 Welcome to Chris Lemlin's session. Chris wants to be a product and innovation at Liquid's Web. He's a blogger at chrislemlin.com and also winners.blog. He's a writer of various ebooks and an expert speaker. He loves telling stories to help people leverage their technology for their personal use and business. And the strategist, Chris Lemlin. Yeah! She was struggling with her website. She called me on clarity.fm and she was like, I'm having a problem. The website is slow and it's not converting. So I have a conversion problem and I'm having trouble. I said, what are you selling? She said sandpaper. I'm not sure conversion is the problem. She said no, it's sandpaper but it's sandpaper of all different kinds and I mean we have international customers from across the globe that all buy different kinds of sandpaper for different kinds of projects that they do. And we make good money out of it but we're having a big problem. And I said, so who comments that? She said yeah, I said okay. Can you give me the URL so she gives me the URL. Now if you don't know clarity, clarity.fm is a service where people call me and they pay by the minute to get advice. And I charge a decent amount of dollars per minute so everything about this has to be fast. So she gives me the URL. I type the URL into my browser. I have really good internet access. You know you go to that like speed test or something and you write it and you're like oh look, the dial's going way far so I know that it's not going to be my problem if something's slow. And normally on a call like this, silence just feels like it takes even longer. So I say, can you give me the URL? She says sure. I put it into the browser. I hit enter and we begin to wait. And we wait. And we wait. Do you know how many seconds it took to load that home page? It was 27 seconds. 27 seconds. And on a clarity call where you pay by the minute it felt like hours. And she's like what are you doing? What are you doing? Are you looking at the site? What are you doing? And I'm like just hold on a second. Still loading. Still loading. Hold on a second. I said I don't know all of your conversion problems. But I know at least one. Right? When you found that you saw the oh, I like this kind of same paper for this kind of product, right? And you clicked the category that was on the home page like this is the kind of same paper I want. You clicked. You started waiting all over again. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. You finally get the page to load. And I'm like okay here it is. All right I'm going to add it to my cart. You click a button. And you start waiting. And waiting. Here's what you should know if you don't know this already. A two second delay. A two second delay in a WooCommerce site going from one page to another. Right? An internal movement from one page to another in a WooCommerce store. A two second delay can cause a 51% decrease in session length. Now this is not going to be rocket science. But let me be clear. When does conversion happen in the course of a session? At the first half or at the second half? Right? It's the second half. For those of you that were like wondering it's the second half. If you cut session length in half you are also often cutting conversion completely out of mix. Right? If you have a two second delay going from page to page and you cut session length in half you are likely cutting conversion out of mix completely. People are just not well let's just do a quick quiz here. Right? You go to a website that is not Amazon.com. Okay? You're looking at something that you think hey this is pretty cool. You go to click to get more details and you wait three seconds. And then you click to go back or to add to your cart and you wait a few more seconds. How many of you keep plugging along and how many of you go find it on another website? How many of you keep plugging along? Right? There's three of you. You're so good. The rest of us are like no thanks. I'll just go somewhere else. Right? Here's another thing to note. And the last slide that I just showed you on the last data I showed you on the 51% decrease session length that was from a 2017 study. This was also from a 2017 study. Right? That the optimal time to wait to get to a site and have it load up is mere seconds. Mere seconds. Right? And you and in fact that special number 2.7 that's a special number because Google has decided that they're going to determine how friendly you are and if your site takes on it in 2.7 seconds to load especially if it's a store, right? They're going to decide that you don't really want customers. 2.7 is the matching number. If you are above 2.7, Google is just like no, we'll send traffic somewhere else because you're just anti-customers. Now here's the crazy thing. I run a team at Liquid Web where we have just launched a Managed to Commerce product. That is not what I'm talking here today but I will tell you that so here's what we did. We went to WooCommerce.com. You can all do this too, right? If you're going to showcase you have a whole bunch of WooCommerce stores people have submitted and said hey, check it out, I'm using WooCommerce. There are 562 sites if you click hitting next and you pull down all the URLs 562 sites. Of the 562 sites 60 no longer use WooCommerce. Right? They've gone on to do something else whatever. That's not a big deal in the big scheme of things. 