Shopify Success: Boosting Your Bottom Line with Page Speed Optimization | William Belk

William: It's like going to like the finest sushi restaurant in the world, that it's like a perfect experience, right? There's nothing that takes away from what you're doing. And then you don't realize until the end like, oh, you know, you didn't have to think about where were the chopsticks.

You didn't have to think about when the next piece came. You didn't have to think about any of these other things. So a lot of our page speed experiences like that too, where, we wanna remove all of these small impediments to having the best experience.

Matt: Welcome to the e-Commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. The E-Commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver e-commerce wow. And to help us do just that I am chatting with today's guest, William Belk, on how to boost your bottom line with page speed optimization. We're gonna get into that.

Probably a few of the little bits and bobs knowing William. Uh, but before we do, before we dive into our conversation, let me share our podcast pick. Oh yes, some previous episodes that I think you are gonna enjoy. So check out how SEO ranking can improve your customer experience with the fantabulous.

Nick Trueman, who is an absolute legend and actually, uh, a good friend. So do check that out. Also, fixing the biggest problem with Shopify. Uh, I have traffic but no sales was a great episode with, uh, Elle McCann. Still the biggest problem people have with Shopify. Uh, they've got traffic but no sales. Now you can access our podcast pick and our entire podcast archive for free on our website ecommercepodcast.net.

Plus, if you sign up for our newsletter, we'll send you the links from our podcast pick along with the notes and any links from today's show with William. They all get delivered straight to your inbox at no cost to you, which is pretty amazing. We know it is. Now. The sponsor section. Dun, dun, dun. Are you struggling to grow your e-commerce business?

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It's right there. You just click play. Uh, but that's all there ecommercecycles.com. So do go over there and access this free training and get started today. It's time to start delivering e-commerce wow to your customers. With the help, of course, of e-commerce cohort. Okay, so that's the show sponsor. Who is today's guest?

Well, today we are chatting with William Belk, who is a software developer and SEO expert with over 20 years of experience. He is the creator of five very popular Shopify apps. And the founder of Page Doctor, a free tool for testing page speed and optimizing performance. He has also written rapid reviews.

We're gonna get into all of this. Oh yes. So, uh, William and I are gonna chat about how to boost your online success. We're gonna be talking about these Shopify apps, why its written and what they do, and how they're gonna help you. So William, welcome to the show, man. Great to have you. How are you doing?

William: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm so, so impressed by your intro Radio One quality.

Matt: Yeah. That's great. Right. Actually in the UK there is, uh, there's a, there's a radio station called Radio One. BBC Radio One. Right. I know. Okay. Well, cool. Did you also know that there is a dj, a radio one DJ called Matt Edmundson, uh, which is slightly scary.

William: Oh, I've heard him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard him. Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. So you know who I'm talking about. And, uh, our surname is spelled all my, almost identically. Um, and on Twitter, uh, I still, it is funny on Twitter, I still get people connecting with him, me, on Twitter, asking me if I can play certain songs on the radio, which I find quite funny.

That's so cool. Yeah. So he must get, uh, I've never actually met, uh, my namesake on the radio, uh, but he must get the, um, The bizarrest of requests about e-commerce coming through on his Twitter feed is like, why is this? Yeah. Yeah. That would be funny. Yeah, that would be really funny. So, well, thank you for the compliment.

Uh, and if BBC Radio is listening, I'm happy to be, uh, probably a radio two. I think I'm more radio two than radio, but, uh, yeah. So whereabouts in the world are you, how come you listen to Radio One?

William: Uh, just, you know, get around. I get around. Yeah. I spent some time over there. Yeah.

Matt: Okay. That's awesome. It's a bit like that.

Um, oh, that song you, I get around, I get around, uh, who's at the Beach Boys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's, I've got that song now playing in the back of my head. Yeah.

William: Yeah. If you're, if you're listeners in Europe, imagine me, I'm probably like that, you know, at the, so I'm currently in LA. I split my time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, so,

Matt: okay, nice.

William: And then in LA right by the beach. I try to surf every once in a while. When I'm not working. It's gotta be a hard life. It's gotta be a hard Yeah, it's pretty tough. Pretty tough.

Matt: We had a great guest on the show called Jared Mitchell, um, who's based down in San Clemente, which is, oh yeah, I think about 45 minutes south of LA.

He's always surfing as well. You two should hook up. He's big into e-comm. Uh, he's big into surfing. And I've actually stayed at his house. Great guy actually. And he's been on the show. So do check out his episode. Jared Mitchell. Really cool guy. So you're in LA you've got some really interesting posters on the wall behind you, you know, for those that are watching the video.

Um, very colorful, very graphic sort of, uh, are they record album covers? Are they what's going on in the wall behind you there?

William: Yeah, there's a few, few album covers up there. Got your, got your new order.

Matt: Ah, yeah. That's got the world in motion, right?

William: Yeah. A couple couple other Gems. Gems up there.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. So is that what you do when you're not busy, sort of, uh, Shopify app development? You are, you are listening to vinyl LPs.

