. Say actually if we say that a 0.5 % increase in conversion rate for a hundred milliseconds,
If I save a second and a half, that’s probably more than I’m getting from these click-throughs. So yeah, the platform you run can be really impactful. And the other thing is politics. And this I find super interesting working with lots of companies. often, again, nobody sets out to build a slow website, but so many organizations, the website is kind of an IT asset, and there’s processes and there’s politics, and it takes a year to fix anything or change anything. Or the person who wants it is super opinionated and they really don’t like…
Greg Shuey (21:21.795)
Mm-hmm.
Jono Alderson (21:30.06)
this particular platform or this particular piece of advice, et cetera. And a lot of the reasons things stay slow is just they’re not following best practice. Maybe they don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe they’re opinionated. But again, stuff like web.dev and Core Web Vitals really codifying best practice fixes a lot of that. So yeah, just read the documentation. And if you need to point people at that sort of thing. So yeah, all of this is manageable. That is the same problem on every site.
Greg Shuey (21:50.37)
Awesome.
Greg Shuey (21:53.838)
All hope is not lost. It’s manageable. Love it. Cool. So I know that we briefly touched on fonts. So when a brand is looking at, let’s just say they’re looking at designing a new website and figuring out functionality, like how does, do those pieces impact slowing down or improving site speed?
Jono Alderson (21:56.526)
Yep.
Jono Alderson (22:20.32)
Yeah, it can get super complex, but I guess there’s a few rules of thumb. One is there’s a tendency for modern development agencies and trendy developers who’ve just come out of university to favor complex JavaScript frameworks and things like React and Next and headless websites and those sorts of things. Mostly because the CMO at some point will say something silly like we want it to feel like an app.
And then as a bit and then you triple the price and you triple the amount of time it takes to build and you get something that’s fundamentally unusable. I would push back heavily on most sites needing anything of that flavor. And if your your teams go to is we’re going to build this thing in a fancy JavaScript framework. You probably aren’t ever going to have a fast website like there’s such deep challenge in those in those kinds of setups and most websites. If you’re okay, you’re a brochure where you an e-commerce you’ve got.
Greg Shuey (22:46.862)
Haha.
Greg Shuey (22:53.613)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (23:07.843)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (23:14.528)
images and HTML and text in a checkout, you probably don’t need it to feel like an app. And there are ways you can achieve that without a JavaScript framework. So that’s the big one. And then it all comes down to trade-offs between flexibility and predictability. So if you want the ability in your platform to be able to run special offers and drag and drop stuff on the homepage and have big sliding carousels and 3D videos of your products generated on demand,
Greg Shuey (23:29.518)
Yeah.
Jono Alderson (23:44.332)
those sorts of things are unavoidably going to come with a performance overhead. And that’s fine. Like if you want to put pixels on a page and have them do stuff, that takes time to load. And the thing you can do is be conscious of those trade-offs. And again, you can A-B test, can run things like page read insights and get a feel for what is the impact. But really it’s going to come down to how much do we want to prioritize making this thing fast versus making this thing fluid and fancy and interesting? Yeah.
Greg Shuey (24:12.344)
Pretty and functional.
Jono Alderson (24:14.412)
And you still can make pretty, you can make beautiful things that are very, very fast, but you’re to be locking stuff down. You’re to have fewer moving parts. You’re going to have fewer fancy animations and interactions because loading that stuff takes resource. Tricky.
Greg Shuey (24:27.5)
I like that. You know, big takeaway from that response was if your CMO says we want your website to work like an app, you need to turn and run. Turn and run.
Jono Alderson (24:35.918)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s such a great red flag moment I guess I’m nerding out Yeah, nerding out slightly for a moment I think one of the reasons they say that quite often is they like the idea of like page transitions that when I click a link it goes whoosh instead of that thing we’re all used to where you click it you wait a second the page unloads and reloads and Two really nice things one is if you just have a fast site, you don’t get that awkward on load reload your page just loads
Greg Shuey (24:42.092)
Maybe you took a wrong job.