502 sites. 476 of them take longer than 4 seconds to load. Now you're going to go oh, this is WooCommerce's fault. Like if everybody is slow it's WooCommerce's fault. It's not. It's not WooCommerce's fault, right? There's a whole bunch of things that go into it and we have a target. We know what we want for those stores for every one of those stores and all of your stores, right? Get it down under 2.7. A third 2017 study, right? said 53% of the traffic to stores specifically was coming on mobile devices. Now here's the crazy thing about mobile devices. You won't have them, right? Everybody here have a mobile device? You likely have three things with you at any point when you leave the house. Your keys, your wallet and your mobile device. Right? So what happens when you're on a mobile device and you're looking at a store, right? Oh, I'm checking out this thing. I want to buy this thing. And then Facebook pops up or Instagram pops up or you get a notification a text message from someone and you get distracted. If the majority of your traffic is coming to you on mobile phone and your site is slow and they get distracted you've lost the conversion there too. Does that make sense? So what I'm telling you, not shocking, right? It's not a big deal. It's not something you won't understand. Is that speed matters, right? 100 millisecond delay can hurt conversion times by 7% speed matters. What happens is you hear all the time, right? How many of you are developers? Okay, how many of you are not developers? Awesome. Let me talk to the non-developers. When you are non-developer and you talk to a developer, they're like, well, it could be fast, it could be cheap, or it could be good. Pick two. Right? And now we say, no, I want to pick all three. I want to pass. I want to cheat. And I want it good. So what we're going to do with our time today is we're going to look at stuff you can do that's fast, stuff that you can do that's cheap, and then some of the stuff that's really good that may cost you a little bit or may take some time. Does that make sense? Everyone, we're good for this? This is the verbal part where you're like, yeah! Oh, that's great. All right. So we're going to get started right away. By the way, every one of these slides is going to have one and only one point. So if you were thinking, I'm going to have to write every one of these points down, if you go to slideshare.net, slideshare.net slash C is in Chris, F is in Frank, L-E, M is in Mary, A, C-F-L-M-A, slideshare.net, slash C-F-L-M-A, this is the most recent presentation that's all there. So you don't have to do that. You don't have to write all the notes down. The other thing you can do is take your mobile phone, if you have it, point it up to the screen, take a picture, and if you want, and tweet it out to the world, and make sure that you put at Chris Lama so that everyone knows that I was the brilliant creator of this most beautiful slide. Right? First thing you can do, super fast, get rid of the plugins you're not using, and you're like, duh, that's stupid. Except, do you know that the average WooCommerce site that we've seen at Liquid Web, the average WooCommerce site has over 30 plugins on their site, at least 5 of which are constantly deactive. And you're like, what's this? Now we've seen some other sites that have like 47 plugins and 12 deactive. And you're like, dear God, what are you doing? And they're like, I don't know, I didn't build it. Someone else built it for me? I gave them, I said I want all of Amazon and I want it by Saturday and I have $300. And this is what I got. And you go, yeah, okay, that lines up. I get that. So here's the thing, right? If you've bought a WooCommerce store or you've built a WooCommerce store, you may have used certain plugins to import data. You may have used certain plugins to monitor what's going on. You may have done all sorts of things that at this point you no longer need. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. The first pass, okay, we haven't used that. You can ask questions. Does anyone use this? Why is this here? I'm not joking. I have a WooCommerce customer who had three redirection plugins. Because if one is good, three is probably better. Three, you're like, this is insane. And it was because he had different people work on the site over different periods of time. He wanted to say, well, this is my favorite redirection plugin. I pulled it in and done some something there. So get rid of the ones you no longer using. That's super fast, right? Also, get rid of the ones that could just be a snippet, right? Some, it's not you. Okay, let's be clear. This is not any of you. But there are some people out there who have activated a plugin that is like, it does 45 things and they're using it to do one thing. Like, turn off the shop buttons. I just want a catalog of my website. You're like, yeah, okay. So I downloaded this super premium plugin that it controls all your WooCommerce styles and it does all these things. And then you're like, well, what are you using for? Well, I just wanted to turn off this one. And you're like, dear God, we could have done that in one line of code, right? You don't need the kitchen sink plugin to do that. I'm