LOCAL MARKET MONOPOLY EPISODE 47
Site Speed: How and Why to Make Your Website Faster
Podcast by Clarence Fisher
how to make your website faster

About This Episode

Does your local business website load slowly? Does it really matter? 

In this episode, Clarence dives into Google's recent update, Core Web Vitals, and discusses how your website must meet specific site speed guidelines or else risk big problems for your web presence and Google ranking. Plus, he offers simple tips to make your website faster so that you can make the cut instead of suffering the consequences of Google's hard-hitting hammer. 

If you want to protect your local business's online presence (and you should!), listening to this episode must be on your to-do list. 

Disclaimer: The transcription below is provided for your convenience. Please excuse any mistakes that the automated service made in translation.

Clarence Fisher: Does your website load slowly, does it even matter? Welcome back to Local Market Monopoly. I'm Clarence Fisher, your host. And today we're going to talk about Google's latest update. It's called core web vitals and how your website must meet specific sitespeed guidelines now, or you risk losing your ranking and your Google presence. I'm also going to give you some simple ways to make your website faster. Uh, so you don't suffer the consequences. Okay. It's a real deal. It's brand new. So stay tuned because we don't want you losing ranking. We'll be right back.

Intro: You're listening to Local Market Monopoly with Clarence Fisher, uncovering the tools, tactics, and strategies the most successful small businesses used to their local market and own the block.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. When I say losing ranking, I'm hoping pretty sure you understand what I'm talking about, your web pages rank on Google search. So when you look at the first page, you know, you have a number of websites there and you work hard during your SEO to rank as high as you possibly can. Well, the latest update Google's core web of vitals, it's important for you to take steps right now to protect those said rankings. They announced this thing in 2020 actually, but those ranking factors are just now starting to take effect they're kicking in and we are noticing the changes. So here's what you gotta do. You gotta act fast, right? So here's what they're looking for. Number one, loading performance. How fast is your website load? It's not just not good enough anymore to take even multiple tens of seconds.

Clarence Fisher: Your website needs to load very fast and then responsiveness. Now, when we say responsiveness is like, how fast does each page react to your visitors' input? Like when they are interacting with your website, how fast do things happen? Have you noticed lately? So the thing is now is that there's content that loads just on time as you're scrolling then the content loads instead of the entire website load, the entire page loading when you visit a site and the reason that is, is to make the page faster, but then also, we can have that interaction with you. You know. It's funny I got caught, I guess it was, it was last year we got caught, we put a brand new site up and we had a contest running on that site.

Clarence Fisher: Well, we had a what's called lazy load enabled on that website. Well, as we running traffic to the website, that wasn't the issue, but it became an issue because lazy load wasn't loading the, embedded contest widget in time before people would click off of the website. So the header would come in and people would scroll down for a second and because it was lazy, cause we had lazy load set. It, wasn't going to load, contest widget, the entry form until people scrolled down. And I was like, what's going on, man? We got like all these visits and the opt-in rate is a Bismal. This is not good. So thankfully we found out that that was the issue. I turned lazy load off for that page and boom, the widget that was embedded there, cause it was a third party content software that we embedded into that page, but it wasn't being triggered. So turned lazy load off. In instances like that, we're just not going to get away from, I mean the page is gonna load as quickly as we have it but when you start looking around at other websites, you'll notice that this lazy load and other type of tactics are being used now to only load content when the user needs to see it instead of trying to load the entire page. But they're also looking at visual stability. Does stuff shift around the screen as the page loads or does it remain stable and easy to view? These are some of the things that they're looking for in these Google web vitals. I'll tell you, you can kind of encapsulate this and is your site fast? Does it load fast and is the user experience enjoyable?

Clarence Fisher: How is the user experience? So it's fast site and user experience is really what they're looking into. So here's some tips that you can take and you can look for send to your web guy or web gal, your web guy, or web gal send this to them. And you can just send them this episode. The first thing you want to do is optimize your website code. It is not difficult at all to have a website that has, that is just super heavy with code. And because these sites are getting really big now specifically you want to, minify what the called minify all JavaScript. And if you have a WordPress site, you can upload something like, I think Hummingbird does this. The Hummingbird plugin, I think, uh, but you, you can Google Hummingbird, but then also minify JavaScript and there's a button on that, you know, for a WordPress that you're on that plugin that you can click and it will minify the JavaScript for you.

Clarence Fisher: We'll go and look for all this large code and kind of minify it for you. If you do not then the person who put together your website, you can reach out to them and say, Hey, let's have we optimized our web code and they will. I promise you they'll know exactly what you're talking about. You want to update all software that is running on your website. If you're using third party applications, make sure you're using the most recent edition. If you're, if you have a web WordPress, then make sure you keep WordPress updated. I think that's one of the things that I don't think a lot of business owners are told once or maybe they are, and maybe business owners don't believe it, but you have to have some type of maintenance plan when you have a website done or you have to take that in house and you're going to be responsible for logging into your website and making sure that the, all the plugins, especially if you have a WordPress site, all the plugins are updated, make sure that the WordPress core itself is updated.

Clarence Fisher: Okay. And make sure everything works together. I mean you have to do that. So again, get with your web person and see if they have some type of monthly maintenance it's super cheap. If they don't, if you don't, reach out to me because we do. Reduce the number of redirects on your website, and this is pages that are going to pages, uh, pages that are going to other pages. Another core, another plugin that you can use is one called Smush and you can use there are others, but you can use that. Or you can use a search for something else to optimize and compress all of the images on your website. That's definitely gonna make your website run faster. And you want to, you want to smush or make smaller, uh, make web ready, all of those images and to make sure that your site is caching correctly, that's going to save a lot of time and, you know, when people come to your site, it loads and then say they come back you don't want the whole thing reloading.

Clarence Fisher: I know you can use Hummingbird for that. And when I want to say Hummingbird, it's a plugin, or you can use WP cache is a C a C H E is another one we'll put these links, resources inside of in the show notes as well. And then clean up your site plugins. Here's the deal sites can get really bloated websites. And, and especially when I say plugins, I'm meaning not only WordPress, many other, other CMS or content management systems have plugins, but, WordPress for sure you want to make sure that you are deleting any plugins that you are not using because it slows the site down and it's just sitting there. And it's really easy to try out a plugin and if that didn't work, or maybe we're not using that anymore. And you're just deactivated, but it's still sitting there if you're not using it been deleted.

Clarence Fisher: And the last tip I have for you is to improve your server response time. And it's kinda techy, techy, techy, techy. ut if wherever you're hosting, you just want to reach out to them and say, Hey, how's our server response time. Are we in the, are we in the green? Are we in the good? I'm trying to make sure that our Google core web vitals are up to date. So I'm checking on this and they will say, yes! We are up to date. Or they will say, um....

Clarence Fisher: They say that, tell them to get their act together. So here's the deal. It is raw. It has already been brought in. Okay. It is rolling out, core web vitals. And you have to look at these things. If you notice that you are slipping in the rankings, I promise you, it is most likely this. So you got to get that tune up. Okay. Send this episode to open the discussion with the person that manages your website. If you don't have a person, definitely reach out to us, we will be happy to help you super inexpensive to tune up the website for you. All right. That's all I got for you this week. I hope you're enjoying your summer is still going crazy out there with the, with the vid, but the one nine, you know, I gotta be, I gotta be cool and give it a nickname. But do me a favor, comment, share like this episode and go out and put it to use. I'll see you next week.

Outro: We appreciate you listening to Local Market Monopoly. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit ClarenceFisher.com for more resources that will help you dominate your local market and own the block.

Resources

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