How significant is site performance to SEO success and what aspects of site performance most impact SEO? Those are just 2 of the topics that we cover in our webinar discussion “How does site performance impact SEO success?”
Dixon Jones was joined by John Henshaw from Coywolf, Pam Aungst from Pam Ann Marketing, and Lukasz Zelezny from SEO.London.
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Transcript
Dixon Jones
Hello. Welcome to Old Guard, New Blood Majestic Episode 19. Today we’re going to talk about site performance and how site performance affects search engine optimization. Once again, I’ve got a great crowd. You’ve got on the old guard I reckon is Jon and Lukasz and on the new blood is Pam, who’s changing your name as I speak, I think. Why don’t we start off with you, Pam, who are you and where do you come from? And thanks for coming on the show.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Thank you for having me. Please be kind as the new blood, I’m not here to chum the waters per se, but-
Dixon Jones
No, no. We like the new blood to really rip the old guard apart, basically anything that we say-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Okay, I like-
Dixon Jones
Disagreeing with us, because you’ve got new ideas, is absolutely great because-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Okay.
Dixon Jones
Go on.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Okay. Not sure whether that’ll happen or not, but we shall see. So I’m Pam Aungst Cronin of Pam Ann Marketing and Stealth™ Search and Analytics. Both companies specialize in the same four things, SEO, PPC, analytics, and WordPress. With Pam Ann Marketing, we work directly with clients and with Stealth, we work under the radar of other agencies on a reseller basis.
Dixon Jones
Ah, cool. Excellent. And Lukasz, tell us all about SEO.London. Who are you? Where do you come from?
Lukasz Zelezny
Hi, I’m Lukasz Zelezny. I was working for around 15 years in London, in various companies. A couple of years ago, what was my hobby and side business, I decided to make my main business. I have a SEO.London, which is my consultancy business and yeah, I think quite good domain.
Dixon Jones
Excellent. I see you’re going on there with adverts on your chest, which I very much approve of. This is a Majestic sponsored event, but other brand may show themselves off. Jon, how are you mate? Long time, no see.
Jon Henshaw
Hey. It’s been a long time, although I’ve seen you a lot over the years.
Dixon Jones
Well, yeah, but COVID has taken us too far apart. Tell about yourself and where you come from, Jon.
Jon Henshaw
Okay. I’m Jon Henshaw and I am a co-founder of Raven Tools, which was sold in 2017. I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, I guess that’s why I’m the old guard. Today I am an SEO lead at ViacomCBS. Then in my spare time for fun, my digital playground is coywolf.com. That’s about it. I just eat and breathe SEO and never get tired of it for some weird reason.
Dixon Jones
We love Raven Tools in Majestic, not least because he uses our data. So thanks very much for that.
Jon Henshaw
That’s right, you-
Dixon Jones
Over the years gave us a lot of cash actually. So thank you very much. It’s-
Pam Aungst Cronin
And great t-shirts. I still have the one that says, “I’m a social tool.” Everybody likes-
Jon Henshaw
That’s great. That’s a favorite. Yeah, this is… Wow. Okay. So this is going to be a nostalgic time.
Dixon Jones
Absolutely. Thanks so much, very much to everyone for coming on just before we jump to the questions, in case I’ve missed anything out, let me introduce my producer, David, where are you?
David Bain
I am right here, Dixon. How’re you doing.
Dixon Jones
I’m fine. Have I missed anything out?
David Bain
No, not at all. I just want to tell the listener or viewer that obviously we’re broadcasting live at the moment. We are available on Spotify, on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts as well. So please subscribe there if you want to catch up with all previous episodes as well. If you want to watch a future episode live, please go to majestic.com/webinars and sign up there.
Dixon Jones
Excellent. Thanks very much and thanks to the Majestic for sponsoring the event as usual sooner. So guys, we’re all talking about site performance, SEO or SEO and its effect on… Or site performance effects on SEO. I was going to start with one tip, if people haven’t got time to get through the whole video, what one thing do you think is very important? Lukasz, why don’t I start with you. What’s one tip one takeaway that people can take from the top of the show, for site performance?
Lukasz Zelezny
I think the easiest to implement would be from my end, recommendation of usage of the WebP file format as the main format for images. Most of the time people are still using JPEG. They may not perform that well, WebP are giving a better amalgamation with what Google expect us, regarding to the performance. You may see often error in the PageSpeed Insights that if website is not using properly compressed images or properly formatted images, then the WebP is an answer.
Dixon Jones
Okay. That’s a great tip. I’m going to come back to that because, that’s easier said than done sometimes. Okay, we’ll come back to that one. Jon, what about you?
Jon Henshaw
There’s no such thing as one tip, but I’ll try.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Okay. We’re not allowed to do, it depends on this show. I should have said that.
