On the next episode of the Majestic SEO Podcast we’ll be discussing the most important website performance issues in 2023, how to monitor your website for performance issues, and how to fix them.
Joining David Bain for this episode on finding and fixing website performance issues will be Nikki Halliwell and Prachi Keshavani.
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Transcript
David Bain
On today’s episode we’re discussing what are the most important website performance issues in 2023, how do you monitor for website performance issues, and how do you fix them?
We are going to be joined by two great ladies to discuss this and everything else that we’re going to discuss today. First on the panel is Nikki.
Nikki Halliwell
Hi, my name is Nikki Halliwell and I am a Tech SEO lead at Journey Further, an agency based in Leeds in the UK, covering all sorts of industries, and I also work as a freelance SEO specialist as well at nikkihalliwell.com, and you can find me on all the usual socials.
David Bain
Thanks for joining us, Nikki. A joining us is today is Prachi.
Prachi Keshavani
Hello, my name is Prachi Keshavani. I’m currently a freelance SEO specialist, I’m based in London at the moment, and you can find me on LinkedIn at Prachi Keshavani.
David Bain
So we’re gonna have a great discussion here about website performance issues, how to find them, how to fix them, and hopefully the way that they’re fixed means we won’t see those issues again. But we’ll see from your experience what’s possible to do. So let’s start with what the most important potential website’s performance issues are that you tend to see in 2023. Nikki, which issue would you like to highlight to begin with?
Nikki Halliwell
I’m going to talk about an issue that I see come across websites of all sizes and all industries and I feel like it’s something that we’ve been talking about for years now, and it’s the number one issue that always comes up when we’re talking about site speed and web performance… Images.
I’m sure we’ve all been told lots and lots of times by various people that images are an issue, and we need to make sure that they’re optimised and to be as efficient as possible and all that fun stuff. But yet it still ends up being an issue in every audit that I do. So I definitely think that’s something that hasn’t gone away, and it’s probably not going to go away anytime soon. I don’t even want to know how many images are probably loaded to the web every day. So it’s not going anywhere, anytime soon. But there’s a lot that can be done with images, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that in a little bit detail in a minute.
David Bain
Absolutely. I’m sure we can dedicate a whole episode to images. So I should be careful about that. We’ll come back to this is just a second, but first, let’s get Prachi’s opinion initially about a key website performance issue. What key website performance issue are you seeing at the moment?
Prachi Keshavani
I think the most common issue that I’m seeing David is network latency issues. So it refers to the time taken between the server and the visitor, and how long it takes to pass the information between them. I think the main reason for this is that the domain name server and the poorly formatted or poorly optimised database. I think SEOs should definitely look into that further.
David Bain
So issues with regards to latency there. That’s a deep dive in itself as well. In the meantime, we’ll go back to images and Nikki. So is it image file sizes that is that the biggest issue you’re seeing?
Nikki Halliwell
Typically, yes. When we’re talking about image optimization that also covers things like file names, as well as alt text and all of that fun stuff. But in terms of web performance, yeah, we’re talking about file sizes as well as file format. Most of the time images are uploaded as either JPEGs or PNGs, and sometimes they’re not even in the right format. PNG is great for images with transparent background, but they’re huge. If it’s just going to be like a photo of our three smiley faces that we’re going to upload to a website afterwards talking about this great podcast that we’ve done, then we don’t need that to be on a PNG format because it’s going to be much heavier than necessary. Something like that should be like a JPEG.
If we’re going to stick with like standard formats then we have modern day formats that we can talk about as well, but really it’s just knowing when to use the right format. There’s also options like SVGs that can be used for logos, which have a smaller file size, as well as having a lot of flexibility in the sizes that they can be used at. As well as that, things like setting appropriate height and width for the images, so that they are much more responsive makes a huge difference.