William: Ah, you know what, sadly, I think about 10 years ago I got rid of most of my records. No, it's Spotify's unbeatable. It's unbeatable. I, yeah. And I still have, I still have a bit of a collection, but.

What are you gonna do? You know, you're busy and Spotify, Spotify's a good product. I can't, can't lie. Less vibes, but good product.

Matt: Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we have, um, we have a young lady who's, who's started living with us for a few months. She's just, we've got a reasonably sized house and so we take in, you know, waves and strays every now and again.

And, um, there's this young lady living with is, uh, Jasmine, she's, uh, in her early twenties and I was walking past her room the other day. Um, cause I was doing some renovation on the house and she had the door open and do you know what I saw on her desk? Which really surprised me. I appreciate this has got nothing to do with e-commerce, but you know, we've started down this road.

Let's see what, yeah, let's out please. Yeah.

William: Um, e-commerce is boring, let's be honest. We talk about it cuz we asked you, you know.

Matt: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Uh, the, the, the not so boring e-commerce podcast. Maybe I should just, anyway, on Jasmine's desk, uh, was a record player. A young 22 year old girl with a record player listening to vinyls. I was like, what is going on? Uh, it doesn't make any sense.

It's like I'd been thrown back to the 1980s. Yeah, she does. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, page speed optimization. Right? Uh, let's talk about that. Um, Because I, I mean, it's interesting when we make this quip that e-commerce is boring. I imagine for most people listening to the podcast, they're gonna be going, well, if e-commerce is boring, perhaps one of the most boring parts of e-commerce would be page speed, uh, optimization, especially if I'm honest with you, William.

I think probably most people don't understand it. Right? Sure. We've all gone to payable, uh, Payable, dunno what that is. Uh, Google page, speed insights, put our web URL in and it's come back with a number, which is usually not good. Um, and told us, you know, we need,

William: especially for Shopify. Yeah. It's almost always not good. Yeah.

Matt: Well this is, this is part of the problem, isn't it, I suppose. And, and thinking about Shopify, because if you are on Shopify, um, I suppose, how much control do you actually have over page speed?

William: Um, So that is somewhat of a trick question, so, well, I'm glad asked you early then you kinda opened up Pandora's box, right?

So mm-hmm. There's a few, a few issues. So a lot of people, a lot of people have trouble differentiating between like perceived page speed and rendering performance and like, uh, the totality or like holistic page speed performance, right? Mm-hmm. So when we go to a tool like. Google page speed insights. It gives us so much information.

And unless you're re, I mean, even for me, I get lost in Google page speed insights, right? Mm-hmm. So you get all these different numbers, you don't really know what they mean. They have all these like vague, you know, cls and then like other types of like, you know, measures that we don't really understand.

So that's kind of the beginning of the page speed problem. In terms of like, you know, you have like a problem solution space. So the solution space for most people as it relates to page speed is really hazy and like gray and hard to understand. And then the problem with Shopify is that Shopify is so good and they have so many friendly tools.

Everything's like one click, right? So everyone thinks that, okay, I can set up a Shopify store and you know, to, to run a Shopify store, you can run a 10 million a year store. For like 300 bucks. Mm-hmm. And, which is incredible. Yeah. But then in order to get our performance and rendering profile where we want, we actually have to invest time.

So when you asked how much, you know, uh, how much control do we have? We have all the control we want, but if we assume that we're just gonna do one, click everything to fix, you know, our page speed problem, it's just not gonna happen. It's not realistic. Right. So then, You know, I say, I have kind of a saying is that you're only as slow, or excuse me, you're only as fast as your slowest app, right?

So a lot of these stores have 10, 20, 30 apps installed in their store. And then that's one of the biggest problems is that those, those apps are allowed to inject scripts and assets into our stores. And then, That becomes like this mountain of, you know, background requests and CSS and job, like additional JavaScript resources and delayed stuff.

So then, um, you know, we, we end up, if we, if we use the traditional like Shopify one click mentality, then we end up really deep in this hole, this performance hole. So everyone says like, oh, Shopify is slow. Shopify is not slow. You know, but if we add all these third party applications and we, we just click them and think that they're not gonna have an effect in for a performance, a performance effect, then we're kind of like misguided in that way.

So then a lot of what I focus on with my apps and just everything I do is performance. So, you know, I started, uh, a tool that I think you've seen, which is pagedoctor.com. So it's a free page analysis tool, and then Yep. I was tired of using Google Page speed Insights because it takes me so long to figure it out.

So I built my own page testing tool that gives me like that first pass analysis of what I want to look at. Mm-hmm. Which is like the big stuff. So most shop owners can make massive strides just by fixing fundamental problems. So like they'll have like maybe 10 lines of code that are just done improperly that Yeah.

