Google Core Web Vitals

46:42

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

google, aaron, page, eric, website, load, site, user, developer, vitals, damon, called, seo, kurt, tests, earthling, core, run, e commerce, interactive

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Erin Courtenay, Curt Anderson, Eric Landmann

Damon Pistulka  00:00

All right. All right, everyone. I’m gonna get us live on LinkedIn. And we’re rolling.

Curt Anderson  00:07

Happy Friday, guys. Hey, thank you. Dan. feels alive. We had some technical issues, but man, we’re conquering it right?

Damon Pistulka  00:14

Yeah, that’s right. Thank You bet. Yeah, here we are. Yeah, no doubt. Welcome everyone again to the manufacturing ecommerce Success Series. We’re here on Friday, like we always are at in my world on the west coast. It’s 1030. We try to your 1032 we were a minute late today.

But we’re getting off today we’re gonna be talking about Google core web vitals and why they matter. And I’m going to turn this over to my co host, Kurt Anderson. If you’re a first of all real quick as I forgot, as I usually do, if you’re on LinkedIn, go ahead and drop in the chat where you’re listening from if you got questions, I’m looking at it over here. And Kurt’s taking care of things over here if you’re in Rico hit the chat like you are and have some fun with it. Let’s get going Kurt

Curt Anderson  01:01

Hey guys, Happy Friday man Damon how things on West Coast brother you go you your I got things covered on the East Coast So hey, 1/3 dan, we were minute late. Oh, here Here we are. So Happy Friday. It’s the last Friday of August Can you believe it? This is insane how fast 2021 is going by so guys I’m gonna walk my dear friend Mark Hill he’s in Chicago near Chicago Greg Gary Gary’s in New Yorker. We got Chris Harrington Kevin from Genova dine up in Alaska. And of course, our love goes to Dan bigger.

So, guys, we have an amazing, incredible, incredible show. So let’s get the intros going here first, then we’re going to dig into a hardcore topic to get that juicy what I did there, Aaron hard core. Okay, guys, Aaron Courtenay. Landman from Earthling interactive interactive from the great state of Wisconsin. Aaron, I’ll start with you. Hello. Happy Friday, my friend. Well, thank you. I’m so excited to be here. Oh, we are thrilled Eric. Welcome, my friend. How are you? You’re wisconsinite as well.

So have you been? Yep. Thanks. Thanks. Cool. Let’s do a little intro here. So we’ve got Aaron Aaron, you stated fascinating journey. I think things started at New Mexico State drying that like who went to New Mexico State ended up at university. went to University Wisconsin got your master’s degree big copywriting degree. Field, career tree hugger, calm, all sorts of fun, exciting things. You now find yourself you are ecommerce pioneer at earthing interactive. Just share a little bit about yourself what’s going on with you and your world? Oh, thanks,

Erin Courtenay  02:41

Kurt. Well, I do have one thing I want to share nothing to do with this. My little girl had her last day at preschool today. She’s starting kindergarten. And I know your last guest was sending a kid off to college. So I know we do a little personal and that’s my thing today. I’ll try not to cry. Yes. So it I hail from the great state of New Mexico. It is a great, it’s the land of enchantment. And then I moved on up here to America, Siri land and I have just found Madison to be a wonderful community to live in.

I worked in conservation and communications for a long time and then settled over here, Earthling primarily because of the awesome people that I get to work with and all the smart folks that help our clients do the digital thing digital transformation, but make it something that everyone can attain. So e commerce super important part of digital transformation kind of touches all the points. And it’s it’s a great privilege to work with Eric as well because his knowledge is so deep.

Curt Anderson  03:45

Awesome. That’s wonderful. So Eric, we’re gonna slide over to you sir. And so a long time graphic career you are in Magento specialist, I believe e commerce pioneer. Talk a little bit about your role what you’ve got going on in your world at Berkeley interactive. Sure. Before I start, you know, the definition of a pioneer. I’m not sure it just means you’re cool. with arrows in its back. Oh, we personally. Practice settlers reap the land that you’re reaping the land with honors. So share a little bit about what you have. Well,

Eric Landmann  04:25

my name is Eric Landman, I’m the e commerce division Manager for chrisley Interactive. We build ecommerce sites for both b2b and b2c clients. Quite a variety of clients, no particular type of business. I personally been involved in building out over 50 e commerce sites on lots of platforms. The ones we tend to use nowadays, they’re Magento, Shopify, a couple of other little ones, or other ones, and also Magento, certified solution specialist and digital developer by trade. Select That’s what I do. Awesome.

