The eCommerce Marketing Podcast walks you through everything that goes into ecommerce marketing — from inbound marketing to paid advertising to conversions. Learn the strategies top marketing experts use to grow their businesses.
Marketing Strategies and Topics Covered in this Episode:
Arlen
[00:00:58]
Welcome to the eCommerce marketing podcast. Everyone. I am your host Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Shane Bishop, who is the Head Wizard at EWWW Image Optimizer, where they focus on site performance and especially image optimization. Welcome to the podcast, Shane.
Shane
[00:01:20]
Thanks. Great to be here.
Arlen
[00:01:22]
Yes. I’m excited to talk to you and I appreciate you coming on and joining us today. Today, we’re going to be diving deep about site performance, which is kind of your bread and butter. We’re gonna talk about some of the things that a specifically eCommerce business needs to do to increase their performance. So a lot of times, of course, a their site’s performance. Rather, a lot of times on the site, we’re talking a lot about marketing and messaging and all that type of stuff, but a lot of times the site’s performance becomes an afterthought. We do touch on a little bit of performance. I’ve talked about it before, when we’ve had guests on that talked about a conversion rate optimization, and I know site performance is kind of tied into that. That’s probably kind of a, a little tool in your toolkit, you know, to, to kind of deal with that.
Arlen
[00:02:11]
So dealing with the site performance is very important, cause there’s no sense in spending marketing dollars or doing SEO, organic SEO, if you have a poor performing site. So it’s very important that you kind of get that speed you before you start 10 sending, you know, a ton of visitors to your site. So that’s what we’re gonna be diving deep today to talk about. And, but before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and you know, how you did get into what you’re doing today?
Shane
[00:02:40]
So started out doing it work at a couple different colleges and they were small colleges. So really was kind of Jack of all trades doing server admin and all sorts of things. Desktop troubleshooting printers yuck
Shane
[00:03:00]
Along the way, started to pick up some knowledge on, on doing websites and HTML and got put in charge of our internet site back at the first college, and then ended up rebuilding our site at the second college I was working at as the it director, which tells you how small it was. I was the it director building the college website and yeah, did that on Droople originally and then switched over to WordPress. And along with that, I had started cause I really liked doing website work, started trying to do some small business websites on the side. Okay. And started looking at performance of them. And I think it was around that time and 10 years ago or so when we heard a lot about things that Amazon and bigger companies were doing, where they were shaving off like a 10th of a second and making a mill million or something, it was just ridiculous.
Shane
[00:04:03]
And right, of course, most of us aren’t gonna be making a million dollars from, from a hundred milliseconds, but the lesson still applies. And so that’s where I started. And then a lot, there were tools out there for some of the, the performance stuff. And some of it you could just do manual on, on the server, but image optimization was not really something that had any great plugins for, okay. One was really unreliable and the other one just didn’t work on shared hosting setups. And so I took the one that required kind of R privileges on a server. If you know what that is it, I took that plugin and made it work on shared hosting. Right. And that was the beginning of the U image optimizer. And from there, we, over the years added a compressed API for people that couldn’t even run command line stuff on their shared servers and added a CDN service. And just the last year launched a complimentary site performance plugin that we bundle with our image optimization services now. Okay. So that’s kinda the, the short version.
Arlen
[00:05:19]
Gotcha, gotcha. Good stuff. Yeah. You know, as you mentioned, it’s definitely very important and you know, of course we all would, would wished if we do have a e-commerce side, I know everyone listening would wish if they were to cut a few milliseconds off the low time that they, we can make a million dollars, unfortunately. Yeah. We’re, we’re not all Amazon. And we, you know, we hope to, we aspire to something like that, but yeah, for the average e-commerce site, that’s that it’s not happening, but you know, the seconds that you can shave off for your business, no matter how small you are or how large, rather than, you know, it, it can definitely make a difference. Even know where I wanna kind of start off with today is when we’re talking about site performance, why is it so important when it comes to reaching customers and generating more traffic and sales? And if you can also kind of define really when we think of site performance, what falls under that category of site performance?