like, well, I didn't know. What's crazy is people will pull five plugins like that to do five different things, right? And you're like, whoa, we're going crazy here, right? Later in this presentation, I'll show you a place where you can get a whole bunch of snippets so that you can just load it up into a plugin called Code Snippets, right? And so you can just pull these things in and go, oh, good, there it is. I don't have to use plugins to do that. Okay? I know that at every WordCamp that you've been to for five years, we have told you don't do this. Don't go get the multi-featured, super bloated theme for your website. Do you know how much impact we have had as public speakers who have been speaking at WordCamps to 300 across the country for five years in a row? You're talking about 1,500 or more events and in each of those events, two to three tracks and in each of those tracks, five to eight people speaking, you're talking about tons of people who have said stop picking your theme because it comes with 42 form plugins and 36 slider plugins and because the demo looks beautiful but it's like 900 megabytes large. We've said it over and over. Do you know how much impact we have had? Zero. That's round numbers. Zero. Zero. Because this is what we do, right? We go onto Theme Forest or we go somewhere else, someplace and we look and we go, does it look beautiful? That's cool. And what does it come with? Because I don't have to buy extra stuff. Ooh, look, it comes with everything. Great. I'll use that one. We had a client the other day who wanted to bring their site over to our stuff and it was WooCom Store. Could you take a look at it? We looked at it, 17 second page look. 17 second page look. We did one thing. We pulled off the theme and loaded up another one. A lightweight theme, which we'll talk about in a second. We just swapped the theme, right? Now, granted, it did change the layout and it didn't look a little bit. It wasn't dramatic, right? Three second look. You're a super cool theme, right? You have to decide that you want that multifaceted, multi-featured, come with everything, every plug-in possible. You have to want it 14 seconds so badly that you're like, yes, I understand what I'm doing and I still want it, right? And that means conversions are walking out the door, right? So you have to be really careful about what theme you're using. Does that make sense? Yeah? I know you all agree but you know what's going to happen tomorrow? You're going to go look at the theme and you're still going to do the same thing, right? Because I already know. I've been lulled into this. You're saying yes? It's not yes. Compress all your images, right? Compress all your images. It's not hard to do. There are tons of different ways you can do this. Eight or nine different plug-ins. There are things you can run on the desktop if you care about. Just take all your images and run them through. You know why? The more photographer who took the beautiful photos of those products, that photographer used a high-end digital camera. That high-end digital camera had a 24 megapixel or 42 megapixel perspective on that image and they sent it to you because that that photographer likely has been doing photography for years. And because that photographer has been doing it for years, they remember the pre-digital age where they would send it to places that would print images. So you need it. 300, 400 DPI. So they're sending you a 5 megabyte image for something you're going to put as a 300 pixel box on your screen. You don't need an image that's more than 810, 100 kP, and they're sending you 5 megabytes. You know, you're like, cool. They shared me Dropbox. Let me grab all those images and just move them to my WooCommerce store. Everything takes forever. Average website. Not even WooCommerce. Average website. Taking one, two seconds to load. More often than not, it's because the images. So compress them. You don't need them. Any larger than what you're going to actually display on your site. Does that make sense? Awesome. Now, this one is fast but controversial. Okay? Here's the thing. Your store may be unique and this may not apply. If you're the kind of store that people come to, they are regularly shoppers at your store. They come to it all the time. And they regularly log in. They love getting recommendations for themselves personally. And you are getting high conversions. This probably does not apply at all. But the majority of stores don't function that way. The majority of stores, what happens is you put all your stuff out to display and then customers just come and they take just a quick dive to look, right? Because they were doing a Google search and they were like, they get a leather bag. And so they get a whole bunch of links for stores that sell leather bags. They right click, open up tap, open up tap, open up tap. They got a whole bunch of tabs open. And they're going to come to your site and they're just going to peek around, look around and get out. That's the majority of your people. So you can go look at Google Analytics and be like, how many people visited my store this month? Or this week? And you're like, oh, we have 2,000 people visit. Then you go back and look at your, well, how many transactions? We have six. Okay, if you have 2,000 people visiting