Curt Anderson  05:02

Awesome. This is fantastic. And guys, what I I think I dropped them in already so I jumped to your yes I did in the beginning so I just broke your LinkedIn profile. So guys, you want to connect with Aaron, you want to connect with Eric Aaron IFC. I love your title. You are the digital empathy practitioner. I absolutely love that. And one thing I want to share, guys, if you get a chance, I jumped into their website, you want to check out their website, it is great for companies that are digging into e commerce for the first time getting their Magento experts Eric mentioned Shopify, but what I love Aaron, I don’t know if you know this, I love your Meet the Team page.

I actually have as you know, maybe some of you know or don’t know daymond I do a ton of webinars. Damon was at Temple University this week. But we do a ton of webinars, I actually have a screenshot of your team of how to put out a great Meet the Team page. It is it’s personal, it you make it fun, it’s friendly. It’s like you want to do business with these guys. And a couple other things you that I want to share. So you have some great testimonials on your website. I just wanted to share with everybody real quick. Our website took on an amazing leap. Thanks for Earthling interactive, they and the answer to every question was yes, we can do that.

Another comment was they made our project great due to the tight collaboration, earthly our vision to life. And the last time it was Earthling made our website dreams come true and what demonised we love to do is like we diner on our Monday, we actually started a little money program. We call it dream supporters. And that’s what we admire respect and why you’re here today is that you our dream supporters helping entrepreneurs, they’re not in a silo. They’re not alone. This e commerce thing is daunting, overwhelming. Folks like you are out there experts that will help them on that journey to go through that path.

So let’s just dig right into and Dan bigger says stop smiling so much Aaron doesn’t you have a wonderful smile, man? It’s just it’s just wonderful heart. No, don’t listen to Dan. Don’t listen to Dan. So Alright, well, for any of you out there this week. If you were like me, losing sleep, losing hair over Google core vitals. I know. Right? miss you. I know you’re out there, get a great head of hair. But I know. Over and Paul is with us today politician. So I know you guys are worried about Google core vitals. Aaron, do you know anything about Google core vitals, what’s going on?

Erin Courtenay  07:28

Um, I have all my hair. So I

Damon Pistulka  07:33

learned a lot. This happened to you. Don’t let that happen to you.

Curt Anderson  07:37

That’s not crazy, man.

Erin Courtenay  07:39

I think it’s smashing on you. Anyway, um, you know, it’s funny that you should ask about Google core vitals because I’ve been doing a lot of learning myself getting ready for this conversation and what my main takeaway is, this could seem really tedious and overwhelming, unless you sort of understand why these things even exist. Even the name Google core vitals, I mean, that sounds like ooh, I don’t want to touch it. That’s weird or boring. But I want to tell you a little sort of little story give you a little, a little analogy. Those are my favorites. So Is anybody here? You can raise your hand in the chat if you want.

You remember Yellow Pages dating myself? Remember that yellow pages? Yeah. And do you remember how you’d go to look up a service and you’d be like, a one Acme dry cleaning? And yeah, that was that’s what’s known as early stage SEO, Search Engine Optimization, they were optimizing for the search, that means they want to be number one, so that you would call them and that’s kind of how the SEO game really started out was just figuring out a few key ways to get your listings to show up on those search pages.

Well, Google’s kind of smarter than that. Now, you know, they’re really, really invested in helping you find what you need, not just servicing the companies that pay to get their listing up on Google. So this is where we come into Google core vitals. What that is, is a sort of a set of metrics to help Google identify where your site is in terms of what they think will make a customer happy.

So Google’s customer is the user. It’s also the people paying for the site, but it’s for the ads, but as the user, they want the user to be happy. So they’re looking at your website, are you going to make people happy when we suggest that they go look at your website? And so that’s where the Google core vitals come in. They’re an objective set of metrics designed to help Google understand how well you’re playing the website satisfaction gain, the How happy are you making your customers and your users when they go to your website.

That’s essentially what it is. And so why Google core vitals is sort of elevated to you know, all All of our awareness now is because Google made an announcement. Hey, look, folks, we’re gonna be incorporating this Google core vitals business into your SEO. So get on board. And I’m here to tell you, it’s both simpler and much more complicated than it sounds. And so before I, you know, pass the mic over to Eric, I want to remind you of a few key things. So as you’re watching him, one, these are guideposts Google core vitals are guideposts to help you determine if you’re playing the Google game properly.

