To increase conversion rates, beat competitors, and please Google – your site needs to load in under a second. Jono Alderson of Yoast, shares some quick tips on website speed optimization. Watch his full AWE19 presentation here.

This post “Jono Alderson’s Tips To On Website Speed Optimization” was first seen on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWeurope Interview With Jono Alderson, Special Ops of Yoast

The Importance Of Website Speed Optimization

Phil:
🎙️ Fast snap! This one is about website speed optimization. I’m here with Jono, and we’re talking about?
Jono:
Website speed optimization.
Phil:
🎙️ Exactly, alright. Specifically, how important website speed optimization is, for your website and for your performance.
Jono:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s, arguably, the most important thing at the moment. Certainly, if you look at where Google’s going, and Facebook, etc.

Don’t Rely Completely On Tools For Website Speed Optimization, Use Your Brain

Phil:
🎙️ Okay, amazing. I like how fast you talk.
Jono:
Could it get faster, faster’s better. This is the rule.
Phil:
🎙️ This is not my native language but I’m trying to speak faster. Alright, good. Let’s slow it down, and you can share your three most important tips on website speed optimization.
Jono:
Three tips. Put me on the spot. Okay, number one, is ignore what all the tools say. For website speed optimization, the tools lie, they oversimplify to make it easier and comfy.
Phil:
🎙️ Are you serious?
Jono:
Yeah, all the “you put your website in, it says you scored six out of ten” or “it takes this many” all fluffed to sell you their services and subscriptions. Rule one, is use your brain not the tools.
Phil:
🎙️ That’s very harsh, for many people like me.
Jono:
Yeah, yeah me, I like the tools too. Conventionally, you don’t need to, but yeah, for website speed optimization, use your brain.
Phil:
🎙️ So, you think people are smarter than machines?
Jono:
Complicated. In some cases, I know. So, let me rewind. Google. Google is all about speed at the moment. They are rewarding it massively. They’re penalising certain sites, whether it’s organic or paid or anything. What they are trying to monitor is the user perception of speed. How fast does it feel. And none of the tools give you that. The tools can’t give you that. So you need to look at it as a human and evaluate it, and feel the speed and evaluate it. The numbers don’t matter. It’s how fast does this feel.
Phil:
🎙️ Interesting, okay. So, number one. Number one, ignore the tools for website speed optimization. They’re sh*t. They just want to sell you stuff. How surprising.

For Website Speed Optimization Use Tools to Spot Issues, Not Report Metrics

Jono:
Great, okay. Rule two is use the tools but to spot the issues, not to report on metrics and to tell your CEO you’re getting faster or your competitors are getting slower, but to find the bottlenecks. So, you don’t have to be a developer. You put your page or your site in the tools, and you find things which are holding up other things. Find the traffic jams.

You can see very easily in these tools. I’m loading ten images and they load one, two, three, four, five. You want everything loading quickly and at once, so when it’s not, you can point to that and shout to your developers. You fix those bits.

The tools are really good for spotting bottlenecks and cues, and you don’t have to do any of the sophisticated mumbo-jumbo and all the technical stuff. You just have to spot the slow things, and the tools are really good for finding those bottlenecks. And then you can go shout at your devs.

Utilise Google’s Documentation for Website Speed Optimization

Phil:
🎙️ Okay. So, number two, understand the tools and spot what is actually valuable there and then give it to your developers because like me, you probably don’t have a clue what that means. Alright. three?
Jono:
Three. Go read Google’s documentation. Like, they are all over this. They have some of the best guides, tutorials, information, on the web. Up to about a year ago, this was all voodoo and art. Now it’s all science. No, it’s all defined best practices, standards. They’ve written a rule book on all of it. You go read through it.

The Google Web Fundamentals Documentation. The hundreds of pages of information on how do I make my images smaller, how do I make my Javascript faster. You find the problems of the tools, you look them up in web fundamentals, and you point your devs at them. Magic.

Phil:
🎙️ That’s amazing. Okay, alright, good. I don’t think I need to summarise that. That’s amazing.
Jono:
No, it’s no rocket science.
Phil:
🎙️ Alright, so Google, Google has basically figured it out. Or well, it’s their platform, so they just tell you what to do right. Yeah.

Thank you very much, that’s amazing. Okay, so if I was tasked with developing a landing page, right, I understand that I’d have to do those three things. But if I build something from scratch, how would I go forward there?

Jono:
So you build it right in the first place, which means using the right techniques and structure, which is all in Google’s Web Fundamentals Documentation. They have a huge section on what does best practice look like for building stuff. So you read that, you learn it, you do it.

There’s nothing too complicated. There’s just best practice for how do I do my CSS, how do I do my images, and then when you’ve built it, you check that you’ve done it right and you pull up Google Chrome console, F12 on a Windows, or whatever the equivalent is on a Mac.

Phil:
🎙️ Mac user.
Jono:
And you look at the, function 11 or something. Nobody develops on a mac. And then you look at the waterfall charts, so it shows you everything loading and then you find where the slope is, and you go, sh*t, I made that image too big or I forgot to do this thing and you fix it.

Website Speed Optimization: Building Landing Pages

Phil:
🎙️ Alright. Do you think there is any specific platform that you should build it on? So a lot of affiliates, they outsource landing page work, right? So they have a professional company do that or they have their funnel builders, Clickfunnel, what have you, any thoughts on that?
Jono:
If you’ve got the resources to do it yourself, WordPress. But that means that’s really in the trenches and you’re building a website and yeah, there’s definitely space in the market for fast landing page builder for sure.
Phil:
🎙️ Interesting. Well..
Jono:
Let’s do that!
Phil:
🎙️ Yeah, that’s actually good. I think, one thing I’ve been working with is WordPress, and use tools like Elementer, and that has been working alright for some people. But it’s not the fastest either.
Jono:
So you need to do it. Elementer’s a bit slow in the backend and I linked to an extended version of my slide deck and my talk, I’m sure the slides are somewhere, that has a whole lot of good fun on WordPress plugins and techniques for making stuff faster, so you’re hosting out to use this plugin or that plugin and use these techniques. It’s all science again. And it’s all the stuff that Google’s documented.
Phil:
🎙️ Okay, so basically, there’s no other way that either, come to the next conference and watch your performance there, or hit you up. Can people hit you up if they want?
Jono:
Yeah, Twitter, LinkedIn, Jono Alderson, I’m everywhere. Happy to chat.
Phil:
🎙️ So if you want to go fast, Jono’s your man.
Jono:
Awesome
Phil:
🎙️ Well thank you so much, that’s an inspiration. So thank you Affiliate World. Thanks for watching and thank you, Andrew.