your store and six of ours, doesn't it make more sense to optimize for the 1,994 of them? Of course it does. Because if you're one of those tabs that they get, they spin up the tab that opens and the page is still loading, they just go to the next tab. I'll boot that shirt up. I'll just spend my time there. They never got to your site because it was still circling around, still loading because your site took so long to load. So what do you do? Get rid of the customized, personalized data that's sitting in the header, sitting in the footer. You might even have a sidebar that says, look, here's your shopping cart. And the reason you put your shopping cart there was because if someone added something to a cart they could get that immediate feedback that said, here's the item in your cart right there, on your site. But so few people are doing that, but now you've created a page that can't be cached in any way, shape, or form. You've done that to yourself. So get rid of some of the personalized stuff right now. Okay, your store may be unique enough that you're like, no, I can't do that. Great. Well, we'll also have the tips for you. All right. Here's one. Super easy. If your website is not running PHP 7, right? Just say yes. Right? And if you don't know if it's running PHP 7, contact your host and say, is my site running PHP 7? And they're like, oh, no, it's not right now. Great. Is there something I can do to make it happen? Yeah. We'll just make that happen. Great. Thank you very much. Hey, can you look at my database? Is it running in ODB? Right? Is that the storage engine for my database? They're like, let me look. No, it's not. Well, is that something you can do easily? Yeah. Okay. Great. These are not things you have to spend a lot of time on. You just have to know to ask. But you will dramatically speed up your store if you change how the infrastructure is working. Okay? So those are all the fast ones. Does that make sense? Yeah? We good? Have you got enough that you're like, this session is good enough that we can leave now and we don't have to worry about the rest of them? No? It's not going to. I'm trying. Okay. Let's see if this next one helps. Okay? Yeah. We talked about this already. Changing the theme is something like, wait, we tested 50 different themes for WooCommerce. 50 different themes. Ran through a whole bunch of different tests. We have 25 different performance tests that navigate through. Things where you're logged in. Things where you're logged off. Right? We're doing it where people are actually, you know, we're having, you know, we hit the site while other people are checking my account and other people are putting things in their cart. We ran through 25 different tests against 50 different themes. The fastest theme is a free theme called Astra. A-S-T-R-A. And you're like, are you kidding me? Now they have a pro version that you pay a little more for that gives you some additional features like more plugins to attach to the theme. But this lightweight theme and it works great with a page builder. If you're someone who likes Beaver Builder or Elementor or one of those, it works with those. Right? But you get a lightweight theme and suddenly you're like, this is amazing. We do what we do a performance challenge where we invite you to migrate your store temporarily. Just a copy of the site over to our servers and we'll put it on our managed WordPress Management Commerce offering a bunch of different optimizations on our platform. And then we'll show you what the speed was over there what the speed is over here and the difference. And then we do this one last extra thing where we get rid of your theme and put in Astra and just go, look, we're not saying you have to do this but this is how awesome it helped, right? And it's amazing because you go, okay, it was a 10 second load and then we did a bunch of optimizations and it became like a 5 second load or a 4 second load and then we changed the theme and it was like a 1 second load. And every time it comes back to well, your theme was written by someone who cared about how it looked. Not necessarily cared about how it performed. Now there's nothing wrong with the look. I mean, honest to God, that's what we wanted themes to be. Themes of the things that make your site look the way they look. So the people who are working on making themes look the way they look, they're good people. But just because you're good at designing something that looks good doesn't mean you're good at making sure it performs well. And performs well in the context of e-commerce. So what you want to do is look for a theme that's lightweight and performs well. Now, storefront is another one that the guys at e-commerce have rolled out, the people there. And it's free too. Again, you can pay to get child themes, you can pay to get extra allowance. But there are several themes that are super lightweight. Evaluate that for yourself. Does that make sense? This one is cheap. It's not free, but it's cheap. You can hire. You can go to codable.io and you can hire someone. You can call your host. You may have to pay a little search rubs depending on who the host is. But you can ask someone to look at your database. And we're looking for orphans. Now orphans are not these are not people. These are things that