But sometimes those things and oftentimes will conflict with some things that your users really need. So Google knows kind of like generally what the population is looking for what is helpful for a website user, but they don’t understand for example, you know, if you’re going to Curt site, you might be a very particular type of individual looking for a very particular, you know, one of his events or something, and you know exactly what you’re looking for. And the way you get there might not fit in the Google core vitals.

So there are case scenarios, often that fall outside, but you want to make sure that your website is at least paying attention to those key metrics that will help get your site ranked, because those are the things that Google can quickly and easily you incorporate in their algorithm to determine your ranking ranking. So there’s customer happiness, which has some, you know, in a Venn diagram, overlap with the Google core vitals, but also pay attention to what your customers want need.

And if your conversions as an e commerce site, are just rocking it and they’re awesome, and your score and your Google core vitals is like in the toilet, don’t worry about it. Your job is to make money, you want to pay attention to those gurgel core vitals, but you do not want to mess up your conversions by trying to play the Google game and not keeping your customers happy. So basically, keep in mind, this is a great guidepost to know what to do to make your website work the Google game, but it’s not the be all end all. So that’s just a little.

Damon Pistulka  12:22

That’s a great point, though, too, because it’s the same thing in SEO when you’re trying to optimize a page for readability if I mean, if you’re talking about the laser application of some bla bla, bla, bla, spitting splitting atoms, I mean, it’s just not going to come out.

The readability score is gonna stink, right? Right, right reader that’s gonna enjoy that content needs that kind of depth in it. And similar thing, but that’s that’s a cool distinction between the vitals and not just playing attention. I do also want to say too, we do have some technical difficulties as remail. And Eric is is worked around it a little bit so we can share screen like we wanted to, but he’s he’s got some good good things to show us with a little workaround that we’re doing.

Curt Anderson  13:06

And who would make Google core vitals more fun than Aaron? Aaron? That was just a virtual plug for Aaron. Where’s my music? Now? I get to do a dance. Yeah, we’re talking Cz cough before. So Aaron. chance. Did you guys have a great little demo for the crowd today?

Erin Courtenay  13:27

You know, it’s funny, you should ask because we did, at least I hope we did. We had those technical difficulties. But, Eric, Eric, what do you think about walking folks through those Google core vitals and just kind of trying to demystify a little bit of what we’re talking about today?

Eric Landmann  13:47

Let’s see if technology cooperates. Sure. All right, here we go. Yeah, we did test this out. Aaron, and I were doing karaoke, I wanted to show you what page actually looks like give you a visual. But if you want to hit that URL, it’s it’s what this thing is, is a category page for one of my customers that sell snowboards Rita seaside. They have a high turnover product. And it’s really an interesting site.

What we’re looking at here is one of the free available tools that Google has produced. This is called PageSpeed Insights. If you want to find this, you just go to Google and type PageSpeed. And you’ll get the link, the topmost link. And if you click that way this works. It’s fairly straightforward. You can do this john site doesn’t require any special developer Mojo or anything. Just go to the box here, and type in your URL. And then we’ll do some analysis.

We’ll check lots of metrics to measure all kinds of not only PageSpeed but how other pages built, will look up the process things like DNS lookups, for resources that aren’t on the site, it’ll just run hundreds and hundreds of tests. And then it will return this, this type of page here, this page has. So what we’re looking at looking at it is a page analysis of this specific page and insights. It’s got two, two parts to it, there’s a mobile score. And there’s a desktop score. And notice that they’re pretty different. And that’s actually not not unusual. Usually, there’s quite a bit of difference between mobile and desktop.

And one of the reasons it’s surmised, although the thing about Google is they don’t always tell you how they’re doing things. So that we surmise, the reason the mobile is a lot lower is frequently a mobile user is in a lot slower network connection. So you want to Super optimize absolutely everything. So some things that might not all be a problem on a desktop system, obviously, they’re going to be problem on the mobile setup. So let me go through the pieces of this report, which is all you have a number there. See, it’s nice, happy gold color.