There’s a lot that can be done about images, especially as you said, David, we could do a whole podcast around on what to do with that. But it’s also a thing that I find that not all clients and website owners understand. Sometimes web developers, depending on the size of the development agency that you’re working with, sometimes they don’t understand that it’s not just about making the images as small as possible, which is great, but that’s not just what image optimization is. You need to finesse it a little bit more than that, because obviously, images will start to be compromised in terms of quality if we’re just squashing the life out of it, and that’s the last thing that a client’s going to want, especially on an eCcommerce website.
David Bain
I feel like a little bit of a like a dinosaur for sticking with JPEGs and not embracing newer forms of images like .webp. Is that immediately accessible, readable and possible to utilise for most browsers nowadays. Are there any downsides to it?
Nikki Halliwell
It’s usable on most browsers. I think Safari is not quite there yet, in the same way that that Chrome is with formats like webp, but they’re quickly catching up because they know the popularity of it and the benefits that it can have for end users in terms of helping their browsers to load quicker.
David Bain
So roughly, with regards to webp, if a website was being built now would you suggest that website completely just utilises webp and if so, what file size can a website manager expects their site to gain or to have less in terms of image size by using webp instead of JPEG?
Nikki Halliwell
I would want to use webp where possible, especially for the largest ones, but you do need a fallback options such as JPG, just in case that the user’s browser isn’t able to cope with that, especially if you’re a business that’s targeting people in international markets that might not have as fast of a web connection is we might have seen in the UK, so you need a fallback option, just in case they’re not able to support those.
David Bain
Will CMSs be able to do things like that to automatically? To generate fallback options if you upload a webp, or even another image to turn it into webp and then have that generate a version of the JPEG as well, so that’s all options are delivered, when necessary?
Nikki Halliwell
In my experiments, yeah. I’ve been able to work with the development teams to make sure that they are set up in that way, especially on like largest CMSs like Magento. With these more complex ones rather than WordPress, for example, you are able to build it into it. It does come as a fallback option in the same way that you have backup fonts, you know, if you have like a fallback option for those in case the browser’s not able to use it, it broadly works in a similar sort of way.
David Bain
I guess the challenge with fonts is that they’re potentially going to be taking up a little bit of a different amount of space on the page, and you’ve got to think about how that’s going to impact the layout and things like that.
Nikki Halliwell
Yeah, and then you start to have things like layout shift if you’re not careful, which again, is a whole other topic.
David Bain
That’s a website performance issue as well. Prachi, you obviously talked about network latency, so let’s go into that a little bit more in-depth. You talked about how a domain was set up and how it was set up to point towards a particular server. What are the wrong ways to do that, and what are the ways that you tend to correct that?
Prachi Keshavani
I think it goes back to when you’re choosing the right hosting platform, you need to make sure that you have some key questions answered, is this hosting platform going to help you scale your website as your business grows? So if it’s an eCommerce website and you start with the basic plan, and then you go on further and start adding on things, you have to make sure that the websites not going to crash. So I’d say definitely think about the future and think about the goals that you have in mind with regards to your business.
David Bain
So what are the elements of a host that is going to mean that you have the fairly fast experience for your users? Because obviously, if you sign up to a cheap, shared server, based in another country, compared with where the majority of your users are, that’s not a good experience to be using. But what are the some of the best choices that you can make to enhance that experience to increase the speed?
Prachi Keshavani
I think Cloudflare is a pretty good one. So if you’re using that, then it’ll help you scale your business and it’ll help you scale your website. However, I’ve not really used other ones yet, but I’d say Cloudflare isa good option.
David Bain
Okay. So generally pay a bit more for your host and try and have it in the same countries as your users. And then you’re talking about CDNs as well as a way to potentially massively improve the experience of your users, certainly if you’ve got users in different countries all over the world there as well. Shall we explore a little bit more into images? Is there anything that you feel that we haven’t discussed yet, Nikki, in relation to images?