were left in your database when you deactivated a plugin, stopped using a theme, changed how you were doing something and they just sat there. You have tables that are sitting there. You may have external calls or transits. There's all sorts of things you could have sitting there that you don't want to need. And you go, yeah, but I'm not using it, so what does it matter? Your database as a whole is storing things in a predefined set of tables. Database tables are the places where we store things. If you have extra entries in that table that you don't need every time we do a query at the data from those tables that we do need we have to go through all the other stuff you don't. Imagine if we're in this room trying to listen to this conversation and we said, oh, well there's going to be like, you know, there's going to be a big commerce and a Shopify and a Squarespace e-commerce guy. They're all going to be up here. They're not going to get a mic because only Chris gets the mic because this conversation is who commerce, but the rest of them can be up here and they're just going to be talking. Just ignore them. And you're like, well, I can kind of ignore them, but it's annoying. And it's hard to hear all the time and sometimes I miss a word. Well, that's what's happening in your database. You've loaded up with other stuff that doesn't belong there and it's hard to get at the rest of the stuff that you do care about. So hire someone to go in and clean it up and they'll just go, okay, it's not a big job, right? Just go in and you're like, okay, I see that you have these tables here. No one are needed. I see you have these entries here. No one are needed. Clean it out. Does that make sense? Now, WooCommerce has a whole bunch of super cool features and because those features are super awesome, they require scripts that have to be in your site to actually be able to do things, right? This is fantastic. Everything about how WooCommerce was designed for this lets you be super flexible. That's their point, their ability to let you do what you want to do. But with great power comes great responsibility. And some of you, not you, you know people. Other people aren't very responsible, right? So what happens? You have your theme or your code or another plugin that is actually spinning up additional input calls or JavaScript calls or prepping for shortcuts that will never materialize on a page because you have already determined you're not going to put a shortcode there. So why do you want those Woo functions running on those pages? We love JavaScript, right? We love JavaScript. You learn it deeply and JavaScript was this thing that you was like oh it's so cool because it's asynchronous, right? It's just going to go off and do its own call. You know what happens with JavaScript is that first you have to connect to whatever server has the JavaScript. Then you have to pull it down. Then your processor has to go figure out what's in it and what we have to do with it. And all of that takes time and we're talking about speed and performance every second every 100 milliseconds count so if you have 3, 4 or 27 additional calls and you're pulling files down and then you're waiting for them to come all the way down and then you're processing them figuring out what you're compiling and what you're going to use. All for a page that has no shortcode in it you just threw away an extra second and a half, two seconds for no good reason. So limit root functions on non-root pages. Now, there is a super cool plugin called the query monitor plugin. This is one of those that you're going to want to install, use, and then de-install. You have to wait and get off because you don't want to leave plugins sitting around doing nothing but this is super cool because what it will do is it will actually show you the queries that are being run on your pages and you're going wait, what's a query? Everything about your store, everything about WooCommerce, everything about WordPress is fundamentally stored if it's not in a plugin file if it's not an image, it's stored in the database and in order to get the data from the database back to the engine to the PHP, the processor, brings it out to you all of it has to go back to a database unless it's cached, you're hitting a database. So think about it as the long distance call to your grandma. You have a long distance call, you have to make that call. Now, how much does it cost to make the call? It depends on where your grandma's at. And query monitor tells you, oh my grandmother, for the longest time was in South America, in Chile. We can only call her certain times of the day when the price was right. Right? This thing tells you the price of every one of those calls this thing tells you literally, here is exactly how many calls that plugin's making how many calls that plugin's making how many calls that page or that post or that plugin it's telling you that so that you can look at it and go, wait a minute I barely use that plugin. Why is it making a hundred queries? Right? And you can start asking yourself very special questions about I love my grandma, right? But I remember asking my mom hey, how come we don't call her when we come after school like we call the other grandma that happened to be here in California? I said we love her, we