Jon Henshaw
What I really want to talk about all the things you should be doing to your site, but since I only get to choose one, I would say that people are going to find immediate performance gains simply by using a good caching system like WP Rocket, and then also leveraging that with CloudFlare. If I can combine those two things into one tip, that would be the place I would start to get something immediate, but there’s so much more you have to do and I’m sure we’re going to talk about it.
Dixon Jones
Yeah, we will. No, I just wanted to give everyone one, then I’ll allow you to call that one, even though that’s two, that we can have conversation about both of those.
Jon Henshaw
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate that.
Dixon Jones
That’s all right, Jon. I like to be generous. Pam, what about one for you?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Well, Jon stole my WP Rocket answer. I’ll just go higher level. I was also thinking of saying, before getting deep into the technical weeds, just high level, my number one tip would be don’t spend too much time debating the importance of this or trying to figure out how much of an improvement you’re going to get, if you put the time into it. Site performance is important for both of your audiences, your humans and your search engine robots. Just do it.
Dixon Jones
That’s a good bit of advice. Just do it. Even without swearing, which that’s the modern world way from the youngsters, really. No, we’re in the middle of this, so that’s great.
Pam Aungst Cronin
I’m glad you guys think I’m so young. Thank you.
Dixon Jones
Okay. I’m going to start with this one. What is, to a person that hasn’t spent years in SEO, what counts as site performance? Is it just site speed? Is it about UX? Is it about how you go through the site or is it basically just site speed? Pam, why don’t you go with that?
Pam Aungst Cronin
I would say all of the above. I think at first it was construed to be just site speed back when Google first started talking about how speed matters, but now, especially with the Core Web Vitals and really all along, it’s been, how well does your site perform? People are like, “Oh my gosh, these, these Core Web Vitals. This is so hard to tend to, blah, blah, blah.” What even are they? Then when I explain what it is, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I hate when I go on a site and it does that. I immediately leave.” I’m like, “Well, there you go.” So it’s the experience, which is comprised of both speed and usability.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Anyone else want to add anything to that? Or are you just going to go with what Pam says there?
Lukasz Zelezny
I agree-
Jon Henshaw
Well, I would-
Dixon Jones
Go ahead, Lukasz.
Lukasz Zelezny
No, I just wanted to say I agree.
Jon Henshaw
I want to say also, but I want to add something to it. That is that, if you look at what Google has been doing over the years, it’s all around just general user experience. What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to make sure that the sites that they’re recommending and the search results are going to have the highest level of engagement. That’s why it matters whether or not somebody comes in and then they have to wait for something, or it’s a bunch of popups. Because what you’re going to end up having is people bouncing back out and going elsewhere. Google cares about delivering, at least from the organic experience, the best pages possible with the best user experience and they’re using things like Core Web Vitals to leverage that, to basically force people for sites and publishers and to doing this, it’s their way of doing it. It’s why they say there’s a ranking component to it. That’s what I wanted to add to that.
Dixon Jones
Can I throw a spanner in the works and just come back here and ask the thing guys, does that mean that really good interactive engaging content then gets a real hit because it takes a while to load up this stuff. So may be that the best content doesn’t actually get seen in the search results because it’s too engaging and that involves a complicated webpage, that might require people clicking on things? Is that just a fact of life, or do you have to have some gateway pages into that interactive content to do things fast? I’ll throw that through to Jon. Anyone else can jump in.
Jon Henshaw
Sure. I mean, I think that what you’re describing is like an online game or something, I don’t think that’s typical content.
Dixon Jones
Yeah.
Jon Henshaw
I think that the type of content that most people consume, it’s either going to be text or video. So you should never have an experience where you get to a page and you’re just waiting for it to load. I mean, the whole point is to not go back to the flash site days. The whole point is that you can immediately engage in something and if you do have a site where the content, the experience that you want the visitor to have is something that takes a while to load or whatever it might be, then yes, in that particular case, which I would consider to be an edge case. But in that case, I would do something so that, at least from the Core Web Vitals perspective, something loads immediately and then, you can lead them into that experience.
Dixon Jones
Okay. Yeah. Because I’m thinking of things like maybe surveys because everybody loves a good survey done. Well, they did when I was watching at school as everyone looked at the magazines and then went through the, “Do I look cool on Saturday night?”
Jon Henshaw
But a survey should be instant. I mean, it should be… A survey, if we’re thinking SEO should actually… If you want that first page, that first component of a survey to rank, if we’re talking about visibility in Google, then you’re probably going to want to make it like an article and then have that first thing either below, or have a call to action to start the survey.
Dixon Jones
Okay. Pam, you look like you wanted to add something there.