Cost, cost them 600 milliseconds or like 0.6 seconds or something. Yeah. Um, so that's like a good start. And then the, the next step is just to evaluate all the apps that we're using to try to figure out which ones are hurting us the most. So like a lot of people have apps installed on their store that they're not using, and they don't even realize that those apps still have like a direct line to inject scripts into their store.

Yeah. So like a good example would be, Like product reviews apps, sometimes people try three or four different product reviews apps, and then they just pick the one that they like and then they forget to uninstall the ones that they don't like. So like Yotpo, as an example, will inject, I don't know, 120, 140 K into your page, like 10 to 15 requests when you're not even using it.

Wow. So you may not even, it may be installed, but you don't have the modules installed on your site. They'll still just be lighting your site up with all these background requests. And that all takes browser resources and slows everything. Like it slows stuff down that people don't even realize. Like scrolling.

Yeah. You know, um, resizing. Or like every time you do something cool or movement based on the page, then the browser has to reinterpret the whole entire page again. So then the more stuff that we have, you know, you get that kind of like, Just that, that non-Japanese or German pro precision feel. Mm-hmm. You know, you get that kind of like vending machine feel.

Matt: Yeah. It's a good way to describe it. And it is, it is interesting. I mean, you mentioned this, you know, um, that the amount of people that have redundant apps on their Shopify store, um, I don't remember ever talking to somebody about their Shopify site and they didn't have redundant apps on there, on their store.

You know, they've not gone through and done that. I need to take these out. And so what I'm hearing you saying, William, is actually by taking those out, just do, by doing that due diligence, this is before you've even checked on the ones you actually do use. You're gonna increase your page speed and increasing your page speed is, um, well let's get into that.

Actually, let's start a bit, a bit more headline. So, Page speed optimization is something I don't think many people talk about, that everyone talks about conversion rate optimization and all this sort of fancy stuff. So we don't talk much about page speed optimization, partly because I think a lot of people think it's outside of their control.

Um, so. What is page speed optimization and why, why should I care? Um, about, you know, as a, a store and as surely my iPhone and my desktop now they're super uber powerful. Do I even, do I even, I mean, broadband is what gigabit now, so do I, do I even need to care?

William: Sure. So we can kind of address that in a couple different ways, that question.

Mm-hmm. We can talk about the simple stuff. So like the measures based stuff or the numbers based stuff. Right. So if we improve page speed, we reduce bounce rate. So like customers that come and just leave because they get frustrated or bored or whatever, right? So they won't each, each visitor is not like us.

So we have our own, if we have our own store or clients. We are not the target customer, right? Yeah. So that's a good place to start thinking about page speed is that we look at our shop 20 times a day or you know, if we're like marketer, we're always looking at the landing pages. If we're a developer, we're always looking at the features.

So the measures based stuff is all. Really our bottom line. So if, if, and it also depends on, on, on store size, so how much like traffic and revenue we're doing. Mm-hmm. Let's say we're, you know, whatever, a 5 million shop, 1 million to 5 million. So improved page speed reduces bounce rate, it increases conversion rate, it can help with seo.

You know, it kind of, that's a hard rabbit hole to go down, but, Generally speaking, page speed does help SEO across the board and SEO ranking. And we know that page speed improves page quality score for ad buying. So that's the big thing. So if we're buying a lot, a lot of ads, we want our pages to be as fast as possible because we're competing with other people.

So when, when Google or different ad networks. Or Facebook, they'll check our, they'll check our pages and give our page and ad quality score. Obviously, you know, key phrases and content have a big part of that. Mm-hmm. But page speed is also a factor in that. So, you know, if Google has two pages with identical, you know, practically identical content, who do they want to give that ad to?

They want to give it to the faster page. Right? Yeah. So those are like the easy, those are the easy things, right? But then we have. You know, page speed almost as like a spiritual component, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yep. If we, if we have, it's hard to, it's hard to think about, right? So every single millisecond of our experience with every page is affected by the page rendering performance.

So like, not just the page speed. So the page speed is one thing. So we have like page speed, which is how fast it loads, right? Mm-hmm. And then we have. The general performance of the webpage. So if we install all of these apps, they're putting stuff in the background, background requests, and then they're injecting these big giant blobs of HTML.

So one thing that you see in page Doctor and Google Page speed insights is like the DOM element. The number of DOM elements, right? So if we have 500 dom elements versus 5,000, and I see 5,000 all the time. Every time the browser does things, it has to, a lot of times it'll have to go through every single element in the entire tree.

So the, in the browser, it's just like a giant object. And then we have nodes on the object. So every time we redraw the page, then we have to go in the browser, has the browser's brain or like the, the processor has to know where everything is and go through everything and make sure nothing changed. Cuz everything in your, in your browser has like a size.

You know, it'll have like some sort of container. It'll have like a x, Y, um, it'll have all these styles on it, you know, oh, does it need a border, does it not? So everything that we do to the page that increases that cognitive load on the browser affects everything. So when we scroll down the page, like I said, we have that like vending machine feel, right?