Jono Alderson (25:04.686)
And the other is there is a really nice CSS spec that’s about to land, been working progress for a while, that allows you to do those kinds of fluid page transitions without JavaScript. Just happens naturally. So you can go make it fade in and resize and reshape. And you do really cool stuff. And it loads instantly. Really nice. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (25:04.706)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (25:21.996)
That’s cool. That is cool. Okay. So we also touched on imagery. So, you know, this podcast focuses on e-commerce brands. They sell product, right? So, you know, we’ve got big, high quality, beautiful imagery so people can see the details. They also record them and publish a lot of videos. So how do you balance that?
Jono Alderson (25:28.344)
Yes.
Jono Alderson (25:34.22)
Yeah, big image.
Greg Shuey (25:52.202)
with the need for faster load times.
Jono Alderson (25:56.302)
Sure, so the good news is I don’t think you need to balance it. You can have high quality, detailed, beautiful visuals if you just optimize those assets and get the markup right. So you don’t ever need a six megabyte image of your product. You can achieve an awful lot in 250 kilobytes without any meaningful or visible visual degradation of the image. That might mean that you need to spend a little bit of time
Greg Shuey (26:00.686)
Okay.
Jono Alderson (26:25.888)
in a image performance tool like Squoosh. Squoosh.app is really nice, built by a couple of Googlers. And you might need to play with, should this be a PNG or WebP? And if I drag the quality bar up or down a little bit, what’s the trade off in the visual degradation versus the bytes on the… And if I tick this box, how much bigger is yada yada yada, which takes a bit of time. But that time is going to pay off versus the four seconds your visitor would have waited for the image to load.
Greg Shuey (26:31.021)
Okay.
Greg Shuey (26:49.442)
Got it.
Jono Alderson (26:54.318)
And then the other thing is the different sizes again, but you don’t need to ship a huge image to the user if they’re on a mobile device So having the white HTML markup to say actually there’s two versions of this image pick the most appropriate one based on the device’s capabilities viewport Bandwidth etc and ship the white one for that. Yeah, you can you can create high high fidelity 4k beautiful imagery that fills the whole page and have it take 300 kilobytes and not 300 megabytes for sure You just need to do the work on the image assets
Greg Shuey (27:23.096)
It’s just going to take a minute for you to do that. Got it. What about.
Jono Alderson (27:25.782)
Yeah, and this kit that purports to do it automatically, that’s okay, but always do it by hand.
Greg Shuey (27:31.852)
Yeah, what about video?
Jono Alderson (27:33.742)
Video is harder. Video is much harder. Video is big. I would think a lot and think very hard about whether you need auto playing video above the fold on the page. And a lot of the research says it doesn’t do a huge amount of good. Like that is very trendy for websites at the moment to have like a big hero banner with like a background video in it behind a very very swish.
Greg Shuey (27:35.15)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (27:44.622)
Okay.
Jono Alderson (27:59.746)
doesn’t really impact conversion, doesn’t really impact brand or attention, et cetera. A lot of research suggests that’s the case. And you’re gonna add seconds to loading time. That said, if you insist, and I understand very much why some brands will, huge part of the experience and experience is important. Use the right technical techniques. So I would want to preload maybe the first two seconds of the video so that that starts paying immediately, then maybe detect the device’s capabilities and start streaming the rest. Again, there’s
combinations of HTML markup and the right kit out there to do it, but it is going to take more time. You’re not going to be able to go, I’ve just filled this in film this image on my iPhone, upload 500 gigabytes, insert play. That’s going to break people’s internet. So yeah.
Greg Shuey (28:45.73)
Got it. Okay, cool. So, and I know I’ve mentioned this before a couple of times, you’ve worked with a lot of businesses and brands out there. Could you share with us a couple of success stories where improving site speed really impacted either their conversions or their rankings?
Jono Alderson (29:09.358)
So it’s super hard to tie back rankings because there’s so many other moving parts. Sure. I don’t have any, because I’m not allowed to talk about anything, unfortunately. But if you’re looking for arguments to get buying for this and to validate it, there’s a really nice website called WPOSTATS.com and they compile all of these case studies. I’ve just opened it up and on the front page, they’ve got things like Adobe improved from 7.2 seconds to three minutes seconds.
Greg Shuey (29:13.71)
True. Let’s just focus on conversion.
Greg Shuey (29:28.911)
Okay.
Greg Shuey (29:38.147)
Hmm.