Shane
[00:06:13]
Sure. So that that’s a lot of stuff. So make sure I stay on, on track here, but first of all, going back to kind of that, that same mindset that Amazon had, that if you in increase the speed of your site, it typically is going to increase your conversion. So whether that’s newsletter signups or actual sales yeah. Like we’re dealing with e-commerce sites here, performances is paramount. And the, the reason it’s so important, we often think, oh, well, it’s just, cuz we’re all so impatient. Right? And we live in a fast paced world and whatever, but it’s actually because our brains are hardwired to dislike interruptions. Hmm. And waiting for a site to load is an interruption to our brain’s workflow. And so that’s, I dunno if it’s psychology or whatever it is, I’m not no psychologist, but that’s what I’ve learned over the years is that’s one of the biggest reasons why you wanna make your site as performance as possible because waiting aggravates people that are on your site. And even if you got ’em there and you got add something to the cart yeah. You might lose ’em on the checkout. If it takes two minutes to check out, you know, so not necessarily, you know, the whole process, but I’m, if they’re sitting there waiting for it spinning for two minutes, they might be like, well, forget that shoot even 10 seconds might be too much. And people are usually a little more for forgiven on the actual checkout process. It seems like, but the site definitely needs to be snappy needs to be quick.
Shane
[00:07:47]
And so there’s, there’s several different aspects of that. The one that I focused on for a long time has been images, of course, with the, the side projects that I started back in the day I did all of it. I did page machine and, and everything else. But images was always first and foremost because that was where you could find your biggest wins. Typically. You know, if, if you’re doing a great job of compressing your images, making sure that the right size already, you might not see a huge difference by installing a plugin for it. But most people just don’t have the time to, to dive into that real deep. So it it’s a lot easier when you can just upload an image and, and a plugin takes care of making sure it’s well compressed and you have the right size and everything. And, and WordPress helps with some of the sizing issues out of the box, which is, is really nice, not something that was the case 10 years ago.
Shane
[00:08:39]
So there’s that. And, and then, you know, you’ve got other things like the page cashing, of course, which I mentioned, which is a big deal that makes sure that when someone’s visiting your site, it’s not having to go to the database to look up all the data needed to, to display that page. It’s already cashed as HTML code and the, your server just goes, oh, here’s the code and sends it right onto the browser without even thinking about it. It just sends it. And that’s, that makes things a lot faster in some cases, I mean, it could take it from 15 seconds to, you know, couple hundred milliseconds it’s pretty credible. And so that’s just the, the page Ren, well, not really the render, but the, I don’t know a good word for that, but it’s, it’s the time to build the page basically on the back end. And then there’s some things with JavaScript and CSS optimization that you can do. And so that’s with the page cashing and the Java and CSS and fonts, I guess, too, that’s where we’ve dived into in the last year or so with our, our new Swiss plugin. So those are kind of the three areas that I usually focus on images, page cashing, and then as basically asset optimization with JavaScript, CSS and fonts.
Arlen
[00:09:55]
Gotcha. Yeah. Sounds good. That, that all definitely falls into the category of performance and, and helping improve site’s performance. Now, taking it back to the image, a optimization aspect of it. I, I, I know a lot of businesses out there that maybe have an e-commerce site. A lot of times these days, we’ve got a, a huge influx the businesses now that are just using these standard, I guess you could say kind of off the shelf solutions or they’re using the Shopifys of the world or the square spaces and all of these different platforms. And, you know, they may have put up the site themselves. Maybe they’ve got somebody that’s not necessarily a, a develop up quote unquote or a designer, because as you know, with all of these quote unquote no code types of platforms, it’s pretty easy to get a site up and running. And so I know a lot of times the, the owner or the business owner whoever’s in charge for that, they may not know, okay, what, what really should the size of these images be? Is there a general rule of thumb when you’re thinking about, let’s just say, you know, any image on the homepage, should it be over under a certain size? What do you usually recommend?