Google considers anything over a 75 be acceptable for corporate vitals. So you can see that we’re doing really good at desktop, not so good and normal. And it will give you suggestions for what things you can change. The results then are, there’s two chunks of data. If you’re dealing with a site that doesn’t have much data. Notice that this is field data here. This is actual data that’s been collected by Google about the correlate vitals for real users hitting this page. stuff. So they collect all these data. And so what you see here is it looks a little weird. We’ve got some colored bars and one of these areas but not the other areas. And that simply means that Google doesn’t have enough data on it.

So then, the second part is that the lab data, and lab data are Google’s synthetic tests, about what they think, you know, there’s what they surmise, good user experience will be tough. The whole purpose here is to produce the best user experience. Now talk to you about these, these four categories of data that we’re seeing, and what they mean. They’re a little bit geeky titled, but they’re, they’re somewhat understandable. So the first contentful paint means, you know, when you go to a website, and kind of nothing happens, and then oh, something pops up on the screen. Right at that point, that is the first contentful paint, seeing, oh, we’re seeing some content.

But first, first thing. So this is saying that took 3.6 seconds, it’s a little on the slow side, but not too bad for a category page. And if you look up that category page, you will see that there’s some content, a couple of videos, I think there’s about seven or so product thumbnails and descriptions and pricing. So there’s, you know, it’s a fairly rich page. The second one that matters is one to the right, which is called first input delay. But that means is a lot of people like to go to a site, and then they immediately do something, they click a search box with a rollover navigation, or they click something, they want to go somewhere else.

That is called an input user input. So this measures the time that it takes for the page to load, and the user can actually click on something first. So this is six milliseconds, which is like nothing at all. That’s that’s basically immediate. What this is saying is almost immediately, as soon as the page loads, the user can do something. And that’s cool, because suppose user, in this case, make bank teller, they may have already been at the site, they may know exactly what category they want to go to.

So the page will start to load with a select category, and then there’s a bar somewhere else. That’s a good user experience. Because the user wants cruise to the site really fast, they can do it. The third thing that matters most in the Google hierarchy is called Give me the layout chip that that means everybody’s seen this before you start to load a web page and then something happens it gets all jacked around and Jared and it bosses and then maybe maybe a slider comes in or some testimonials panel was started moving around. That’s called layout shift that in Google’s eyes and most people that I know think that’s really kind of sharing experience serve as disruptive.

Google has, will ding you then if your layout shifts around a few start to load it, and then it jumps around a lot. This isn’t really super common thing, by the way, I want to throw out one little number for you. It’s the latest testament, I read, I think a week or two ago was that 4% of the websites, on the web, passed correlate vitals. So don’t be all freaked out if you’re sick scores really bad, because you’re in good company. So that’s a cumulative layout shift is. So those are some, you know, some basic numbers that give you some nice little colored bars, and they give you a score. And you know, that’s pretty pretty, you know, understandable.

Then it gets into reporting, what, what the what the evaluations were for these various categories. They give me little, this little thumb strip of how the page loads, so then what they’re doing is they’re actually grabbing screenshots as the page loads. And there’s another little tool you can do to actually save this video, which is kind of cool. So if you’re somebody like me doing optimization, you can record it before and after, and say, Well, here’s when we started, here’s what it looked like. And then when we do the optimizations, get our work done. We record it again. And we can show how much improved it is.

Then it comes back to you with suggestions on how to solve some of these problems. And they’re saying these are very specific, usually developer centric solutions. Now, if you’re ever say owners going minify, JavaScript, I don’t know how to do that. That’s surprising, requires usually some sort of server configuration or extension on the site to compress it, but it does show you what you could save if you do this. Now, there are some caveats to this information. They’re making some assumptions. That, oh, it’s just you just compress it and it’ll be good to go. Well, that’s almost never the case, developer and me and says, Whoa, it’s never that simple.

Because there can be problems where Java scripts aren’t loaded in the right order. And then you paste in screwy things. And so yeah, these are recommendations, like Aaron said, they’re not always right. Or appropriate for the platform you’re using. So that’s, that’s an example of a recommendation. Here’s another one here saying, oh, you’re loading these web fonts, that w f f two is a font. In this case, I think it’s Open Sans. Yeah, Open Sans. So that’s the font that’s been used on this site, it’s being loaded from fonts that use static calm. Well, it’s saying, Oh, you could do this slightly differently, that will save you 20 milliseconds. 20 milliseconds.