Yeah. Versus like that really smooth like ball bearing feel. So all these apps that we're installing, It's hard for people. They don't think that every single time someone scrolls, that's part of, you know, that, that, um, I don't know. I, I don't know other way to call it, but spiritual, it's like this experience that you can't explain.

Mm-hmm. And you don't know why you just had the best experience ever. It's like going to like the finest sushi restaurant in the world, that sometimes it's about, it's like a perfect experience, right? There's nothing that takes away from what you're doing. And then you don't realize until the end like, oh, you know, you didn't have to think about where were the chopsticks.

You didn't have to think about when the next piece came. You didn't have to think about any of these other things. So a lot of our page speed experiences like that too, where, we wanna remove all of these small impediments to having the best experience that we can have. And then that is kind of like, that's what creates this nice, nice customer experience, right.

Matt: Yeah, no, I, I get that. I, I, I like your restaurant analogy actually. Um, you, you don't always, the, the consumer doesn't go to a website thinking, oh, this has got a really good page speed optimization system going on here, but it does go to the website going, I really enjoyed being on that website. Uh, it's just that unconscious bias, isn't it?

So if page speed optimization is primarily about load time, Right. And there's all these things that, so for Shopify it's easy cuz we can pick on the apps. If it's not a Shopify site, Google page speed. Um, insights tends to pick on JavaScript, especially on news. JavaScript and a few other bits and bobs, isn't it?

And it, it, it picks all these things out. Um, so we've, whether we're on Shopify or not, we've got some unused code on our website that we just need to not be lazy in cleanup or at least the, the web developers need to not be lazy in cleanup. So if web speed optimization is predominantly about loading my speed as about loading my site as fast as possible, is there, like, is there like a minimum ideal time?

Have I gotta hit like a three second load or two second load, or six second load? What's the, what, what am I trying to aim for here?

William: Yeah. I, I think that the. That's one of the problems with Google Page speed insights is that number, you know, the score that we get is mm-hmm. No one has any idea what that means, right?

Like, we just have absolutely no idea. So even an idea in, in your example where you mentioned we have different, uh, network speeds, right? So half a second versus one and a half seconds. We have no idea. We have no context to assign to that. So then we have our own browser at home. Whatever internet connection we have, we might have like a fiber connection.

We might have a slow, you know, DSL connection. So what I like to focus on, so the, I brought up page doctor before, so mm-hmm. Which is at pagedoctor.com, free page analysis tool. Um, I just focus on the simple stuff. So like, do we have JavaScript errors on the page? Oh, shoot, dropped my pen. So do we have JavaScript errors on the page?

Um, that's a simple one that we can look for that we don't need to assign any numbers to, right? Mm-hmm. And then the other one is like, do we have blocking JavaScript tags? That's a huge one, right? So when our page loads, a lot of times the way that the page is loaded, the developer needs a library, like j like jQuery.

Mm-hmm. So then they'll say, okay, I don't want anything to happen until after this library is loaded. And what that means is that the, the browser hits that line of code and says, okay, this is an essential resource. And then it loads every single bit of it into memory, processes it, and then moves on. So blocking requests are like a huge thing.

Right. And then your example of all these different assets. Um, so you like the, we wanna reduce the number of everything. And then sequence it in a way that makes the most sense. Mm-hmm. So, like, you know, our apps, um, look for apps that are more performant is like a simple one, right? So, um, so my, my product reviews app for Shopify, which is called Rapid Reviews, it is the most hardcore performance oriented app that you can get for product reviews.

No one is even in my Galaxy of existence. And then this is a hard thing for people to explain, but my whole entire app is one request with 12k payload. That's it. And that gives you questions, um, obviously reviews, questions, deep search on everything, filtering all of that. And so I can do it in one request with 12 K.

It's possible I do it. It's, that's what my app does. So then if you compare that to an app like Yotpo, So Yotpo will sometimes make 25 to 30 requests on your page, 300 to 500 K to load less features than I have. Um, so then, you know, all of these things are possible. So what we want to do is look at all the fundamentals.

So first we started the code, you know, JavaScript errors, blocking script tags, how much CSS are we loading? Mm-hmm. So what you said is people are loading a lot of stuff that they don't use. That's like a massive problem. So you have like, Your core theme css, it'll be like theme css, right? It'll be whatever, 400 K of css when you only need like 40 lines for your homepage or something like that.

So you can break up all these pages, or you can break up all your css mm-hmm. And load less. So every CSS file is the same exact thing. When the browser hits that c s s, it knows that it's essential for everything below it or around it puts it into memory. Then moves on. So then if we have 20 apps that do this too, so the 20 apps load all the background processes and then they load all their CSS assets as like style tags.

So they just inject them in. The browser, hits that and says like, oh, okay, now I have to figure out the page again. Right. Um, so these are like the, you have to just work from the bottom and then go up. And then images are another one. So like, are we lazy loading our images? Um,

Matt: you know, what do you mean when you say lazy loading?