Shane
[01:11:06]
That can be a tough one depending on, you know, how it’s used in the page, but we usually, you know, recommend people, at least cap them to about 1920, which is the typical wide screen, 10 80 P resolution. It has a 1920 width. So that’s what we usually say. You know, that’s kind of the top end. If you want to cater to folks on, on max a little bit more, you could go 25 60, but unless you’ve got full screen images, that’s really overkill. And even 1920 could be overkill. I see, in, in those sorts of cases. So if you’re not doing much for full screen display, you could bring those down, you know, to around a thousand, 1200 pixels wide. And, and that usually will, will help quite a bit in comparison to a typical digital camera image that might be three, 4,000 pixels or 6,000 pixels, you know, anymore. They’re, they’re pretty huge.
Arlen
[01:12:06]
Definitely, definitely. And what does that translate to as far as like the actual file size and make
Shane
[01:12:12]
A sure and, and file size. I try to keep, if your image is over a hundred kilobytes, it’s probably too big, right? A full width image would probably be over a hundred kilobytes, but most of your images should be under a hundred, if you can get ’em down to the 10 to 30 kilobyte range. Yeah. That would be ideal. And even, even more so if, if you’re just displaying small thumbnails that are one 50 or 200 pixels wide, those should easily be under 10 kilobytes.
Arlen
[01:12:41]
Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Makes, makes sense. Yeah. Cause I know a lot of times, you know, a lot of businesses are probably wondering, you know, really what should it be? And, you know, with these no code platforms, sometimes within platforms they’ll have, I guess you could say kind of image resizing tools where it’ll kinda fit it in a certain block of the site, but they may not NEC it may not necessarily be reducing the file size. Maybe it may just be shrinking the dimensions, but not necessarily right. Optimizing it. So it’s definitely good to know. Now you mentioned, of course there’s other aspects of performance and optimization. You talked about CSS optimization, you talked about also cashing using some of these networks. So for an e-commerce business that is just sitting down and just saying, okay, yeah, my side is slow. I’ve gotten some complaints. I really don’t know where to begin. Are there certain benchmarks that they should be looking at to determine what they should be striving for
Shane
[01:13:45]
Sure. There’s a few different testing sites out there that that folks can run their site through. The one we typically steer most people towards is GT metrics. Of course, Google has their page speed insights and GT metrics uses some of the same or a lot of the same benchmarks as well, as far as different things that improve the, not just the speed, but also the user’s perception. That’s something you gotta be careful of a little bit on Google’s tests, especially that the they’re not just looking at speed. They’re also looking at things that impact user perception, right? And for a bot to test user’s perception is kind of tricky and can only really be simulated. What I usually say with any of those. So whether it’s page speed, insights, GT metrics, webpage, test.org, ping them, or any of those speed testing sites, look at what they’re recommending.
Shane
[01:14:43]
Don’t necessarily focus as much on the score, cuz that can fluctuate wildly depending on internet latency. And if it’s nighttime versus early morning or mid afternoon, all sorts of things can affect the scores I see completely randomly, but look at what they’re telling you for recommendations and why they’re giving you the score they’re giving you. And that will often help you to know, okay, where’s my biggest win. And then that’s kinda what I look at first is where’s your biggest win. Don’t just go start going down the list. But look for the one things that’ll have the biggest impact and, and work on those first. Cause typically those are gonna be easier to solve. Hopefully they’re easier to solve than not always, but look for the ones that are gonna get you the big wins.
Arlen
[01:15:32]
That’s good. Good to know. Cause I’ve seen some tests, I’ve seen GT metrics and I’ve seen some other testing sites where, you know, they try to, they kind of hook you by give you that score. But a lot of times, like you said, there’s a lot of other factors there as to how they came up with that. And so just because it’s a, a low score, like you said, at a certain time, it could be other factors of, of reasons time to day and stuff
Shane
[01:15:54]
Like that. Yeah. Well, especially on, on Google’s page feed insights. Yeah. You look at their mobile test and everyone’s like, well I want my site to do really good on mobile, but the thing you gotta remember with their mobile test is it’s worst case scenario. It’s on the slow 3g connection. And most of us are on 4g five G you know, there’s people on 3g, but slow 3g is a totally different animal and that. So if you can get a good score on slow 3g, you’re doing insanely good. Okay. You know, so that’s like, you’re gonna have to spend days on, on it usually to get it really running nice on, on that with certain they, they can cheat the system and kinda make it look like you’re doing okay or better than you really are on those. But, but for the most part, that’s something you gotta be careful of.