That’s, that’s pretty much nothing. That’s almost literally the blink of an eye. But you know, if you add up 50 years, 75 speed tweaks to this page, you know, it will add up on some things you can do are much, much more productive. So when we developers do this, we look for the low hanging fruit, we look to see what’s on top of the list here to to clean it up. And then we we do those first and then we run another analysis and see, see what happened. Now the other kind of maddening thing about this particular test is if you run this three or four times, you’ll get three or four different values. Miko, what, what’s that about?

Well, it has to do in part, how busy Google servers are, maybe how busy the servers that’s posting the website, could be network latency could be DNS lookups, could be all kinds of things. So you can’t just run this once and say, oh, what’s Okay, that’s it? Well, no, not really. you kind of need a matrix of scores. So when I do this, I run this test about six or eight times, and then just look at the lowest score and the highest score, and kind of take an average that’s more realistic from a data perspective. So it all makes sense so far.

Curt Anderson  24:46

crystal clear.

Damon Pistulka  24:47

Yeah. So this is where it says lab data there are those opportunities to gain time or what’s the lab data? Oh,

Eric Landmann  24:57

the lab date is running this Because Because Google doesn’t have enough real world data reported from and where it comes from is the Chrome browser. The Chrome browser browser reports this data, okay, Google, Google mothership. And they collected, it’s anonymized. But this is saying that, while the top are the same, so this part, here’s with the gray bars, what that’s indicating is that Google doesn’t have enough information, real world actual user information. So to answer your question, the lab data is this, this bottom part where it’s running a bunch of tests, and they’re making some assumptions that users are doing things in a certain amount of time.

And, okay, they’re making assumptions about their network speed, and things like that, what kind of browser they’re running. So that’s, that’s the difference there. It’s pretty common to find sites with very little or no field data at all. So you’re just going back to lab data. So that’s what that means. There’s more information to this. But one thing I want to point out is you see these gray dots, those are the things that don’t need any attention at all. So we like seeing that. That’s cool. Don’t want to see red. That’s bad. Gray is good. Yeah, this is, uh,

Curt Anderson  26:27

this is fantastic. And Aaron, I like how you said, you know, it’s, it’s challenging, but it can be easy. And, Eric, I love how you’re laying this out. Because, you know, just few notes I took down, you know, so again, just kind of recap, you know, what Google is looking for is like loading, you know, how fast are you responding, the interactivity on the website, and then the visual stability are kind of like the three bullet points.

And again, like, good, we, you know, we do these little fun ecommerce trainings, we talked about, you know, taking advantage like Google Search Console, you know, this PageSpeed tool, these are great, fantastic tools available to everybody. And again, our favorite word, free, you know, so they’re at our disposal. And it just, you know, it can be daunting, overwhelming or intimidating, like, What is this, but Eric, I love how you’re kind of laying it out. And just if you just go through it methodically, or, you know, partner with an expert like yourself, you can, you know, help entrepreneurs get through these tests,

Eric Landmann  27:22

right. And I want to show you another tool, too. I was going to hopefully switch back and forth between tabs when we can do that with, for some reason, today’s religion. But it’s letting us share this. This is a also a very popular test used among developers. This, in fact, this web page test was actually developing the wall and was only recently acquired by cashpoint. So it’s Google’s basic stuff. Now, here’s what’s really interesting. Look at it, those letters along the top be a while looking at this, you go Oh my God, we are headed to college. That looks great.

Curt Anderson  28:02

It looks like my report card in college did not go someplace. Great. Yeah, my 2.3 didn’t didn’t equal that. So

Eric Landmann  28:14

this, this page gives even more technical information about this. But the most interesting thing about this from a developer’s perspective, it’s what’s called this waterfall. This, I wouldn’t expect a user to know what this means. And that’s scary. That looks scary. Oh, my God, your eyes glaze over and boom. Well, I’ll just tell you briefly what it is. This is showing every single resource as it loads from the very start of the page from the very DNS, very start DNS lookup.

That’s the turquoise color there, to the connecting of the server, the SSL handshake, and then loading the base page. That’s line number one there. And then the whole cascade of things that happen as a page is loaded. So when things are lined up in a, in a vertical orientation here, like lines 12, through 36, those are all those are all files that are loading simultaneously. So you’ve got a whole bunch of things going on all at once. With the HTTP two protocol, you can load lots of things at once. That’s what servers do. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so fast. Nowadays, it’s pretty cool.