William: So, that's a good question. How do I say? Um, so there's two, two different ways to lazy load an image. So lazy load means as you scroll down the page, so on the page we have the fold. Mm-hmm. Which is everything we can see when the browser opens or like the phone opens. Yep. Which would be like the preliminary load screen area is the fold.

So then anything below the fold we want to defer. Uh, for, for imagery specifically, we want to defer that until we scroll down and hit it. Mm-hmm. Then there's two ways. There's old way, which is generally using a library like lazy sizes, um, which is, you know, a third party dependency you can call it, or a plugin dependency.

And then the browsers now have a new way, which is a lazy or a loading attribute. So it's like loading equals lazy. So a lot of our themes are older or we may have a website that's totally custom that was built three or four years ago. Um, I mean, you know how it is, right? Like if it's working, don't touch it.

Right? So, uh, so we wanna like lazy load our images. That's like a really simple one that we could do. Um, yeah. And then it takes, the other thing that I encourage people to do is work with their developer, like, develop, or excuse me, that's a bad word, but B, build relationships with developers that you trust, right?

Don't you know, you could use fiber and find somebody for $5, which is, may work really well in some cases, but you want people that you can depend, you can depend on over time and that you trust and that are gonna tell you the real deal and how, you know, how much effort it's gonna take to get to where we want to be with our sites. Right?

Matt: Yeah. Well, no, I, I, I, it's interesting you mentioned about developers, because I've always done this thing in the past where occasionally I'll go and check our site on Google Page Speed Insights. Now I'll walk into the developers and I'll go, look, we've got a rubbish score. And the developers, the first thing they'll do is gimme 10 reasons why page speed Insights is wrong, and why I should ignore them because of X, Y, and Z.

Yeah. And so you, you can quickly get caught up in this. Um, Google's wrong. I'm right cycle, which I,

William: how does, how, how does that work for people generally?

Matt: Yeah. Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I, I'm, but I think it's interesting if you are a site owner, And you are talking to your developer. Um, it's very hard to argue with a developer because they usually know more about coding than you do.

Um, and they can, they can come up with all kinds of plausible sounding reasons as to why that doesn't really matter or that doesn't really matter over there. Um, and so I think it's sort of easily dismissed. It's a hard, maybe it's just me. I Do, you know what I mean? I, it's one of those where I think it's a hard thing to argue.

Whether developer on Page Speed Insights, um, part of me thinks it's because the developers are actually genuinely quite lazy and don't want to, you know, it, it, I think optimizing for speed is not a sexy thing. Um, you know, we, we, well,

William: I'll, I'll push back on you a little bit. So maybe here's another way to think about it, is that most brands, esp if we, if we look at Shopify specifically, everyone is so used to everything being done with one click.

Yeah. So like, think about how many apps there are now. That, uh, they say, they say they can improve your page speed score by like 20 or 40. All you have to do is click the button and install the app, right? And most brand owners or marketers or you know, budget allocators, if we wanna call them, don't want to hear that it's gonna take 15 hours to improve our page speed.

Right. So I think some of the developers are probably conditioned to think that people are very, very cost, cost conscious. Yeah. So if they say, um, I mean, to go back, circle back a little bit. Google's page speed score is never wrong. Right. It may be inconveniently low, but it's never, it's never wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, so then that's, that's one thing you can say is if you go to the developer and you say, Hey, we want to increase our page speed score, they may be actually giving, um, obviously some developers are not the best communicators and, and likewise with the marketers or brand owners, right? They kind of generally speak two different languages, right?

Mm-hmm. So they may be saying in a roundabout way, yes, I can help you with this page speed score, but I'm gonna need, you know, two more full days of focusing on it. Or they can say, they might be telling you, Hey, you've installed these garbage apps and I told you not to install them, and I told you there were better ones, but you didn't listen.

So now we have a score of 12. Mm-hmm. On mobile, you know, so then part of it is building the trust with the developer and say, Hey, I want to increase my page speed score because I want to spend less. You can, you can, you can do it two ways. One is, I want you to help me because you are committed to excellence and you are an expert at what you do.

So help me. Tell me what, tell me what we really need to do, and then mm-hmm. You can also sell that to other people in the organization. From the marketing side is like, I want to spend less on ads, right? I want to have the best customer experience that I can have as a brand owner or marketer, or merchandiser, you know, e e-commerce, merchandiser, or whatever it is.

And then build that type of relationship instead of saying, you know, oh, I'm gonna focus on the number. And then the developer will be like, yeah, well, I don't know. It's fine. We have all these apps. Cuz the developer knows in certain cases that the, the store owner or the marketer, a lot of times they don't really listen, right?

Mm-hmm. And they don't really want to have the conversation. They just want to say like, oh, it's bad. And then you be like, okay, cool. It's, you know, if you, we really want to get this. We're gonna have to. Like, rip out this app and then switch to this app, and then, okay, let's change the theme because this theme is garbage, where we have all these like fade ins and fade outs.