Shane
[01:16:45]
And even there was a site I was looking at with the customer last week, I think it was, and he kept getting around, you know, to 10 to 30 on mobile and it’s like, what’s going on? What can I do to improve this? And so we were looking at a couple different things. And then the next day we had done a few things and I ran the test and it was at a 70, we’re like, oh, that’s fantastic. I ran it again. And it dropped a 40 something and I ran it one more time and it was even dropped a few more points. And then I ran it a fourth time and it was at 30. It was like,
Arlen
[01:17:19]
Seriously, what’s
Shane
[01:17:21]
Going on, Google? What is your problem? It’s so there there’s a lot of different factors. One of the biggest reasons we recommend GT metrics is cuz you get to pick your testing location. Yeah. Cause they’re using similar metrics. And so it’s like, well, why not choose Googles? Cuz they’re the most popular, but that’s what the biggest reason is it lets you choose the location and it’ll be more consistent that way. Cuz you’re always testing from the same pool of servers with Googles. I’m sure they got servers all over the world. And so it’s kind of random as to what servers you’re gonna get. And if you get three different tests in a row and they’re all using different locations and you’re using a CDN, well then you’re really gonna have trouble. Cause it’s gonna have slow performance all the way. Cause every time it’s gonna be getting uncashed assets on the CDN. So that’s, that’s a whole nother mess.
Arlen
[01:18:14]
Yeah. Yeah. Makes, makes a lot of sense. Now if we’re, we’re, we’re looking at all of these kind of three things that make up the whole performance, is there a, if someone is just sitting down and they’re trying to figure out, okay, what’s the best strategy for me to kind of dig in here, fix my sites performance, where do they start? Is there a particular strategy in, in mind when they’re looking to, to kind of go through everything, what, is there a particular thing that you would recommend as far as moving forward
Shane
[01:18:44]
In general? I kind of go in the order that I mentioned earlier with the different categories and that would be looking at image optimization first and notably, you know, making sure the images are well compressed, well optimized and then properly sized, lazy loading can, can have a huge impact there. Especially if you have an image heavy site, you know, if you’re, you’re showcasing a lot of the products on your home pay page or on any given page that can be super important. You know, if you’re only doing six to 10 on a page, you might get away with, you know, decent performance. But yeah, if you’ve got more than 10, 20 images, lazy load is huge for that. Okay. And then going down from that, I always make sure and almost, I would say page cashing first, making sure you’re, you’ve got some sort of page cashing, whether it’s plugin based or server based, you know, most of those, no code solutions are gonna have page cashing built in better web hosts.
Shane
[01:19:46]
Like Kinta WP engine flywheel. I think Pagely is a bunch of the, the bigger managed hosts we’ll have server based cashing built in, but no matter what, yeah. That’s like the number one plugin that I tell people to install or functionality that you need is make sure you have page cashing, number one, then yeah. Hit the image, optimization, looking at those different aspects. And if you get a plugin like hours, then it just takes care of most of that for you, which is fantastic. Saves me a lot of time. That’s why I built it course. I’m spending all the time, making it better and then JavaScript and CSS and those other assets that tends to be lower hanging fruit, but it can, there’s things with those that can make, make a big difference on, on rendering time. And that’s, that’s the area where you get into where the, the site itself isn’t necessarily any lighter, but there’s things you can do to make it feel lighter to the user. And so deferring, JavaScript, deferring CSS and using critical CSS or that above the fold CSS, having that in line makes it so that the, you know, as soon as that page is built, boom, it can be displayed and it doesn’t have to wait for anything kind of the ultimate in, in user experience on that.