And why we can build sites with hundreds and hundreds of resources. And you really don’t even notice, because it’s all zipping down the line really fast. So the types of types of data that are loaded are these little colored bars at the top of the graph, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, fonts, I’m going to point out the fonts especially because that’s an inch Just one flash, if you’ve got a flash on your page, you should get your reselect shouldn’t be having that going on. Then as you look down down the waterfall and again, waterfall is just determines how the stuff is coming in how this other files to be employed.

There’s little indicators in here about what’s happening. So what we see here, this little, little kind of orange circle with the x, that is what’s called a render blocking resource. In other words, the page won’t even be rendered rendered means started to be painted on the screen to paint the that particular file is blocking display at the page. And that’s not necessarily bad. Maybe the way your framework needs that paint page. If you didn’t have it, your paper would be a total disorganized mess until it loads. So that’s not necessarily wrong. But something that Google is calling out. shows me exactly what file and how long it took and

Curt Anderson  31:08

things like that. In Eric, we’re having just so Val, Don, just so you guys know, we’re having a pop quiz on all this at 215. Right. So guys, I hope you’re watching closely.

Eric Landmann  31:21

So yeah, Kurt’s gonna buy you a beer or tear or ice cream?

31:30

Good luck, Gary.

Eric Landmann  31:33

To show the things that are interesting in his little multicolored bar, this is pulling resources from another site might think, well, what’s going on there? That’s kind of why are we pulling in things from other sites. And probably the most common thing is fonts, Google fonts are used a lot, quite a lot. And so it’s pretty common for a stylesheet to be calling a file off of Google fonts, but that requires another lookup, and then the site has to go fetch the fonts from Google’s servers, which could be improved, that’s not the absolute quickest thing you can do. But Google servers are pretty quick. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If the speed is good. In this case, it’s 490 milliseconds, which is less than half a second, that’s pretty fast. What you look should look for the odds, if you have a lot of fonts that are not used, or just too many fonts. So here, these little red ones, these here, these guys are web fonts. That one is Open Sans metallic. So we see that we have 2345 funds, not a whole lot. But do you really need five funds, maybe you can use four funds. And each of these files is relatively large, say 14k. So that just that one file file is 14k. So if you don’t need it, you know, you can strip out some of these things and make it faster.

Then when you get all the way down to the waterfall, you might see some other things like this page doesn’t have any because it’s constructed properly. But if you’re missing some images, you’d have what’s called the infamous 404, you have a big red bar through there, we got to fix that right away. So this is this is some of the things you can learn from the waterfall. There’s many other tabs here with all sorts of other cool information, which we don’t really have time for. It’s probably too much webinar just for that. So that’s kind of the really super basic walkthrough.

Damon Pistulka  33:46

It’s really interesting how when you break down the performance of a web page, there are so many things that developers can do to optimize it. And you know, and especially if someone has a as a legacy site that they’ve had around for a while, and maybe they’ve changed a lot of fonts or done a lot of things to it. I’m sure there’s a lot of garbage that you find builds up over time.

Eric Landmann  34:09

Oh, yeah. One of the one of the things we see a lot is that when developers build the site, initially, everything’s optimized, it looks cool, the images are excised. Then as the user kind of goes along, they take some enormous image and drop it into a slider. It’s like three inches wide. And the things like 3000 pixels, or Scott, whoa, that’s way too big. And so over time, things are kind of, you know, a trophy. Right, go ahead.

Damon Pistulka  34:40

That makes a good point. So should people be looking at this over time and then re optimizing their site every once in a while?

Eric Landmann  34:49

Yeah, I wouldn’t get too obsessive about it. But if you have changeable content and where we see this typically is where the images people are well, district Our second fact, is uploading images that were 150 DPI, which is twice as dense as you need.

So actually, those images were four times the size of the needed for the web, you get to know no more quality from putting out much bigger and she doesn’t think to me at worst quality, because it’s got to be reduced. It’s slower. So those are, those are the kinds we see a lot, right? Maybe WordPress sites if the user adds an extension themselves, and they don’t really pay attention to this, that can really affect performance. So there, I wouldn’t get too crazy about it. But it should probably go on a calendar to check these things a couple times a year. So

Curt Anderson  35:48

some good comments in the chat box going here. So Don, Don can take the pop quiz, his dog, his dog ate his notes, so that you will let you know, we love dogs, we’re gonna let you go on that one. And so and he said, this is basic, I’m in trouble. But I think a great takeaway, Eric here, you know, especially for folks, you know, like, Man, this is, this is high level stuff here.