just don't love her that much. She was not my mom's mom, she was my dad's mom. All right. Dashboard, right? You log in to a WooCommerce store and you get the dashboard. You go to reports, you get admin screens, you go to products, you get admin lists, right? You get all that stuff in the admin sign and you get all that stuff in the dashboard and every one of those screens is making calls for the database, more queries and every time you make calls for those things you're impacting the performance of your production store customers. Does that make sense? Every call you make to the database for yourself is slowing down the performance of what your customer's experience on the store. So you can have a tremendous impact on your store simply by what you're looking at. And here's the crazy part. You can also have a tremendous impact on the performance of your store at things you're not looking at. How many of you spend a lot of time on the dashboard even if you're not running a WooCommerce store looking at everything that comes on your dashboard? How many of you are like, oh my god I love this dashboard and I spend a lot of time looking at all this stuff? Yeah, there's always one in the crowd. The reality is there's a whole bunch of queries that are running on that page on the dashboard that you don't ever look at. And there are columns. When you go to the product page, there are columns that they have to literally go to the database to go pull so that they can show you the price of the products or the orders or anything else that you're pulling queries and you and I even care. So start turning those things off. Take those things off the dashboard, turn off columns in the admin pages that you don't specifically need and limit the amount of calls you're making that impact your customer's side. Does that make sense? Awesome. And you're probably going, okay but hold on a second. How are we going to do that? I'm going to show you how to do that in just a second. Now we're here at that second. github.com lukecalf slash code dash snippets dash WP dash speed dash up. If you go to that URL Luke is a guy that works for us at the web and he has a ridiculous quantity of code snippets that just do different things and the beautiful things you're like, yeah but I don't read code. No, but you can read the title of the snippet. And the title of the snippet is stuff that's not imaginative. It says stuff like turn off the woo orders widget in the dashboard. And you go, great I'm not looking at the dashboard for orders. So yes, let me take that one and let me put it in my code snippets plugin and activate it. And the code snippets plugin lets you say activate this only on admin or activate it on the whole side or activate it just on the front end of the customers. And you're like, oh that's an admin one so let's just run it in admin. And you go, great that code snippet will turn that off. And there's a whole bunch more in there. And you can go, that's good let's try that. I'm not telling you which ones to run every choice of that is yours as you test out your store. But there's a whole bunch here to look at. Does that make sense? Those were all the cheap ones. Let's talk about spending some money. Change your host. Change your host. You're like wait a second don't you work at a host? Yep and I would tell you the same thing if you work with us right now if you're a customer of ours right now I would still tell you regularly evaluate your host. Do you know why? Every single hosting company in the world whether they own their own data center like we do or not whether you're sitting as a host is sitting on someone else's data center at the end of the day there is always a server right? Could be containers which sit on top of resource whatever but there is a computing resource and it turns out nobody gives you those for free. Someone has to make a capital investment so what happens? The people who make the most recent capital investment will have faster equipment than the people who are trying to milk another year out of the capital investment they made 5 years ago. So it doesn't matter which host you're talking about whether you're talking about GoDaddy or the GoWeb. At some point they had to put an expense and if they are not owning their own data center they're paying someone else that person has to pay for the expense and then that company is going to pass along that dynamic to them. So fundamentally at some point you're paying for outdated hardware the fastest thing you need to speed up your website test it on someone else's hardware it's ridiculous it's so simple it's stupid and it will cost you something because every migration costs you something right? But test it, take your stuff put it somewhere else, run through some tests and decide if you want to go there or not but you should do this regularly probably every 18 months to 24 months you should evaluate all the hosts all over again for serious performance you go oh, okay this one's faster, now this one's faster you don't have to have tremendous loyalty to OOs you have to have tremendous loyalty to that performance of that store because that's what drives conversions okay, now there are as much as I say get rid of these plugins and don't use big plugins and bloated plugins there are a couple plugins we found