Nikki Halliwell
Coming back to your question that I didn’t quite answer that was about how much improvement people can expect to see, I mean, how long is a piece of string? I think it depends on the size of your website. Websites that are more in that eCommerce space are more likely to have many more images than, say, a service based business, because obviously, they’ve got lots of different products and you need lots of photos from different angles of all of your different products. So I think they’re much more likely to see a greater improvement by spending time working on their images.
For me, images are something that I see come up time and time again in an audit, and when we’re looking at website performance, it’s one of the first areas that I actually try to work on, because it’s one of the easiest, depending on the scale of the other issues. It’s also one of the easiest to get buy in from key stakeholders as well, such as development teams, because everybody understands image size, when you’re talking about things like minifying, CSS and JavaScript, so you definitely need to look at that as well.
When people start to be a bit like, oh, I don’t know what that means or I don’t know what to do about it, then as SEOs, we can support them with that. That’s absolutely our job, especially when it’s a new client. It’s nice and easy to get buy in from everybody on images, prove your success on that one, monitor it, see the results and the improvement that you’ve made from working on those images, and then they tend to have a little bit more trust and understanding with how these things will work, and they’ll trust your expertise, and you can then start to look at other things like CSS files, HTTP requests, etc.
David Bain
So in terms of proving what you do, and seeing the results, are you just talking about the results in terms of the amount of seconds that it takes for a page to load? Or can you ever actually see the results in terms of improved rankings and tie that back to improving website performance?
Nikki Halliwell
You can do both. One of the first things is looking at Time To First Byte (TTFB), which ties back to what Prachi was saying about server latency. You can quickly see the difference in terms of first byte, and if that’s over a couple of 100 milliseconds, then there’s likely to be an issue with the server because of the delay and the time that it takes to get to that first byte. So that’s a key one to look at.
You’ve also got key metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and also the time it takes the page to fully load as well. We spend a lot of time especially with Core Web Vitals talking about First Contentful Paint (FCP), LCP as well as Time to Interactive (TTI), but fully loaded time can be an interesting one to look at as well, because obviously, that’s when everything’s loaded on the page. How long does that actually take? It’s often a lot longer than what you might think and it can end up taking 20 to 30 seconds until it’s done absolutely everything on the page and then you’re like, how the hell does it take that long? But that’s because there’s everything else still waiting in the background. Your website is visible and usable, but you’ve still got all these other processes running in the background, and often they’re not even needed, and you might not even know that they’re still there. It could be from redundant code that’s no longer used on the site but has it’s just been left there.
So yeah, there’s lots of different areas and metrics that you can look at. Site Speed and Page Experience definitely do play into Google’s algorithm, and they are certainly things that we should look at. Google has talked recently, within the last year, about depreciating some of these systems around page experience. And for me, that’s because I find that people have just been looking at trying to get a perfect 100 out of 100 score on things like PageSpeed Insights, but 100 out of 100 means means nothing. I can go into the back-end of any website and just tweak the scores to make it look like I’ve got a nice green light. But actually, it’s the real life metrics, like TTFB and LCP that are actually given a real measurement of how users are engaging with the websites. That’s why I like to pay much more attention to those rather than getting a nice little green traffic light, because that doesn’t amount to anything. But rankings are always going to tie back to user experience, and therefore by extension, site speed and web performance.
David Bain
Going back to the fully loaded time for the whole page – is it ever worthwhile to actually limit the loading of images that are kind of below the screen so you have to scroll to actually get to that particular content? Is it worthwhile not loading that content until the user actually goes down there? Or is it better practice to actually load the full page even though the user is not necessarily good to see underneath?
Nikki Halliwell
I’d definitely make use of lazy loading as it’s known, or different off screen images is what you might see as the recommendation that comes up in in tools like PageSpeed Insights. Unfortunately, not all users are going to scroll below the fold, so why waste time for those to load? If your website doesn’t load because it’s loading that massive image that that you’ve got halfway down the page, those users might never see that image because they’ll be much more likely to leave before anything loaded. So absolutely defer anything that’s not needed initially.
David Bain
Prachi, I alluded to a tool called WebPageTest that I know you’ve used in the past. So for that or other tools, what do you think are the key metrics to look at to try to improve?