But a great takeaway for folks, you know, let’s not be overwhelmed, we’re here to have a good time. But think about this, you know, so, especially for our manufacturers out there, you know, you know, Chris, we were just on a call this week, we’re talking about, you know, manufacturers that are challenged, maybe they’ve been burnt by bad paperclip situations.

Damon, we’ve had case studies on this program where people have spent, you know, six figures, and completely, completely, completely burned on their website, or a marketing initiative or what have you. And so the thing is, it’s you, first off, you want to, you want to line with somebody that you trust, you know, and there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes. So if you’re doing it yourself, free to, you know, learn these jump on podcasts and, you know, capture some of this information on your own. In the same regard.

It’s great to align yourself with so with a firm, like Earthling interactive that knows exactly how to conquer these tests. I was on a call this week, where the designer, you know, had no idea about SEO. I’m just a web designer. I don’t know anything. No. And that’s a very dangerous place to be firm to hire. If you’re, you know, if you’re ignoring SEO, you know. So I think that’s why this was such a great exercise. It doesn’t have to be daunting, doesn’t have to be overwhelming, but there’s a lot of great tools and resources to help you in Greg says that happens a lot, Aaron.

Erin Courtenay  37:37

But no, I right along with that is you can’t I was sort of think of it another analogy, Dr. Google, and this is Dr. Google’s lab report that you get here. And so you can let’s say you go you know, have a sore shoulder. And I go to the doctor, and they give me lateral. This is what’s wrong with you. So you can do these exercises. But more likely, they’re going to send me to a PT, a physical therapist, and that physical therapist is going to give me very specific exercises based on their knowledge and their understanding, they’re going to break it down for me exactly how I should move my arm. That’s what a developer is for you with your website.

So Google gives you your lab report. And then you need to go and work with a developer. Now, of course, we can get really into the weeds on this when you work. But that’s where the value is. Right. That’s it. That’s the expertise, the important thing to keep in mind is that you recognize these things matter. And you’re not afraid of them. And you have some methods to play this game, which is the internet. And so that’s why we wanted to do this for folks today.

I mean, it’s, it’s overwhelming, I get it, I get a little I start to have a hard time myself. But when it comes to e commerce, this is so critical. You have so many files on your e commerce site, because you don’t have images. You have such a high demand for user experience in e commerce, because what we’ve talked about the user experience, right, one bad user experience can wreck how many sales? And so this is about being found, certainly, but it’s about how you do your customer service. It helps you there as well. So I’m just trying to bring it back down to earth.

Curt Anderson  39:23

Yeah. I love that. You said as we have Dr. Eric and Dr. Aaron in the house today, but Chris dropped a great comment. You know, she just ran a bunch of tests. And I love what you’re saying Chris Harrington, our dear friend from Gen alpha. She says there’s a lot of great resources and opportunities for improvement.

Chris, that’s why we love hanging out with you because you’re so helpful. So instead of being half empty, like Oh, man, I’m going to shut down, I’m overwhelmed. There are just so many opportunities in what Damon loves to preach in his presentations. You are never done. It’s like going to the gym, on the treadmill. It goes over and over and over. I know we’re Running into time we want to get back to the tables but I just want to share this real quick about Earthling interactive our friends in Wisconsin.

So what I love is like how you guys tackle projects, and then we’ll spend a minute cuz I know we didn’t get back to the tables because people are dying to pick your brains today. But you guys, your web development process is so impressive again, you know, like we work with a lot of different companies and everybody not see anybody doesn’t right or wrong. But you guys go through a strategic process where you dig into the personas, Val Marty our folks in training man, we dig deep into those personas, user stories you do the wireframes prototypes, architecture risk analysis, are you kidding me?

Who does risk analysis and you guys cover future state so what I love is when you work with a firm in a team, like Earthling interactive boy, they have your back, you have experts, the doctors are in the house where you’re walking them through the entire process, as opposed to AV we’re just gonna do is we’re graphic artists will do some web design, you figure out SEO on your on your own, or he will throw up a little Shopify store and you figure out you’re covering the whole gamut. My right.

