 Winning the PageSpeed Race. Secrets to supercharge your website speed. Okay, let me give you a little brief history first on Google because we're talking about PageSpeed and obviously you're watching this video because you wanna increase your PageSpeed. And I can assure you that by the end of this video you're gonna be able to increase your PageSpeed with a little bit of tweaks and you're gonna rank higher. So let's talk about this. In 2009, Google announced that they wanted to increase PageSpeed, which means the load time. How quick that page actually comes up. So in 2010, Google announced that part of their rankings would be PageSpeed. In other words, the pages that loaded faster would have an SEO advantage over pages that loaded slower. So this is something you have to look at if you wanna rank your web pages. Now, five years later in 2015, Google announced that there were more searches on mobile devices than there were on desktops. And by 2019, that had grown to 61% of all searches are on mobile devices. Now, Google has a thing called Accelerated Mobile Pages which is to encourage people to not only have a responsive website on mobile device and have a desktop but to have accelerated mobile pages in addition to that. Now, I'll throw this up on the screen right now. Although many site owners and SEO complain about having to tend to the PageSpeed and AMP on top of the other 200 plus ranking factors that already give them headaches, PageSpeed is indeed a worthy effort for site owners to focus on. In 2017, Google conducted a study where the results very much justified their focus on making a web faster. They found that as page load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases, get this guys, by 123%. Now, Google even announced a thing called Core Web Vitals. And why is all of this stuff so important nowadays because people's attention span has become so short? So the faster your pages load, the faster they come up on a mobile device, the better off you are because their attention span is so low that they may just leave. So that's why we have to pay attention to this now. Now, I want you to think of your PageSpeed load time like winning a car race, okay? If you wanted to win a car race, what would you do? You would have the lightest, most simple car with the most power and most control and that way you would be faster than all the other cars. And that's how you have to think of your website. It's a car race with your web pages. You don't want complicated pages that do a lot of things and then look real fancy and then have a lot of colors and a lot of stuff moving because that makes your website heavy and that makes it slow and we wanna go fast. Now, I want you to think of it this way. A race car doesn't have cup holders. No, they don't have that. They don't have radios. They don't have sun visors. They don't have any of these things because that does not help them win the race. And it's the same thing with your website. Don't put a lot of stuff on the pages that people are gonna be going to because they don't need that. That's not what they need and it's gonna slow down your website. Now, this would include getting rid of third-party coding on there, optimizing some of your images and not having them at such a high resolution that they take a long time to load. All of these things are gonna help your website. Now, let's talk about making it powerful. I know the main goal of you guys and most of you have websites is to have the cheapest hosting plan possible. Matter of fact, you may have even searched cheapest hosting plan possible. However, you're gonna be on what's called a shared server with a whole bunch of other websites which is gonna slow down your site. Why not pay a few dollars more a month and have a dedicated hosting plan so that your website loads incredibly fast? Did you know that a lot of these discount hosting plans cram tens of thousands of websites into one hosting plan which slows everybody down and it leaves you competing for power? You don't want that happening. Now, check out the graphic I'm gonna put on the screen right now. If you wanna race in big leagues, it's time to get a grown-up hosting plan. For WordPress websites, managed hosting companies such as WP Engine and Flywheel utilize servers that are powerful and specifically tuned to serve up WordPress websites faster. If managed WordPress hosting isn't your thing or if you don't have a WordPress website, okay, upgrading to a VPS or virtual private server will result in your website having way more computing resources available to you. You'll also have more control over your own hosting environment, allowing you to tune up your engine with things like the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, varnish, caching and other modern web server technologies. You'll no longer be at the mercy of your shared hosting plan. You can actually do something with your hosting plan. Now, if you wanted to win this race with your race car, what else would you do? You'd probably drive it better, right? You'd cut the corners a little bit more. You'd be a little bit sleeker than the other drivers. That's what you need to do with your website. Think about your navigation. How quickly can somebody navigate your website? Get