We have all these like effects. Okay, well can we remove this like carousel? This carousel has a, like a, uh, plugin dependency. They'll be like, no, we have to have the carousel. We'll, have you tested it? Do you know that it helps? No, but I like it. And the customers like it. Well, did you check, like, are you sure that the customer loves the carousel or could you just have like, could it have scroll instead of like the wacky button with the like, you know, and then building a relationship or being open-minded as a brand owner really helps the developers help us, right?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah, no, I totally get that. And I, I like your wacky button with, uh, sound effect.

William: Everybody knows it, you know, it's on every e-commerce page, nd I guarantee you that that thing right there is like a hundred or 200 K of not very optimized JavaScript, just to have something on a homepage with like nine tiles that you can't see, you know, they're off to the right.

Mm-hmm. You know where they are, and then, Like, does a customer even use that? And do you even want them to use that? Like get them to a collection page, get them to the product page, allow them to buy, don't keep interrupting them with all of these things. And then constantly saying, as a brand owner, like it has to be my way because I know everything.

It's like you don't even test anything. Like most of these people are like, you know, all the different like psychological things, right? They're emotional. They're insecure. I mean, I'm insecure about everything I do. Right? Whenever somebody says something to me about my apps, I'm like, oh man, like, you know, you know how many hours I spent on this or all the different things.

But it's, you know, it's like unless we test it, you know, what do we know? Right?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fair enough. So the, um, so site speed, the, the ability to get something fast on the phone. You mentioned earlier that it is connected. Um, with the page quality score by ad advise. Now, um, the reason I, I want to dig into this a little bit is we have recently switched companies, um, who do our Facebook ads.

Okay? So our Facebook ad company has changed, and one of the first things they have said to us, um, on one of our E-com sites is, your page speed is, Incredibly low and we are gonna need to work on that. Um, and it's the first time an Ads company has actually said to me, part of your problem is your page speed.

Um, on that particular website. So I went away and checked the page speed, and sure enough, he was right. It's insanely low and I think, um, it's not something that we've looked at for a year or two. And as things get added to the site and things change and evolve, this site's slows down and we now need to spend a bit of time revamping, uh, that as it were, but I'm curious.

Um, you've mentioned it, the, the ads agency that we use, they've also mentioned it. What is it about page speed that makes, uh, ads perform better? That's gonna help us with our return on ad spend.

William: Sure. So we talked a little bit about it. Um, we touched a little bit. I don't, uh mm-hmm. We touched a little bit on it before.

Um, you know, our page speed affects bounce rate and engagement. Right. So the slower our pages load, obviously the longer it takes for the customer to see it. Mm-hmm. And especially when we're, when we're buying ads, these are the most fickle visitors. Yeah. These are the visitors that have the least time to donate to our calls.

Right. They don't have an existing, or generally speaking, they don't have an existing relationship with our brand, especially when, when we're in growth mode, right. We're mm-hmm. Trying to find new customers that we don't already know. Obvi, obviously we wanna say like find people, like whatever, and then we're not talking about retargeting.

So retargeting, they've already been hit with an ad or they've somehow found our site, or they saw us on Instagram. But these fresh visitors are incredibly, incredibly fragile, right? So a half a second extra page load time will just naturally increase our bounce rate. So bounce rate there just means people that hit our page and leave without doing anything.

And, you know, that's a, that's a huge thing, right? So that's the, the faster the page loads is the start of the engagement process for the customer, right? And so a good example of something like that would be like, so when, when someone comes to a product page, right? We have a lot of product pages, have product reviews.

A lot of product reviews will show like the star rating, right? Five stars, number of reviews. So that is like essential information for a visitor. So like when I, I, I mentioned my app before, rapid reviews. Hmm. This is like another good example of why page speed is so important. So if we're buying ads, ton of ads, those visitors are landing on like a product page or maybe an optimized like product landing page.

We want stars in the visitor subconscious, like immediately. We can't wait a second or like, you know, Yotpo or stamp, maybe we're, we're not loading those stars for like 1.4, 2.2 seconds because they, they make an initial request and then they'll make nine or 10 or 15 background requests. One of those requests eventually involves the star rating, right?

Mm-hmm. And so that's a good example where one, we have the initial page load, which is just like core theme set up, blocking script tags. All kinds of nonsense loaded to the page. And then we have, you know, our module like rendering and especially if we have something as essential as like a third party module, like product reviews or star rating.

Yeah. So the difference between one second subconscious is like, this is a subconscious thing. This is where we get into that kind of like the spiritual experience of the page. Yeah. All these things are happening that, you know, like these are hard to explain, but we know for a fact. That when we land on like the shoe page and then the stars don't show up for like two seconds, we don't like, that's hard to quantify, but that's like an immediate thing in the subconscious of the visitor.

Oh, this is a five star product. I want to see what people are saying. It has, yeah. 250 product reviews. So these are all the, like, there's almost a, like a stair step that you can work through. And then you can, obviously, if you're doing enough volume, you can immediately connect that to how much your ads are costing and then how well the ads are performing. Right?

Matt: Yeah, that's really interesting. It's really interesting. And, and as you're talking, I, I can start to see now the, you know, the strategy which you've come across most on ads these days tends to be okay. Rather than sending an ad to a product page, I'm gonna send an ad to a specific landing page. And that landing page is gonna resonate with the ad.

It's gonna make sense to the ad. Um, it may be that I reversed the page, so rather than putting the ad to cart stuff at the top, I'm gonna put it at the bottom. And you, you know, we're gonna take you on a sales page journey and we're gonna test that and we'll test the different things. But I'm also starting to see the benefits here because if you have a specific set landing page, you can have that landing page load super quick, can't you?

You can say, right, there's no necessary unnecessary JavaScript on this page. We're just gonna have the CSS for this landing page. We're not gonna embed the latest reviews, maybe the website, uh, we, we call 'em Crunch Jobs. We'll go through and it'll refresh 'em at midnight or something like that. But once you're on that page, man, everything is coming in.

Bang, super, super quick and you can start to see why that is a strategy not only makes sense from a sales marketing point of view, but also from a page speed point of view, right?

William: Yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. And if people have the resources, if you ask the marketing team or the ad agency that you're working with, 10 times out of 10, they'll say, yep, that's our preferred angle.

Like, oh, you, we can host the page for you and we can do whatever we want. Perfect. You know? Yeah. Because you, no, that's interesting. Again, that's like a resource allocation issue as well, right? Like the same with talking to our developer and we, we go to our developer and we complain that, You know, our mobile Google page speed insight score is nine.

And then, then, you know, like if the developer say, oh, cool, can I put 40 hours on this problem? Perfect. You know? Mm-hmm. Same with the marketing agency. Oh yeah. We can just host these for you and you'll, you know, by the way, though, that's gonna cost you another $6,000 a month. Yeah. In order for us to do it the right way, you know?

But yeah, it all makes a difference. Right. And especially again, the problem with some of these, The, the era that we're in now, you know, even we, we could even touch on the, the, the AI component is that people are saying, oh, there's like, no one's gonna write code anymore and everything's gonna do everything for us.

And all these different things. We're, we're already so spoiled as e-commerce, you know, brand owners or developers we're so spoiled. And then, you know, we're gonna get to that next level where, yeah, I mean, it's. It's really like kind of a wild time, but we always have to, we have to keep investing resources in becoming better, right?

Because that's like previously it would cost you what you can do on Shopify today for $300 a month in 2008 would've cost you $2 million a year just in development budget for what you can do on Shopify today for $300 a month. Right.

Matt: Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, technology moves on, doesn't it? It's such a rapid place, and I think this is part of the problem we had, um, with, uh, well, the problem we had with our website is because technology has moved on, our website's probably two years old.

Um, and we've added things like we add Trustpilot for reviews, which we no longer use. We've taken Trustpilot off. We had. Um, a referral system on there and all of these things, when you added them together, just created a massive slowdown, uh, in speed on the website. Um, an unnecessary slowdown. It's interesting, you, you contrast your rapid reviews with YotPo and.

And just the sheer size and speed of yours is very different to Yotpo, which makes me think, well, why have Yotpo done it the way that they've done it? Because they've, they've got a much bigger development budget, right? They've got much deeper pockets. Surely they should have done this right from day one.

Why is it that they, they don't do that? And I, I don't know the answer, William, if I'm honest with you, but I,

William: I mean, because it's hard and it, it involves compromise. Mm-hmm. Right? That's the problem is that they. You know, this is not to say that their product isn't good. It solves a lot of problems. It probably solves too many problems.

Mm-hmm. Right. So like I have customers come to me and say, well, Yotpo stamp, have this like crazy masonry layout. I say, that's fine. Like good for them. Mm-hmm. Right. If you want to live in my world and be the most hardcore and be the fastest you come use my app. Yeah. Right. If you want to, if you want to, if your exchange is, or your barter is, You know, 400 K for that versus 12 K for what I can give you. And you will have to make some small compromises then, you know, come up, come to my side.

Matt: Yeah. That's inter as as I'm listening to you speak, William, I, I tell you the picture that I have in my head. Uh, is the, is the show, um, it used to be called, I mean it's still, in theory it's called Top Gear, but you know, Jeremy Clark's and Richard Hammond TV show, the, the Grand Tour, I think it's called now on Amazon.

And one of the things they do with race cars, uh, the first thing they do is they rip out all the seats. They rip out all the unnecessary weight. Right? And this is what I'm hearing when you compromise, it's like you can either go stupid fast or you, you know, you'd like the Rolls Royce with the crazy heavy seats.

Um, or we can rip out some of that weight, which we're not really using at this stage. Cause I'm just taking one guy around a track. Uh, I can compromise on the stuff that I'm not really using. I can go faster. Um, that really helps me, uh, in my, my simple brain. William. I'm not, um,

William: no, I mean you, it's not to say that you want to be like so rigid that you don't have a great user experience, right?