Prachi Keshavani
I think Nikki covered it really well, I think all the Google PageSpeed Insights metrics are really important. The LCP, the largest Contentful paint and the VID are really important. I think keeping in mind the bounce rate is also really important, which can be tracked on Google Analytics. I’ve used Pingdom before, I think that’s a good tool to check the measure your first byte as well.
David Bain
So you mentioned Pingdom there, do you have to use multiple tools or is there just one tool that you’d like to use?
Prachi Keshavani
I like to use multiple tools to get an overview of what each tool is recommending and what different tools are saying. I think getting an overview from different tools is helpful. But I think with monitoring, you’ll see which tool says that you’re performing better and what areas you can improve.
Nikki Halliwell
I do use PageSpeed Insights. I know I just complained slightly about their use of scores out of 100, but I absolutely do still use them because you can still get timing scores out of that Web Page Test, which I use very regularly. I also like GTmetrix. It’s very similar and they do have a score rank from A to F, like a school grading system, but they absolutely do use real world timings as well. So I use multiple ones for that exact reason. You can also test from different locations on all of these various tools, and that’s really important to see how it’s loading in different areas and how different customers are likely to experience as well, even if you’re just targeting the UK.
I think Prachi, you said you were you were based in London, so you might be slightly further away from the server, whereas I’m based in Manchester. So I’m more North than you. But you might not think that there’s that much of a difference between us because we’re based in the same country. But actually, depending on where the server is based, you can actually see a difference in in how the webpage is loading. So with these tools, you can replicate those locations and it’s definitely worth doing that. That’s another reason for using different tools, and then you can collect the scores and work out the average from them.
David Bain
Nikki, you also mentioned that it’s not just about the score, it’s about actually understanding true user experience, and whether or not people are satisfied with what you offer. But I guess it’s also down to what your industry is doing as well. If all your competitors have websites that gets 50 out of 100 scores or however you want to put it, then is there any value in trying to get top marks or near top marks? Or is all you have to do just get a little bit better than your competitor and that’s all that matters?
Nikki Halliwell
I don’t do it solely with the goal of I want to be better than competitor a. I improve web performance because I want to provide a better experience for my customers, and that’s the way that I measure it, which is a slightly different way of thinking. They both ultimately have the same outcome, but I’m not doing it just to try and beat the site guy next door. He’s not the one that’s going to generate more money for my business or for my clients’ business. It’s the customers that are going to do that. So I put myself in their shoes, and test in different ways and be like, Okay, what’s annoying me about how this page loads? Is it when I go to click on that button and it shifts, that CLS? Is it because there’s a massive carousel at the top that I can’t actually read because it’s scrolling through too quickly, and it’s taking way too long to load? That’s how I try to approach it, and it tends to work out a lot better in that way.
David Bain
Okay, so it’s down to how you actually use the website in terms of what’s important, and it’s not necessarily what the tools say. Does that mean that you also try to get other independent users or perhaps even ones that haven’t even actually experienced the website before to test the website to give you feedback? Are there any places that you can go to online that you would recommend to recruit people that would do something like that?
Nikki Halliwell
Yeah, it’s all about real world experience. You can get an idea of that from Google Search Console, you can see poor URLs and good URLs. You can also use tools like HotJar, although they do add additional code to your website, so if you want to use it once, and then not use it again, make sure that you take that code off the page, because otherwise, it just stays there for years to come and it just adds weight to your page. But if you want to use it for a short while to capture that data and see how people are using your website when it loads, absolutely go ahead. There’s plenty of others out there as well, not just HotJar, so definitely do your research. I know that at Journey Further we have a Web Experiments team, and they do a lot of CRO testing and various processes like that to see how things are happening and how people are engaging with it. And sometimes that can actually be the opposite of what the tools are saying. So the tool might say that this CSS file is the biggest issue, that’s the one that has the biggest red mark, and is slowing down the page, but actually when you use these tools, or you listen to what your CRO team are saying, it might actually be that image that’s just in the way of some of the texts that you didn’t even realise because it looks great on desktop, and that’s what you see. But on mobile, you might have like a chat box, I see that happen a lot actually, a chat box that’s in the bottom corner, but it’s in the way of some of the text and you can’t actually click the Checkout button, because the chat box is in the way, and you didn’t even know that that was an issue, which again, is adding more to the site. So it’s things like that, that you don’t even know an issue until you actually get those real users engaging with your site and testing it and actually recording those people’s experiences.