Arlen
[02:21:11]
Yeah, definitely. Well, yeah. Thanks for sharing those, those resources and tips. That definitely helps now as we, we get ready to, to close things out. One of the things that I was thinking about is you mentioned doing things as far as the CSS, the JavaScript and things like that. One of the things that I’ve seen a lot of sites get plagued with is these are specifically WordPress sites is being slowed down by specific WordPress plugins that for whatever reason, maybe these plugins aren’t, you know, well optimized, maybe they’re on slow servers. Maybe they’re calling a bunch of, and those things and can really slow down sites. I’ve seen a, a ton of different WordPress sites that are kind of plagued by this. And it’s, you know, I’ve talked to the site owners and they’re saying, you know, I’m of the great host wise. It so slow, what can be done when you’re you’re know, you’re, you’re kind of dealing with these third party plugins that have to render and they’re, you know, maybe it’s a live chat. Maybe it’s some different widgets that you have. Is there anything that can be done other than trying another tool?
Shane
[02:22:15]
Yeah. So the first thing I always look at with, with any of those things, especially like a live chat or, you know, some of the exit intent popups and lead generators and stuff like that is make sure that it can be loaded asynchronously or deferred. And so that can do wonders for performance on that side of things, since it basically makes it so that, you know, the page can be loaded and the users can see what’s there start interacting. And then all those extra bells and whistles get loaded in asynchronously. So without the user having to wait for ’em and so that way you get all that nice functionality without having to suffer, making the user suffer for it. One of the, the things I was thinking of, especially with eCommerce sites to watch out for, with WooCommerce in particular that we’ve seen is variations. So if you’re using product variations, be real careful that those aren’t getting outta control. Cause if you have too many that can really go nuts on the database and you can end up with pages, we’ve seen pages that take a minute, minute and a half, two minutes even just to load a single page. And it’s just all variations. They had hundreds of variations and it was just like, oh, I think you need to revamp something in
Arlen
[02:23:34]
Here. So
Shane
[02:23:36]
Right. And, and with that much, you know, it was a big task, but hopefully they’re able to, to make some headway on that. Cause it, no amount of page cashing is going to fix that. Cause you’re going to have people that are gonna have that uncashed page and then they’re gonna be stuck in you just lost that customer. Yeah. So
Arlen
[02:23:56]
Yeah, I I’ve seen that too.
Shane
[02:23:58]
So even your uncashed performance needs to be decent, at least in that five to ten second range, if not better. But yeah. Some of the things I I’ve looked at over the years, cuz we’ve had plugins on, even on our site that I was like, man, something slowing things down in our case, it was on the admin side. So it wasn’t as critical. But what I ended up doing is I just went through and started disabling my plugins. I just, if you, if you’ve clone of your site that really helps. And a lot of hosts have staging setups that you can do or you can just, you know, do a site clone with something like duplicator or there’s another one I was thinking of, but I can’t remember what it is. Nope. Okay. But there’s, there’s a lot of different tools out there that will let you clone a site and, and set a basic copy so that you can play around and mess around with that. If you’re nervous about, you know, if you’re getting lots of traffic, you don’t want to go disabling all plugins on your production site, but that can be one of the quickest ways you start disabling plugins. And then as soon as it starts working fast again, you’re like, oh, well that was the one.
Arlen
[02:25:04]
Right, right
Shane
[02:25:06]
Up. All other plugins that can help narrow those down sometimes are query. I think it’s called query monitor it lets you see any database queries that are slower or you know, things that are generating a lot of queries. There’s one that kind works. So you gotta kind to take it with a grain of salt, which hopefully it’s still maintained. I haven’t used it in ages, but it it’s the P3. I think it’s P3 performance, profiler, something like that. But yeah, those are a couple of plugins that I’ve used, but sometimes you just disable plugins until you find the culprit and then you go that, oh, got it. Finally. And then yeah. You know, sometimes you can just report it to the developer and say, Hey, I was having trouble with this to say with your plugin and everything got fast again. And you know, if it’s a solid plugin, they’re gonna wanna fix that. Yeah, sure. In other cases you, you know, if the guide, you know, whoever it is, doesn’t respond for a week or to you then it’s like, eh, well then maybe you better look for an alternative.