Mm-hmm. But like, the example is if we're buying a lot of ads, okay. So we're gonna have, we're going to, we're going to, let's say we're gonna accept the penalty of half a second of load time or you know, if we use Yotpo, you know, sorry to pick on ya, Yotpo, but their performance profile is one of the worst.

Yeah. It's offensively bad. Like, and I say this just as someone who cares about page speed and like, I'm committed to excellence and it's horrible. Right? So, I think they have, like if we just talk about number of dom nodes, they probably have almost 10 x. They inject 10 x the number of like page elements as rapid reviews does.

Mm-hmm. This is something that's hard to explain. You know, it's, it's hard to help people understand, but all that's like this massive cognitive load on the browser, right? Mm-hmm. And so, you know, like your example of the race car. We don't want to have a seat that's like hard to sit in. That's so light, right?

We still want the race car to look awesome, but you know, if we use like a brand like, I don't know, like Singer, they do custom Porsches, right? Mm-hmm. So they're kind of walking that line between beautiful, elegant, efficient design and like massive performance. Yeah. So that's kind of where we are in like the the race car example or you know, if we use like a Porsche GT3, so we have that.

We're walking that line between like brutal performance and elegance, you know, and that's where we want to exist, right? So a lot of that stuff that we see out there most, I am not a psychologist, I'm not even an amateur psychologist, but my understanding is that many people make their decisions based on like fear and comfort.

Mm-hmm. Right? So the, they see a product that they have today. And then all that they see by making it like the switching cost for them emotionally is what they're gonna lose. Mm-hmm. Not what they're gonna gain. So then they can look at something, oh, as a marketer, I made all these decisions and I told these people, put this here, put that there.

I want this carousel, I want all these like fade ins and oh, if I click on this button, it has to, it has to move up or move over a little bit. Oh, I want this Parallax, everything. Yeah, Parallax. Right. So then, A page speed expert will come in and look at their libraries and be like, yeah, this is junk. Like you're blowing it.

So then we're gonna have to rip all this stuff out. And then the brand owner says, well, like, but I made all those decisions. So then I'm afraid to make that change. Cuz it makes me feel vulnerable and insecure and like sad obviously cuz I'm the same way. Yeah. So then they, really approach it from a standpoint of like fear of loss as opposed to, Inspirational gain.

Like, okay, cool. We're gonna make this page hardcore. Maybe that'll increase our conversion rate by, I don't know, 0.4%. 0.4% is huge. Yeah. If we have, you know, a 5 million ad budget.

Matt: Yeah. Well, every little helps, right? Uh, as the great British supermarket tells us. Listen, William, it's um, it's, uh, fascinating conversation.

I like the singer analogy. It was much better than my car analogy. Um, which is great. Listen, I'm, I'm aware of time, man, and if people wanna reach out to you, if they want to connect with you, we wanna find out more about rapid reviews, page doctor, all that sort of good stuff. What's the best way to do that?

William: Sure. The easiest is to go to williambelk.com and I have all my stuff listed there. Um, I do quite a bit of writing on Medium, and you can find a link. Everything's on williambelk.com, but you can, my Twitter's not that interesting to be honest, but, uh, you can follow me there. And then, uh, medium, I, I really like Medium as a platform.

Mm-hmm. I like to write when I can and then, um, yeah. And as far as my apps go, If you are on Shopify and you know, check out my apps, reach out to me. Yeah, you can reach me directly. Like, I'm not hard to find, I try to be as involved with all my stuff as I can be and, you know, help people out because I don't know, I like, I like building stuff and, you know, I like helping people and yeah, it's, it's a good, good thing for me to be doing it.

So yeah, reach out to me directly, you know, maybe we can, um, we can make some, some pages faster. Fantastic. Yeah. Ideal.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. No, that's awesome man. So we will of course link to William's information in the show notes, which you can get along for free with the transcript at e-commerce podcast.net.

Or it will be coming direct to your inbox if you signed up for our very fast newsletter. Uh, William, listen, uh, really enjoyed the conversation man, and, um, very good timing for us as we are having this, uh, conversation internally about how we increase page speed, so Oh, perfect. Uh, very, very well timed. So brilliant.

Thank you so much for joining us, buddy.

William: Yeah, thank you for having me. It was so fun.

Matt: No, that's great. Great. Huge thanks again to William for joining me today. Also, a big shout out to today show sponsor the e-commerce cohort. Remember to check out their free online training free, yes, free at ecommercecycles.com.

Also, be sure to follow the e-commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. No, I don't. And in case no one has told you yet today, dear listener, you are awesome. Yes you are. It's just a burden you have to bear.

You've been created awesome. It's a burden I have to bear. It's a burden William has to bear. It's a burden you've gotta bear as well. Now, the E-Commerce podcast is produced by Aurion Media. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The team that makes this show possible is Sadaf Beynon, Estella Robin and Tanya Hutsuliak.

Our theme song was written by Josh Edmundson, and as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes, head over to the website ecommercepodcast.net. That's it from me. That's it from William. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.