David Bain
Are you generally finding that there’s some good testing going on with each type of device, or do you tend to find that there are certain types of devices that make mistakes when it comes to testing?
Prachi Keshavani
I think people should be testing more on the web and making their websites more mobile friendly, because nowadays a lot of the traffic comes from mobile devices and from tablets. So I think there’s definitely an improvement there that we can make going forward.
David Bain
Okay, let’s talk a little bit more about what to do when you’ve identified these issues. Perhaps you’re working in an agency, or you’re dealing with a team within an enterprise or you’re working in-house, but you still need to actually articulate why these changes need to be made. How do you go about telling an IT team that these changes need to be made when you get push back of them saying that there is 20 other things first on their TODO list, so they’ll get on to your changes in six months time?
Nikki Halliwell
That’s actually one of the biggest challenges that a lot of us face, especially when it comes to dev teams and IT teams. For me, it’s learning to speak the language of the IT team, the dev teams, and actually giving them the information that they care about first. So I created a template here with Journey Further that we’ve now rolled out across all of the SEO team. Obviously, we customise it as needs be, but it has all of the things in there, like, how do you find this issue, the operating system, and basically everything that a developer would come back to us and ask, such as how and where to find it, what to do about it, screenshots, etc. You name, it’s in there. We’ve also got like the size of the issue, which can change depending on who you’re working with. Some do like small, medium, and large, that kind of ‘new T-shirt sizing’ or whatever the case may be. But that’s been the number one thing for us is speaking the language of the people that we’re also speaking to, because that cuts out the questions that we have to keep either asking ourselves or answering on behalf of the client. It also means things can move through the dev queue a lot quicker, and it’s just a lot smoother and more efficient for everybody.
The number two thing I say is assigning a value to it. You can’t do it for every task, and sometimes it can be like finger in the air type stuff, but everybody wants to know how much money this change is going to generate them. Sometimes you can kind of do that if you’ve got traffic and Click Through Rate data and various other metrics that you should have if you’ve got your GA4 set up correctly. But even then, just having like a ballpark revenue, is sometimes all they need. You don’t have to say exactly to the pound or dollar how much money people can expect to generate.
But even when that’s not possible, I’ve found that using like something like a PIE metric (Potential, Importance and Ease), and scoring each one out of 10, gives us a final score out of 30. Even just things like that can help other people understand the importance of it and how much it should be prioritised. So for me, that’s been another effective way to get around getting these tickets through the system when you’re not always able to assign a monetary value to them.
David Bain
So talking about monetary value, there was a figure that I used to use, and this is from a long time ago. So back in 2009, I believe there is some leaked data from Amazon that was published online. And I understand that Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of latency cost them 1% in sales. So I used to use that figure to calculate potentially how much speeding up a website could save them. Is that the kind of figures that you use now?
Nikki Halliwell
Yeah, exactly that. As I say, taking into consideration things like traffic and click through rates. But yeah, that’s exactly the sort of formula that I do use when presenting these.
David Bain
Okay, and yourself. Prachi, so when you’re talking to teams, in the big enterprise, is there anything in particular that you do to try and persuade them that what you’re recommending should be implemented as soon as possible.
Prachi Keshavani
I think Nikki covered it well, prioritising the right issues is really crucial with these teams, because they tend to ignore SEO tickets as well!