Jono Alderson (29:39.214)
and they halved their bounce rate. Sunday Citizen improved their largest content for paint by 60%. They increased 6 % in conversion. And you can filter all of these by types of sites, so it was e-commerce, leadger, et cetera. You can look at it by year. You can look at it by the types of metrics they affect. So there’s a really nice compilation of studies that just reinforce time and time again that if you shave off these 200 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds, it really does turn into money at the other end and it’s worth it.
Greg Shuey (30:07.574)
Yeah, I like that. We’ll make sure to include that in the show notes as well. Kind of solidifies and reinforces like this isn’t this isn’t just nice, right? You have to have it and it works. I love that.
Jono Alderson (30:18.254)
Huh, yeah. Yeah, there’s one here like Bridesmaid Dress Retailer Revelry relaunched its e-commerce site. Smaller images, the site is 43 % faster, bounce rates have decreased by 8 % and conversion rate is up 30%. Yeah, and it’s again, it’s not because anybody was sat there thinking I’m really irritated about how long this page is taking to load. It’s because you’re not the only site they’re looking at and you’re not the only thing they’re thinking about. And there’s so much noise.
Greg Shuey (30:32.844)
Whoa!
Greg Shuey (30:40.312)
Sure.
Jono Alderson (30:46.637)
that those milliseconds bleed you.
Greg Shuey (30:48.942)
Yeah, interesting. Cool. Well, as we’re wrapping up here, like one of the things I like to ask everyone is if you had one piece of advice that you could leave our listeners that would benefit them and help them grow their businesses in 2025, what would that be?
Jono Alderson (31:14.35)
going to cheat. I’m going to give you two. One is pass score of vitals. These scores are really handy. They’re a really well codified way of understanding is my site fast enough. And if you can do more than just pass them, excel on them because again, those scores get harder over time and your competitors are playing catch up. So if you can leapfrog and get ahead, you’re going to deliver a better user experience. And user experience is increasingly the thing that will divide brand story, brand preference, recall, those kinds of things are the things that are going to matter in a world where
AI is bigger than ever. It’s hard on a hundred to drive traffic, et cetera, et cetera. The other thing, and this is, this is a slightly devious hack, but the other thing to consider is the ecological impact of all of this. That if my website slow, it’s slow because either I’m transferring a load of data, which is pipes under the sea and coal power plants burning carbon in order to fuel those processes and service to push that data.
across the world. And then the user’s computer receiving that data, the graphics card spinning up to paint the pixels on the screen, et cetera, the fan kicking in because you’re overheating it because you’re loading an auto playing video on all the carbon and power that goes into managing that. So you’re like double, double carbon impact on both sides of and the hosting infrastructure and all the other stuff around this. Many, many organizations will have some kind of corporate social responsibility policy. They will have an eco policy.
the CMO and the CEO if pressured will say that they care about the environment and that you shouldn’t burn trees. This sort of stuff has a huge, huge carbon impact. there’s tools out there you can use to estimate how many trees is my website killing. That’s a really strong argument. Yeah, it’s huge, really huge. That three megabyte image for 10,000 visitors is probably a tree.
Greg Shuey (32:55.158)
Never thought of that before. That is fascinating. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (33:05.102)
Huh.
That is insane.
Jono Alderson (33:08.066)
And then you scale that over days and weeks and months and years and lots of web pages yeah it becomes quite significant so that’s one of the best arguments I found for caring about this stuff and getting other people to care about it if you’re struggling with the but but it’s faster now if I don’t think it’s slow fight a different way.
Greg Shuey (33:22.902)
It’s fast enough. I don’t think it’s slow. There you go. I love it. Well, John, I think.
Jono Alderson (33:26.05)
Yeah, yeah the CEO says it’s fine on his desktop in next to the server always
Greg Shuey (33:34.618)
That’s funny. Well, John, thank you so much for being with us today. I’m incredibly grateful that you were able to carve some time out of your busy schedule and be with us and to help the e-commerce businesses who are listening really help move their companies forward. So I appreciate you.
Jono Alderson (33:39.65)
Now thank you.
Jono Alderson (33:53.07)
There’s a good chance to move them forward and move them faster. That’s that’s the thing. Definitely.
Greg Shuey (33:57.368)
I love that. Help them move faster. It’s fantastic. Awesome. Well, to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Make sure to join us next week. And thank you so much for joining.
Jono Alderson (34:00.364)
Nice.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