Pam Aungst Cronin
I’m mulling over a thought that I’m trying to put into words. Basically it’s like yes, poor page experience could hold back really great content, but there are 200 plus other things that could also do that. So you kind of have to do the best you can on every front. I wouldn’t say that this is the only thing to worry about to hold back the ranking of great content. There’s a whole bunch of things you can do, right or wrong or whatever. It’s the mix of how you do with everything. I always explain SEO as a game. You’re earning as many points as you can to beat your competitor and you have to do it with a whole bunch of different cards in your deck. Play whatever you can play. So anyway, that’s just the best I could put that thought together, something along the lines of-
Dixon Jones
Pam Magic The Gathering Cronin there, we’re going to-
Pam Aungst Cronin
There you go.
Dixon Jones
I get it.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Something along those lines is what was thinking-
Dixon Jones
Love it. I love it. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Lukasz, how do you measure it? I mean, what’s your favorite tools for measuring site performance then?
Lukasz Zelezny
I am using URL Profiler through APIs. I think this is enough, because that can give you a view on a multiple of the URLs. So when I’m implementing something that impact significantly, like Jon said CloudFlare, for example, I don’t need to measure on the impact on a few URL. So I’m just going through the whole website very often and yeah, this is pretty much how I’m measuring this. However, I just wanted to say one thing about all this concept, because Jon, you sounds like you are very pro web vitals. I feel very often that it’s a high development that we’re experiencing. Guys from one side, we are in the 5G era. We have the fastest internet that we ever had, and we are faffing with image compressions and CSS compressions, and JS compressions.
We are looking on this kind of indicators. This is stupid, I feel sometimes. As an SEO, if you’re looking on the broader view, then the amount of money that been spent in last two years on page speed optimization, and the outcome that came from this. Very often it’s a chasing of the indicators, chasing of the metrics, chasing of the color of the bubbles, like some people are chasing religiously Yoast, and they thinking that, if they will have everything green then they need to rank. It’s not like that. I am a moderately skeptic about everything. I see this other side of the coin. But if you’re asking, because I know that there is other side of the coin, but there is also dance because Google is playing one of our colleagues wrote about AMPs, Barry. Dance, dance, because Google is playing. So, I’m dancing.
Dixon Jones
That’s his pet hate, isn’t it?
Lukasz Zelezny
I have URL Profiler, I have APIs and I’m going through my WordPress websites or non-WordPress website. It’s like, oh, whoa, average ranking, average page speed right now is that much. Then, I’m implementing WP Rocket and CloudFlare. Oh, now by average it went that much up. So it’s true.
Jon Henshaw
It’s true. I have a slightly different view of this. The way I would put it would be that, we wouldn’t have the majority of changes that we’ve had, have made the web better, if it hadn’t been for Google implementing all of these things. For example, we likely wouldn’t have as many mobile-friendly sites as we have now. We likely wouldn’t have most sites being secure. In regards to page experience, and even down to Core Web Vitals, these are all initiatives to push and force the industry to be able to improve the user experience overall, which goes back to what I was saying earlier, which is Google needs a way, a mechanism to be able to know that the sites that they’re recommending are going to be a halfway decent user experience.
So they’re using these instruments to do that. I think that people can get lost in the scores and stuff like that, like Lukasz is saying, and it gets a little silly, to do that. But there’s an entire history of Google doing this with… I would say before Core Web Vitals and the page experience stuff in general, we had AMP. AMP was probably the worst version of Google trying to force an industry to behave a certain way for that user experience to be a certain way, but it was the worst example. They know that, and they’ve changed how AMP has done.
I actually am a proponent of AMP now, as opposed to an opponent, which I was before, because of them detaching it from stories because they are now making it so that things are true components that anybody can add, through their Bento initiative. But in regards to the fact that page experience, Lighthouse exist, the core vital scores exist, I see as a positive. I see as a good thing, I see as a way to sort of navigate us towards a way where we can make our user experience better for our visitors and we can benefit from it and Google search.
Dixon Jones
Okay. I just want to come into to our users here, just for anyone in the audience that doesn’t know Core Web Vitals is a platform in Google Search Console and Lighthouse is a platform in Chrome, that you can use, that’s in there. So just wanted to… Sometimes we get carried away with three letter abbreviations and running off in our worlds and I’m very aware when I go into a different audience or a different world and I’m the listener when people start banding about three-letter… TLAs, three-letter abbreviations that I don’t know, then I panic. Pam, any other tools that you like for site performance, measuring site performance? You probably need to go off mute.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Yeah. As if I don’t do that 10 times a day, you’d think I’d learn. I just want to quickly echo what was being said on both fronts, just now on the, it is stupid in a way that Google is holding us up to a standard of Lighthouse uses a 3G 1.6 megabit per second connection, emulation. That’s ridiculous. On the flip side though, I do think it’s a good thing that they’re setting these standards for the industry as Jon just said. So it’s like as with everything in life, a middle of the road approach is probably best, to go to one extreme and not do anything about it, not good to go to the other extreme and obsess over every little score, probably not good either. So anyway, just wanted to echo both of those points. As far as tools go, of course, PageSpeed Insights which is what shows you the core web vitals and the Lighthouse scores in one place.
Also of course you can see that data in Search Console, especially for clients to understand easily for a quick red, yellow, green kind of a measurement, I like PageSpeed Insights and it’s Google. So it’s kind of straight from the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t really matter if the way they calculate those scores is ridiculous or not. We have to March to the tune of that drum, anyway, like you’re saying, we have to dance anyway, because they said dance. So, we usually start with PageSpeed Insights, but also GTmetrix is excellent and WebPageTest, that org is excellent as well. We definitely go to those for digging deeper.
Jon Henshaw
I do want to say that while the 3G sounds ridiculous to us, because I’m assuming that we all have broadband and we spend most of our time on desktop, I think the reasoning behind that is because, most searches are done at least, in Google search on mobile devices and the majority of searches are probably not from us with really fast internet connections. I mean, I think there’s validity to them making that a baseline. It’s just that we don’t experience that, but I think we might be in the minority and that’s probably why they do that. I think for other-
Pam Aungst Cronin
That’s fair. That’s definitely fair. Yeah. They’re just setting the bar high because it’s hard enough to drag people to do something. So they set the bar high and get as close as you can.
Dixon Jones
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t use the internet on 3G. I mean, just getting Google search results in the first place on the screen just takes too long for me.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Right yeah.
Dixon Jones
So, Google itself needs to improve, if they think that they’re going to carry on with 3G.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Exactly.
Dixon Jones
Now I get that that’s not the same the whole world over. As soon as you go out of the cities of America, you’ve got exactly the same problem anyway, quite a lot of the time. So, certainly in the wilds of Wales, when I go into the Welsh mountains, 3G is good, but, it’s not the same as 4G. So there’s a way to go.
Jon Henshaw
I Want to also say something about the tools, which is all the tools that were mentioned are really good and I have used and use them. Of course, I mean, I think we’re aware that Google has its own tools built right into Chrome and so on. But the point I want to make was at, at the end of the day, the only scores that actually matter in regards to this, or what shows up in Google Search Console, because they’re using crux data, which is real data from real users and that’s actually what they use, in regards to how they might rank something. So we use the tools that were already discussed previously to help troubleshoot and improve our sites. But, what really matters is whether you have good or I don’t know, yellow warning, whatever they call it, or red. So we’re going for green or good and Google Search Console. Everything else is just for development, is for improvement.
Dixon Jones
Sure. I mean, I’ll just add SiteBulb into the mix just because I can sit there and just do a whole load of webpages and have a look at the individual pages and get them all done in there as well. He’s not paying me but-
Jon Henshaw
There you are, to this.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. But for me mostly I’ll use Lighthouse as well because it’s easiest there. I don’t have to log into anything. I can just do it from Chrome. Okay. I want to go back to this images thing, because clearly when you’ve got un-optimized images, that can be the slowest way of loading your page. It’s a simple thing for a lot of SEOs to fix, but only if you know what you’re doing. You mentioned WebP format Lukasz, which is, I’ll be honest, not one I use. But anyway, it can be fiddly. If you’re a WordPress user and you’re not technical SEO and stuff, it can be a bit fiddly, just trying to suddenly make those images web-optimized. How do you go about that? Well, firstly, Lukasz, how do you put something into a webpage format? How do you put-
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah. There is a plenty of conversion tools. The most manual thing I can even think about and it happens sometimes to me, it is just take all the folder with media, no matter what CMS disease, just copy this on your local machine, take some compressor, compress this, and then send back to developers and let them to replace that. This is the super manual process. If the developers don’t understand the thing. For WordPress the pain is buried under plugins, the plugins for everything, there is a plugin for that. For example, short pixel. Short pixel is an API-based plugin that on their infrastructure image will be compressed, converted into WebP and sent back to your server and job done and you can have this also on the fly. So, During the life cycle of the website, a website will be converting and converting. This is great because you just forgetting about this. You shouldn’t think as a business owner, or even as a manager about this kind of super nitty gritty stuff. It should be semi-automated or automated.
Dixon Jones
There’s lots of WordPress plugins that do automate all of that, the compression for you, but on the other side of optimization, isn’t there a really good argument for the less plugins you have in WordPress, the faster your site is.
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah, that’s-
Dixon Jones
Which isn’t to me.
Lukasz Zelezny
That’s true. But I wanted to mention, this is almost the same, all the CSS, JS must be compressed and finally you ending with this one last one, which is surprise, surprise, Google analytics, JS code, which is never compressed in many files. Google wouldn’t wouldn’t compress. Or I love this cumulative layout shift, which always hits me in Gmail, always in Gmail-
Pam Aungst Cronin
And Google Images. Google Images, everyday.
Lukasz Zelezny
Oh my gosh. You’re about to click and everything is shifting up and I’m always-
Dixon Jones
Oh, maybe they should employ a UX company.
Lukasz Zelezny
They should hire me. I always would love to see Google.com on Search Console, how many impressions Google having Googled?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Right.
Lukasz Zelezny
But anyway, yeah, Dixon, you’re absolutely right, the plugins can be the killer and that’s why I’m not saying that plugins are ultimate remedy for any problem. They need to be used wisely. Sometimes plugin can be used only for a moment to do the job and then remove it because you don’t need this anymore. Less plugins, always better. However, we need to remember that if we will be that kind of how to say this? If we will go too far, we may end up with the website that Warren Buffet have. Have you seen Warren Buffet website?
Dixon Jones
Classic. He’s done not badly.
Lukasz Zelezny
He’s done not badly. No CSS, no JS. Nothing. Plain text. The fastest website on the internet.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. If you can find the Barkley website David and put it in the comments and that’d be great. It’s an absolutely terrible website, but it’s probably quite quick. It’s really 1990 something. Pam, what do you use to compress images?
Pam Aungst Cronin
I use Imagify, which is made by the same company as WP Rocket. It works in similar ways the other image plugins we just mentioned, but the big benefit that I see with Imagify is that it integrates directly with WP Rocket to cash the WebP versions of the images. It’s also pretty good at serving up the old fashioned style images, the JPEGs, when a browser doesn’t support it. So that fallback and the integration with the caching in WP Rocket makes Imagify my go-to.
Dixon Jones
That’s good. That’s a good tip. Jon?
Jon Henshaw
Yeah, I don’t use any plugins-
Dixon Jones
I thought you were going to say, “I don’t use any images.”
Jon Henshaw
Yeah. I have no images whatsoever. When I used to use pings and JPEGs, I still use JPEG sometimes. I would use image Optum. Actually I would optimize the output using an image editor called Pixelmator Pro which is Mac-only. I’d use a app called ImageOptim for my pings and that would reduce it. But what I do now, I mainly just use WebP now, which can get you in trouble if someone’s using a really old browser on a corporate computer or something like that. But my audience for the stuff I write and for my sites, it’s generally base, up-to-date. So I use WebP, Pixelmator Pro is one of the only good image editing apps out there, that actually will output to WebP and allow you to control the actual optimization for compression for that. But you actually don’t need all that. You can actually continue to use JPEGs and pings like you always have, and then just use CloudFlare’s polish feature, which will automatically optimize and serve WebP images, instead of your pings and JPEGs, when it knows that the browser that connects to your site, supports it. So, I’m okay-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Well, there’s another excellent point in there too, which is even if you are using WebP you still shouldn’t be uploading a 4,000 pixel wide image into a 40 pixel wide spot. You still have to do traditional image optimization-
Jon Henshaw
That’s not a great idea.
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah.
Jon Henshaw
Yeah, I agree. You might want to resize that, for sure.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Lukasz’s solution of locally compressing all the files, they won’t know what size they’re going to be. Yeah. That’s another challenge. I like the idea of bringing it down local, and then you don’t have any mess up there, but it doesn’t resize the image for you.
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah, that’s true. That doesn’t resize. Pam, if there is a situation that you have only 40 pixels, then in that case, I’m always loading anime GIF, Bob the Builder-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Yes.
Jon Henshaw
Doesn’t matter if it makes sense. That’s what you’re uploading. It’s Bob the Builder-
Lukasz Zelezny
Guys, let’s be honest. Everyone one is talking about JPEG, PNG and WebP or GIFs. Where are GIFs?
Pam Aungst Cronin
They do rule the internet now. Yeah.
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah.
Dixon Jones
Yeah.
Pam Aungst Cronin
I want to see those scrolling marquees come back. I’m looking at that Warren Buffet website I’m cracking up. I just expect to see the marquee and [crosstalk].
Dixon Jones
So anyone on Spotify, we’re looking at berkshirehathaway.com and well worth it, well worth a look, if you really want to get some modern insights into UX. Anyway, you talked about CloudFlare Jon, so let’s move on to CDNs. I’ll start with the basic question, for anyone that hasn’t used a CDN before, like CloudFlare or CloudFront or Amazon have one, I can’t remember what it’s called. Why are they good? Pam, what are they and why are they good?
Pam Aungst Cronin
All right. So CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and it’s based on the principle that there really actually, isn’t a such thing as the cloud, the internet is not in the sky. It’s actually a network of computers, physical boxes with wires that are connected to each other, and there’s some wireless stuff in there, but in essence, it does matter if your website is hosted on a server in California, and most of your clients are coming from New Jersey or the other side of the globe. So that latency, the delay that’s caused by the physical distance is rectified by Content Delivery Network, which is a network of computers that hosts copies of your website, think of it like a photocopier, that makes a stack of copies and leaves them in all different places. So it’s easy for whoever to wants to visit your website, to go to the server closest to them and get a copy of it instead of having to send a request to the server, halfway across the globe.
Dixon Jones
I mean, the good side of that is that then, you’ve got your stuff mirrored all over the globe, I guess, but the downside of that, it’s cash. But the downside of that then surely is, if you’re going to change some stuff, it may not upload onto the person’s computer at the other end, is that right, Lukasz?
Jon Henshaw
Yes. Every time I make a change on my website, because, I have hosting level caching, I have WP Rocket caching, and then I have CloudFlare doing caching as well. So every time I make a change, I have to clear cach in three different places. Then if I need to make another minor change, clear, clear, clear again. So yes, it does not come without downsides.
Dixon Jones
Yeah.
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah, I can only echo that. I am using religiously WP engine as my hosting provider, and I love this guys. They are amazing. But I still use CloudFlare and I still use, I think pretty much that. They have also some built-in caching system. It’s always like, I prefer to put parameter question mark refresh, just to see the change. That’s one thing. Jon probably-
Dixon Jones
What’s that tip Lucas? What do you do?
Lukasz Zelezny
I just at random parameter question mark, and just a random characters.
Dixon Jones
On the URL?
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah, on the URL. Because my caching is working with exclusion of the parameters. So I’m not cashing parameters. Yeah. That is forcing browser to take things from the website. Then I don’t care if people refresh this or not. It will eventually on some point refresh, so I don’t worry about this, but I wanted to mention about one thing potentially. Jon will agree with me or maybe not. On CloudFlare. There is Argo. I love Argo. I always open Argo. Argo is this-
Dixon Jones
What’s Argo. How do you spell Argo?
Lukasz Zelezny
A-R-G-O.
Dixon Jones
Okay.
Lukasz Zelezny
Argo is on the business setup. It is a special way to scale up the number of servers that are across different locations. So they are very proudly cloud or very proudly is telling that, “Oh, we have that many locations here and there. Thanks to that, your website is accessible so fast.” This is great, but obviously for clients is very important to explain the difference between hosting and between a CDN. Because some clients may be like, “But we are already paying Kinsta or WP Engine.” And it’s like, “No, this is something different.”
Pam Aungst Cronin
It’s confusing because some hosts do include their own CDN and others don’t.
Lukasz Zelezny
Exactly.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Okay. There’s another thing, isn’t there, with CDNs? That CDNs also act as firewalls. So they’re blocking a lot of traffic. Particularly, they love to block bot traffic, but I put it to you that as the world is getting much more app-driven, much more driven by voice searches and Netflix suddenly doing search or all sorts of things and Apple coming on, or image search, which is usually a different crawl technology. Is blocking the bots holding back the chance of real users seeing your content? And should you use the default blocking that these CDNs in particular use? I’m not a fan of using them because, they’ll probably block majestic for a start. But, on top of that, I find that, there are increasingly occasions where a human being may not see your content, if an RSS feed was trying to fetch it, for example, it might [crosstalk]
Lukasz Zelezny
Yeah.
Dixon Jones
Then it’s not going to be in an RSS feed. You don’t always have to have it on your website. What if anyone, Jon-
Jon Henshaw
I’ve only had positive experience with CloudFlare and how it blocks bots. I think that, most spots that it probably does block are nefarious and they’re up to no good. At least that’s what I’ve seen with my own sites, that I run through CloudFlare. The other thing is, from a security perspective and fighting bad actors, I couldn’t have done certain things without CloudFlare. For example, on one of my sites, coywolf.news. There was a site in France that decided it would ping my site every minute, and it was trying to get the RSS feed and then it would take it, then it would auto translate it into French and then republish it on its site. I was able to research, investigate, figure out exactly where it was coming from and after pinpointing everything block every possible way that it could actually get to my site.
In doing that, I’m sure I blocked some people from an ASN out of France. I’m sure that there were some poor experience or whatever, but to me, you’re talking about under one percent, you’re talking about something that it’s an insignificant amount of bad experiences from perhaps a real user versus somebody stealing and translating your content and trying to monetize your own content or somebody coming in and using up the resources of your server. I personally am pro-CDN, besides the fact [crosstalk]
Dixon Jones
Oh, no. I’m pro CDN, don’t get me wrong. I’m way pro CDN.
Jon Henshaw
You said you were against them and you would never use them earlier, I heard you.
Dixon Jones
No, no. I’m a happy user of CloudFlare. I do. Not least because, I’ve had a number of sites as soon as somebody decides to try and run a bot to try and break my… Well, I’ve got Wordfence to block the auto login things, but yeah, as soon as that goes there, then you can quite quickly get-
Jon Henshaw
I would assume that the Majestic bot is not considered a bad bot by CloudFlare-
Dixon Jones
I think one of the things that is interesting to me is that bad bots don’t identify themselves as bots. That’s the basic thing. You have to positively say that you are a bot for it to have in your user agent, that you’re a bot. One line of code you can use Screaming Frog, whatever. It could be any bot that you want to be called, just put your own user agent in there. So, my bugbear really is that usually, the bad bots pretend to be Firefox users or Chrome users, or they’re using… Most of them are using headless Chrome now, anyways. It’s the repetitive nature of the hitting that needs to kick in and then yeah, that doesn’t need to be the case. Sorry, Pam, you were going to-
Pam Aungst Cronin
No, I was just going to say what you just said, then I would hope it would be catching the behavior, if not the user agent
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Rather than the name really, rather than the user agent. Yes. There we go. So anyway. Right. Okay. So, CDN’s good and caching great, as long as you remember to purge things, when you update your stuff, if you want it to get live very quickly. Okay, great. What about shared hosting? Does it matter? Bad? How do I know? How do I know, Pam?
Pam Aungst Cronin
It’s bad. I mean, it’s cheap, but those shared hosting plans and companies are notorious for squishing, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of websites onto a single computer. Again, there is no such thing as the cloud, it’s actually physical computers and you can overtax them. That’s basically what happens. Also, there could be other malicious actors on that server with you and you can get penalized for their bad behavior. So thumbs down to shared hosting. How do you know if you’re on shared hosting? I mean, you can obviously check your hosting bill, but there’s a lot of other tools out there to check it for you. Some of them don’t work so great. I’m actually looking for a new one. The one that I go to is who is hosting this? But, it doesn’t-
Dixon Jones
Well, I’ll answer you the question then I’ll save Jon from coming in and answering it for you. So Majestic’s Neighborhood Checker, I think it’s free and it will tell you-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Neighborhood Checker, okay. I’m going to check that out.
Dixon Jones
Domains that are on any host, so you’d rather put in an IP address or put in your own website in at least, well, for at least the first 100 or 200 domains that are on any website and then tell you how many there actually are. Then, how many links to all of those pages as well. So you’ve suddenly got an idea of how you’re competing with resources, really. So it’s plug for Majestic there because… Got it-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Literally made a note to check it out.
Dixon Jones
Yeah. Find out. Jon?
Jon Henshaw
I know you’re going to be surprised, but I have an opinion about this.
Dixon Jones
I love a piece, okay, you’re happy share those thing?
Jon Henshaw
I mean, I don’t have them, but I’ll, I’ll express one now. In real life scenarios in regards to clients, my own sites, that type of thing, I’m in total agreement with Pam on, I wouldn’t do a shared hosting environment. I would do something at the very least something like WP Engine or Kinsta that’s been described before, just because of all of the features that you get with that, including backups and restores, and it just makes things better and easier.
However, to throw in, it depends. I’ve had great success with shared hosting, with things that I’ve tested, but with the caveat of it going through CloudFlare. So for example, we just talked about the IPE being shared with perhaps bad actors, bad sites, whatever it might be. If you run it through CloudFlare, not only do you get all the things we’ve already discussed, but they’re going to mask the IP. I mean, anything that’s delivered via CloudFlare as a CDN, isn’t even going to use the IP address of what you’re using on the shared hosting provider in the same way that they also mass DNS IPs and DNS records.
It can work and I’ve been practicing or playing around with IPFS, which is a whole other conversation, which is decentralized web. I’ve been able to throw stuff on the decentralized web, via IPFS, run it through CloudFlare and it works as good as if I were hosting it at WP Engine or some other say dedicated hosting service.
Dixon Jones
Yeah, and CloudFlare has a free option. Doesn’t it? So if you’re spending all of shared hosting prices, then you probably want the free version of CloudFlare.
Jon Henshaw
Yeah. Oh, I take advantage of the free version of CloudFlare across the board. I definitely pay for it for certain sites. But, it’s there for a reason and if you end up growing and you need more features, particularly like the Argo that Lukasz mentioned, then you’re going to upgrade. That’s why they have that there. I mean, they have it there for other reasons. But that’s why the free account exists and I’m a proponent for it.
Dixon Jones
Put the tinfoil hat to say, “Well, I was there for the CIA.”
Jon Henshaw
Tinfoil hat.
Dixon Jones
Okay. No, no-
Pam Aungst Cronin
I was waiting for that.
Dixon Jones
Right. Okay. I want to finish up with how fast is good enough, because surely we started by saying that, you don’t need to obsess once, at some point you don’t need to obsess, there’s other things to worry about, at some point. You’ve got to get this stuff good. So is there a how fast is good enough thing that we can take away at all? I don’t know, who wants to go in there. Lukasz, any thoughts?
Lukasz Zelezny
I think whenever you passing the green message that is giving you that you’re passing the Core Web Vital assessment, that’s fine. We don’t need to do sculpture in this kind of, “Oh my gosh, 93 and yesterday I was 95. So what now? Oh my God, we need to start from scratch.” We need to build new business. So yeah.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Burn it all down.
Lukasz Zelezny
Burn it down, fire yourself, close the company and start from scratch. Yeah. That’s one thing, and observation of the Search Console, that’s absolutely what I would call Jon. As an off topic, I just wanted to get to the previous shared web hosting. I am using very often built with relation profiles and built with you can see, what are the other website they know about that are on the same IP number and what are the other websites that are using the beginning of the Google Analytics code or Google Tag manager or Hotjar. So you can see a relation between websites on different level. One of this is IP number. That’s as an off topic.
Dixon Jones
I think NerdyData does something similar to that, as well as fines bits of snippets of code and stuff. Yeah. So, that’s cool. Okay, Jon, anything to add?
Jon Henshaw
I agree with everything Lukasz just said on that and-
Dixon Jones
Greenlight is all you need.
Lukasz Zelezny
Of course.
Jon Henshaw
The only thing I would add would just be after that looks good in regards to just, what does Google think of my site? You still have the thing that’s always been there, which is you still need to look at your analytics and see where people are balancing, what they’re doing on your side? So you still have to at least analyze what visitors are doing on your site and make improvements there. But in regards to, I think the core part of this conversation, which is Google page experience, Core Web Vitals, making sure you’re good, you’re green for the majority of your pages and GSEs, that’s where you need to be.
Dixon Jones
So to keep people from bouncing and stuff, you want something like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity tool or something like that, but unfortunately it involves Java script on a page which slows your website-
Jon Henshaw
Or your brain, looking at your own brain-
Dixon Jones
Oh, brain.
Jon Henshaw
That works too.
Dixon Jones
You want to jump in there, Pam?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Yeah. That’s a tool. We can use the brain.
Jon Henshaw
What is that tool?
Dixon Jones
That’s brilliant.
Lukasz Zelezny
Or you copy Warren Buffet websites, that’s the best way this-
Jon Henshaw
Right.
Pam Aungst Cronin
Really is.
Jon Henshaw
Warren Buffett’s website.
Dixon Jones
That’s right, because he made money-
Pam Aungst Cronin
Just do that.
Dixon Jones
It’s true. Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. Guys, thank you very much. Before we go, just ask people to get their last minute plugs for their own stuff. But David, what have we got coming up?
David Bain
Coming up, we’ve got episode 20 next. That was episode 19 you’ve be listening to or watching. So episode 20 is going to be on the 1st of September. That is going to be on SEO for Shopify. We’ve already got Kevin Indig booked for that. So he heads up the SEO for Shopify. We’ll have two more great knowledge of SEOs on Shopify SEO and that one and you’ll see a streaming live at 500 PM, BST 1200 PM, Eastern Daylight Time. And just sign up at majestic.com/webinars for that.
Dixon Jones
That’s great. I can’t imagine we’d get a better person in the world than Kevin Indig for that particular topic. That’s great. So thank you very much. Leaves it for me to say guys, thank you very much for coming on. If people want to track you down, where do they find out more about you? Lukasz, I know it says on your site, on your thing, but not everybody’s got the visuals.
Lukasz Zelezny
Here, SEO.London, remember SEO.london, not SEO.London.com.net no, .London. That’s the top level domain.
Dixon Jones
Not London.SEO, SEO.London.
Lukasz Zelezny
No.
Dixon Jones
Pam, where do they find you?
Pam Aungst Cronin
Anywhere on the web at Pam Ann Marketing. So pamannmarketing.com or @PamAnnMarketing on Twitter. Also, stealthsearch.com for our reseller stuff.
Dixon Jones
That’s brilliant. Jon, are we allowed to find you? Or you’re going back into hiding?
Jon Henshaw
You’re allowed to find me, I guess. I mean yeah, I don’t think I was hiding, but maybe I was. I’m on Twitter @Henshaw. Then if you want to follow the experiments and things or write about online it’s at coywolf.com. C-O-Y-W-O-L-F .com.
Dixon Jones
I’ll tell you what, you know somebody is on the old guard when they’ve got a Twitter handle of @Henshaw.
Jon Henshaw
@Henshaw.
Dixon Jones
Awesome. Very good. Guys. Thank you ever so much for coming down. I really do appreciate it. Thank you to the audience for listening today. Please come and join us again for the next session of Old Guard New Blood. Bye-bye.
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