David Bain
Something else that mentioned earlier on was the use of a CDN. And that’s something that can really make the whole user experience much, much more effective for a global audience. So would you like to share a little bit more about perhaps the use of our CDN, and perhaps which elements on a web site of any particular ones are most impacted positively by the use of a CDN?
Prachi Keshavani
I think all the Core Web Vitals are really well covered if a CDN is used. Apart from that, I think paid traffic also really, really increases if a CDN is used as well.
David Bain
Okay, so that’s, that’s an interesting point there. So what you’re essentially saying is a CDN can cope with spikes in traffic, because of certain events or sales or special occasions happening throughout the year. Nikki, do you have any experience of CDNs being used that have really assisted with website performance during special occasions? Like, Black Friday or perhaps the lead up to Christmas?
Nikki Halliwell
I was actually going to use Black Friday as an example. So any big sale season like Christmas, Black Friday, and even Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can all have significant sales around those sorts of periods. They can experience big surges of traffic and CDNs and their caching features can make a big difference there. Even if you’ve got the best intentions, and a nice, strong server, if there’s a sudden surge in traffic that they’re not expecting, your website can go down, and then you’re losing hundreds, sometimes even thousands of pounds/dollars in revenue. Whereas if you’ve got a CDN that’s able to cache them, then hopefully there won’t be any downtime at all, or certainly no downtime that your users are able to see on their end.
You can also use like load balancing and other service processes to help cope with that. Edge Service is another one. It’s not something that I have a lot of experience in to be completely honest. But it is something that I am looking to explore more depending on the website setup and things like that. It’s not something that people talk about a lot with CDNs, but they can offer a lot of security benefits as well just by providing an extra backup, basically, an extra step that people might need to go through in terms of HTTPS and making sure that the ‘S’ is forced. But also if anybody is trying to be a little bit naughty and hack your website, the CDN is another locked door that they have to fight their way through. So there’s plenty of benefits to be taken from making sure that you’re set up with a good delivery network.
David Bain
What about forecasting likely loads on a website and how much resource you require to power your websites for those peak occasions. So you might be very comfortable the majority of the time not using a CDN or not having a server, but how do you determine how much the traffic is likely to go up, and what kind of support you need for your site in order to be able to cope with that?
Nikki Halliwell
You can definitely forecast. Personally it’s not my favourite task, so I do try to get one of my colleagues to do that instead, but forecasting is very much finger in the air stuff. Yes, it’s based on data, and it should be relatively accurate, but it is difficult. When you have like a big sale or if you’ve got like a bit of press coverage that you weren’t expecting, you might have a sudden influx to your website. We have like a banking client and they were featured on Money Saving Expert talking about the rates that they were offering. And that single mention from them completely took down their website for a good couple of hours. They’re a relatively well known bank, so they do have robust servers, and they do get a good amount of press coverage as well as various sales and CDNs as well to backup, but it’s very difficult to forecast and I don’t know what the correct answer would be in terms of anticipating that other than making sure that it’s as strong as it can possibly be.
But it’s a good thing to test like when you’re crawling your site. We have this with another client in another industry. They’ve got a very slow server, and they’re reluctant to upgrade it, because it will be expensive. Their argument is, oh, well, it’s fine when we use it in the office. Well, yeah, it is. But it’s a couple of you in the office and you’ve got thousands and thousands of customers, and when they’re all using it at the same time, they’re not going to have the same experience. But also when we try and crawl that website, we have to limit it to one URL every 20 seconds. And it takes my colleague two days to crawl the website, because of how slow she has to do it. They’re so reluctant to upgrade the server, and it’s just a bit of a nightmare. If it’s that slow to not be able to cope with a crawler wanting to do that, then you definitely know that it’s a problem. And unfortunately, you’re gonna have to put your hands in your pocket and do something about it. Because like I say, if it’s a problem for the client, or it’s going to be a problem for Google, then it’s also going to be a problem for your users. And that’s where you’ll run into significant issues.
David Bain
So it’s quite reasonable to say that you’re not going to be able to predict every single potential scenario that is going to come up that’s going to drive traffic at your sites and that’s going to cause you issues. So then you come to the next stage, which is just trying to ensure that everything’s monitored, so that if there is an issue, you’ve identified it as quickly as possible, and you’re able to deal with it. So what are your thoughts on monitoring and how to ensure that if there is an issue is dealt with as soon as possible?
Nikki Halliwell
There’s a few different tools that you can use for that. Little Warden from Dom Hodgson is really, really good for giving you a real time notification of when your site goes down. It will literally ping you an email or a notification, depending on which option you choose. It will ping you as soon as it goes down. So you can be like, Oh, damn, I need to do something about this and take necessary action, and it will also send you another notification when the site’s back up. It’ll also tell you how much downtime there’s been, which is really useful as well for tracking and keeping track of that, especially if it happens overnight. We’re in the UK, and obviously there’s a time difference to the US, so it could have happened on the US side, or it could have happened because of US customers and things like that. You’re not always going to be able to do something at that time because you’re probably in bed, but when you come to work in the morning, you’ll have seen that there was an issue so you can start to address it.
There’s also another tool that that we use here at Journey Further called DebugBear. I really like that one, because you connect it to your site, and you can set up several different templates per site. So you might have it on your homepage, your PLP, your PDP, and maybe your blog as well. And it tracks it over time, you can set it to do like one test every day, or even three tests a day. Then it will show you a really useful graph where you can literally see how things are changing by the day. And then you can much more quickly jump on and see if there was an issue with any of the metrics that we talked about earlier. So the TFB, LCP, CLS, all of those, and you can see specifically which ones were affected. But also once you’ve implemented any of the improvements that we’ve talked about today, you can make note of that in the tool and see how that affects each of the metrics on the site and below. So okay, we’ve fixed images that affected our LCP, but we can see that the CLS is still a problem and there’s still a lot of shift going on. So then you can start to look at that. So DebugBear has been really effective for us, and just keeping track of how it’s happening in relatively real time.
David Bain
Unfortunately Prachi disconnected earlier and it’s a shame that she can’t just be here just for the end of this episode, but that you Prachi for contributing. And thank you of course Nikki for contributing as well, you’ve shared a lot of really valuable and information today and a lot of resources that you’ve mentioned that I’m sure many listeners are going to go away and check out and find out more.
It’s impossible to mention absolutely everything on an episode like this, but if you can just give our listeners a few resources and a few thoughts to go away and do further research into these website performance items that you’ve mentioned here as well, what resources can you point them to, and then finish off by just reminding the listener who you are and where they can find out a little bit more about you?
Nikki Halliwell
I think the number one thing to take away from today’s podcast would be that when performance is an ongoing process. It’s never something that you just turn on and then sit back and think you are done. That’s never the case. There’s always something that you’re gonna have to keep working on because things always change, websites always change, users always change, and Google always changes. So it is something that you’re going to have to keep working on. And for me, that’s a good thing, because it keeps us employed. It’s also part of the challenge. And personally, I like challenges. So don’t be discouraged if you work on your images, or you get a CDN once and then you find that there’s still issues. That’s fine. It just means that you just need to keep tweaking and keep going, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that and it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, either.
In terms of me, I’m Nikki Halliwell, I’m a Tech SEO lead at Journey Further, and we’re a performance marketing agency covering SEO, paid media, PR and all of that fun stuff and we’re based in the UK, as well as in the US. I also do freelance SEO as well, and you can find me at nikkihalliwell.com. I also have a website called techseoaudits.com which is offering audits and various other services so you can just literally use like the checkout process on there if you’d like to purchase any of those rather than having to inquire.
David Bain
As you said just at the beginning there, keep tweaking, keep testing, but also keep monitoring as well. I’ve been your host David Bain and you’ve been listening to the Majestic SEO podcast. If you want to join us next time, sign up at Majestic.com/webinars, and of course check out our other series at seoin2023.com.
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