Erin Courtenay  41:09

Yes, that’s right. And for him for not just after, after the lunch as well. That’s one of the things that happens, you know, I think Damon said is you’re always doing the work. And so many people think oh, lunch done, no, sorry. But it’s a it’s your baby, and you got to take care of it. And it’s gonna stay a baby. And so and we want to let folks know, we’re actually doing a beta version of a service on this. So the first person that contacts me and says, Yeah, I’d like to just give this a go and have you tell me how we’re doing on core core vital. That’s going to be a free offering. So I’m going to reaches out to me happy to we’re happy to walk it through your website,

Damon Pistulka  41:50

Bonnie. Bonnie’s Strom injure is just asking about stuff online and that we get to talk to you guys about that. But, you know, the one thing that I tell business owners and the people that I talk to about websites anymore, is we used to build them and forget them, right. And we can’t do that anymore. It’s it is it is almost like your house where you’ve got to be, you know, you’ve got to keep investing in that thing and keep making sure that you’re keeping up with everything. Because, and some people still are not right. You know, you’ll look at some of them and the dates, 10 years old, five years old, I just saw some the other day that we’re from the 90s, which is Yeah, okay.

It was Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, he was born then. You know, but, but it still is. So there, there are investments that need to be made. And like Eric said, and you were saying there’s so many changes done on e commerce website, you’re always adding you’re adding this and adding that and not optimizing that thing to make sure it’s fast, I think is just one basic thing that people can do to keep them going. And the second thing is, I can’t tell you how many people that I’ve run into in the last year that have had someone that is not cheap.

And in terms of website design, I mean, talking 10s of 1000s of dollars, that the developer did not even tell them about SEO, and they did not know and we’re we’re years later seeing the website with absolutely no SEO and and some even where they’ve not even allowed Google to crawl the site. I mean, it’s you really have to understand, and Kurt makes a great point about you guys and develop and developing the websites the way that you guys do it. It is more than just making a pretty something pretty that comes up. Right? Right. That’s web development malpractice. Right? It is almost Yes.

Erin Courtenay  43:43

Which is rampant, which is rampant. And you know, it’s it’s understandable, because you know, if anybody really can make a website these days, yeah. And so it seems like a service you can get into but a good website is a level of expertise that you want to invest in.

Curt Anderson  43:59

So yeah, it’s your first line of defense is the first impression. It’s the first thing anybody’s going to see about you, Damon, you do a great job, you know, Google yourself, Google, your company, Google, you know, your products and services. It’s a first thing. So again, our manufacturers are doing a great job as our friend Chris Harrington says, We’re not gonna be half empty. We’ll be half full lots of opportunity.

So again, if you feel a little bit behind the eight ball or you’re little behind the game, no worries. There’s tons of resources. We have Paul Kisha, we have Greg Misha with the team at Gen alpha. We have a team at Earthling interactive, all sorts of resources. We work a lot with the MEPs the SBDC speaking of that, Damon we better wrap up because we need to get Eric and we got to

Damon Pistulka  44:43

go man, we got to

Curt Anderson  44:44

get them back to the table. So guys, let’s wrap up on this. First off. Dr. Aaron, Dr. Eric man, I’m just I’m like depressed that this is over. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks. Aaron, Eric. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Damon next week. We’re not going to be here next Friday versus everybody you go off and spend time with your families you enjoy Labor Day weekend you guys have if you guys want to hang out, just text me call me. We will take the next Friday off. You guys want to spend time with your families this Monday, Damon, we’re interviewing Sara from Temple University Small Business Development Center.

We’re doing a 10 part ecommerce webinar series with temple Damon just crushed it on Wednesday. We’ve got raiza Gatto coming up next in two weeks. So So again, connect with Eric and Aaron on LinkedIn. Our hearts are out to everybody stopping the best kept secret. Aaron Eric, we love you both. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your passion, your expertise. Everybody go out there, crush it have a killer weekend. daymond Take it away my brother.

Damon Pistulka  45:51

All right. Well, Bonnie’s got a couple questions for us on LinkedIn. But I tell you what, Bonnie, I’ll respond to those in the in the comments in the LinkedIn post. But Eric did talk about that and Google car vitals, if it’s above 75%, you’re doing well. So we’re gonna get go back to the tables now and be ready to go. I’m gonna turn it off on LinkedIn. Sorry, I’m not I’m kind of Oh man. I just realized that we’re off next week, and I’m excited about this week and I’m

Curt Anderson  46:23

like, I’m still gonna be here, just just hanging out.

Damon Pistulka  46:27

Just Kurt and I are gonna hang out. We get on this every Friday anyway, whether we do it or not. So. Alright, everyone, thanks for joining us. Here.

Curt Anderson  46:34

Thank you, Aaron. Everyone. Thank you.