from one part to the other. This is super important that you have very easy navigation, very easy website to use because even if it loads quickly and all your images come up quick and your page comes up quick, if they have a hard time getting around your website, that's gonna hurt you too. Because if it's hard for them to get around your website, guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna leave. Now, check out the image I'm gonna put on the screen here. This is kinda cool. When a browser loads a webpage, it goes through a process called coincidentally painting. Each page is painted as the browser received bits of data from the webpage source code. This painting process can either be executed efficiently, such as painting walls before refinishing the floors, or it can be done in a more chaotic out-of-order fashion that requires several trips back to the beginning of the process to redo or fix or add something that could've, should've been done in the earlier process. Here's where things can get technical, but it's important to do whatever you can to help the site drive the track more efficiently. Now, let's talk a little bit more about how these pages load. And I wanna put a graphic up on the screen here too. This is how a CDN or content delivery network actually works. Getting back to our race car analogy. Utilizing caching, which actually has all that information ready and available for use, and a CDN equals a much faster trip around the racetrack. Those are two of the basic building blocks of an efficient page painting. And there are even more technologies that can be deployed as well. On WordPress, the following can be implemented via plug-in or plug-ins. Again, WP Rocket and ImagineFi are particularly good combo for achieving a lot of this. Okay, so I wanna talk to you now about core web vitals. Now, keep in mind, I know some of this is kinda technical, but once you educate yourself on this, you can go out and search for somebody to have do some of this work for you on Upwork or on Fiverr or whatever. But if you don't know about it, you don't know what to ask for, you don't even know what they're doing. So educate yourself on what needs to be done. Let's check out this graphic. Okay, so these are pretty technical concepts, but here's a quick overview to get you familiar with what they mean. First off, largest content paint refers to the painting of the largest element on the page. Google's PageSpeed Insights tool will tell you which element is considered to be the LCP element of that page. A lot of times this is a hero image or a large slider area, but it varies from page to page. So run the tool to identify the largest content paint on your page and then think about what you can do to make that particular element faster. Next one I wanna talk to you about is the first input delay, okay? It's the delay between the user's first action and the browser's ability to respond to it. An example of an FID or first input delay issue would be a button that is visible to a user sooner than it becomes clickable. The delay would be caused by the click functionality loading notably later than the button itself. And the last one there is the cumulative layout shift. Okay, so that's called a CLS. It's a set of three big words basically that refer to one simple concept. You know when you're loading a webpage on your phone and you go to click on something or read something, but then it hops up or down because something else loaded above or below it. Okay, we've all had that irritating thing happen. That movement is the CLS. It's majorly annoying and it's a byproduct of an inefficient page painting. Okay, so in conclusion, I want you to categorize your website. Is it a race car? Does it do all these things? Or is it a golf cart? A golf cart. You know, it's funny I live in a neighborhood where a lot of people have golf carts. And it's funny, here's why it's funny that a lot of people in my neighborhood have golf carts and they go up to the community center in the swimming pool and all that. It's funny because we don't have a golf course. No, we don't have a golf course, but we have a lot of people with very high-end golf carts. But the thing with the golf carts, they may be nice, like your website, may be nice, but it's not really doing the job. It's too slow. It's not gonna win any races. So you wanna have the race car type website. It's clean and slick and moves fast and gets people what they want. As opposed to that really tricked out golf cart that's got a lot of horns and bells and vessels and fancy wheels on it and all this. I mean, really, some of these golf carts in my neighborhood are insane. They spend thousands and thousands of dollars in tricking out this golf cart, but it's still a slow golf cart. Is your website the same way? I want you to think about that. Now, I also have a course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free, no charge to you. And all you have to do is click. It's a $97 course, but you're gonna get it for free. That's a pretty good deal. Don't forget to subscribe, hit the subscribe button down there. Turn it from red to gray and ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or when I upload a video. 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