Arlen
[02:26:12]
Right, right. So that’s a good, good rule of thumb, you know, when in doubt, just pull the plug and see. So what’s the culprit. But a lot of times, like you said, these developers, these companies that, that have these plugins, they may be aware of it. Maybe there’s a fix to it or they have an another updated version of it that you just need to go forward with. So yeah. A lot of times they know, but yeah, pulling the plug is a quick way to kind of get down to it. So yeah. I appreciate that. That advice and piece there and yeah. Well, it’s been, been awesome talking to you, you Shane, I definitely learned a lot. Like I said, a lot of times on the podcast, we’re talking about doing things to drive people to the site, but you know, a lot of times people don’t realize that all of these performance issues, no matter how much traffic they’re, they’re driving to this site, it will, you know, it may not pan out like they would have, have hoped for, or because of site performance issues. Because like you said, our, our brains are hardwired to not have any interruptions. And then as soon as there’s that interruption, you know, that’s a, that’s a bad experience and people are just gonna jump ship and you know, on top of that, there’s the, of course the tension pan span of people is definitely a lot less these days. Yeah. So,
Shane
[02:27:22]
Yep. For sure.
Arlen
[02:27:24]
Keep that mind as well. People don’t wanna wait around for anything. So definitely keep that in mind. Well, yeah, it’s been awesome talking Duchenne. One of the things I always like to do when I close things out, just so our audience get to know you a little bit better. If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.
Shane
[02:27:41]
Yeah, sure. One of my favorite things to do around here is play disc golf. Okay. I’ve taken that up over the last few years and it’s been a blast playing and, and getting to know a lot of the guys around here, even in a small town that are, that are playing disc golf and nice way to unplug and relax. And yeah, if you’ve never tried it, give it a shot. It’s a blast.
Arlen
[02:28:02]
Okay. Okay. Gotcha. So did, is that with like a, you’re using a Frisbee or what is that actually
Shane
[02:28:09]
Be careful calling it Frisbee. I don’t care, but some people are like, they’re not
Arlen
[02:28:12]
Frisbees they’re discs. Oh, OK. OK. So it’s
Shane
[02:28:15]
Different. They, they are D they’re different. Okay. They’re different shape than a, you know, what you would think of as a catch Frisbee or something like ultimate Frisbee man had a lot of fun with ultimate Fri feedback in the day too. But yeah, it’s a different style disc. It’s a lot thinner lot thicker rim, but yeah, it’s a lot of fun watching those things fly. Once you figure out how to get those things gliding, it’s just like, whoa, that was cool. Okay.
Arlen
[02:28:43]
Okay. Good, good stuff. Good stuff. Yeah. And I know I’m sure in the spring and the summer, I know you said you’re from Montana and I’m sure it’s great to be out in lovely Montana, Montana air. I’m sharing the spring
Shane
[02:28:54]
The summer. Oh yeah, absolutely.
Arlen
[02:28:56]
Yeah. That’s awesome, man. Well, great. Well thank you for sharing that, Shane. I appreciate that. And lastly, before we let you go, if you don’t mind letting our listeners know what’s the best way for them to get in contact, you kind get in contact with you if they’d like to reach out to you and, and pick your brain anymore about site performance.
Shane
[02:29:15]
Yeah, absolutely. So our website is E www.io. It’s three Ws. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter at Eewww IO. We’re on YouTube rumble. You can search for us on there, or you can just email us directly if you want to [email protected], free users, page users, whatever you got questions about images and site performance.
Arlen
[02:29:41]
Just shoot us a note and we’ll be glad to help you out. Okay. That’s awesome. Thank you Shane, for sharing that, I definitely encourage people to reach out to you and we love it was great having you today on the eCommerce marketing podcast. Yeah. Great to be here. It’s a lot of fun.
speaker 1
[02:29:59]
Thank you for listening to the eCommerce market podcast.
Shane Bishop
Founder of EWWW Image Optimizer
The eCommerce Marketing Podcast walks you through everything that goes into ecommerce marketing — from inbound marketing to paid advertising to conversions. Learn the strategies top marketing experts use to grow their businesses.
Marketing Strategies and Topics Covered in this Episode: