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Leo Postovoit – Why you need Website Performance as a Mindset
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Yogesh Londhe: Right now we are in Asia session [00:03:00] and this is a part of 24 hours celebration of the people, the technology and the Big Orange Heart of WordPress, WordFest Live, not only delivers festivals, educational content, wellness sessions, and networking opportunities, but it also is a fundraiser for Big Orange Heart.
Yogesh Londhe: Please visit that donate link at any time to support the mission of our organisation. WordFest Live is a 24 hour opportunity for the WordPress community to come together, to feel less isolated, learn from one another and be present with each other. Yes. Yeah.
Lax Mariappan: Yeah. So we are the Emcee’s for this session. I’m lax.
Lax Mariappan: I’m a backend engineer at WebDevStudios. And I, I love WordPress and all the WordPress communities, so glad you’re here. And I hope you, aren’t all excited for session, Yogesh. [00:04:00]
Yogesh Londhe: Yes, I am excited for all the sessions and even this one. So our first speaker in Asia is a Leo Postovoit . I hope I pronounced that correct. And he’s going to give a session on why. Website performance as a mindset, Leo heads, product and partnership at XWP. One of my favorite organizations, a long time technologist Leo has worked for various publishers, including San Francisco Chronicle, the Denver post and low rider magazine. With a background in design marketing and software engineering, Leo advises on best practices for usability deployment and performance, across many verticals from publishing and e-commerce to education and nonprofit. Leo, we are here for you. [00:05:00]
Yogesh Londhe: Hey everyone. My name is Leo Postovoit. I’m head of product strategy and partnerships, XWP. It is a very early. 5:08 AM. This is a real live clock. Uh, this is not some strange recording from a distant past in the future, uh, here in Germany where I am currently based, but I’m also doing some stuff in APAC and also, uh, in the US I’m really excited today to talk to you about website performance as a mindset. And also I’m excited to kick off things here in the Asia session. For WordFest live 2022.
Yogesh Londhe: So, um, if you have real questions, I’m a real human being. It’s good to see you all excited to see everything as we all come together for this wonderful session here today. So first things first, I wanted to talk a little bit about XWP, uh, awesome organization that I work with.
Yogesh Londhe: Um, we are focused on building a better web at enterprise. So, what this means for us is we build performance web class with world-class solutions [00:06:00] for enterprise media and technology companies. Um, which means the very best in technology and the very best sites that run on that same technology. And so we work in a variety of verticals across the web, everything from awesome publishers to awesome technology companies, to really cool things in education and video games and nonprofits.
Yogesh Londhe: And. But that’s really not what you’re here to talk about, uh, with me today, what you really want to hear about is the growth and performance mindset. So as we unpack and understand the ideas surrounding the web, we want to understand how we measure what success looks like. So how exactly do we measure success?
Yogesh Londhe: Well, do you know that that bare metric, uh, idea performance isn’t measurable in a single number or a single way at a level? You have probably a dozen different metrics for your organization or your clients even on, on site. Um, as we unpack this conversation, you’ll see that I’m really trying to [00:07:00] help you have the tools and language to understand how you’ll be able to engage with your audiences or your site or your customers in ways that will.
Yogesh Londhe: In terms of performance, you might measure them already around things like form conversion, checkouts, or maybe click through rates, sometimes organizations even further, and they might say appointments booked or NPS scores, costumes, customer success surveys. I find that. All of these scores are really good to useful, but there’s a key metric that seems to come up again and again with us that we find that it’s really useful for your team.
Yogesh Londhe: Be able to think about at a high level, uh, in terms of things you can do to improve your overall scores. And that is page speed and page speed and slow loading as a whole. We find that if you don’t do this correctly, you’ll have a softer score across all of these other. So, if you find that your page good scores are slow through lighthouse are page speed insights or anything else that you’re doing altogether, you probably should start there.
Yogesh Londhe: And then we continue to optimize from there. [00:08:00] Um, there was a great study done a couple of, uh, a couple of years ago now because COVID brain and everything else as is the other, uh, Deloitte did a wonderful study and, uh, early 2020 that talked about the ideas of what it meant to optimize for page views. So when these things come together, we really think you need to care about your users.
Yogesh Londhe: And what delights said was that if you give your customers the kind of experience that exact you’d expect to watch these customers to be happy, otherwise they would leave quickly. And within this, we saw that at based on a 0.1 second, natural mobile student group grouping. We saw a positive change, the number of page views version rates.
Yogesh Londhe: And in some cases we saw for just a single 0.1 second. So a hundred milliseconds in total, we saw retail conversions increased by 8.4%. And an average order value is by 9.2. So pretty substantial as these things go. Um, in terms of page speed, we find that if organizations care about these things, you’ll be [00:09:00] able to grow pretty substantially.
Yogesh Londhe: Uh, actually people like to call this as the mindset of these as this is coming together. So performance is a mindset is critical because if you can’t identify all the factors that are. You won’t be able to make the data driven decisions that will be able to help you understand what would be able to make it, make you drive further.
Yogesh Londhe: So if you can decide what you want to focus on first, you’ll have to ultimately sacrifice the things that would be helping you along the way, especially in the context of. Um, another great case study that we’d like to talk about is a case that he’s done about 10 years ago from an Austin journal called behavioral and behavior and information technology.
Yogesh Londhe: And so this was done back before mobile technology was the norm back before we thought mobile technology would be the, uh, the standard across. And at the time when people weren’t engaging just with desktops, which are typically slower as a part of the experience, they’d found that users will Bandon a webpage bending to form it 50, 50 milliseconds of delay.
Yogesh Londhe: I prevented them being able [00:10:00] to engage. And so if we found is that it’s critical for you to focus on eight and it prevents your users to be happy. So if you’re finding that you have 50, 50 milliseconds or more of delay beyond what standards, Hey, you’re not going to be able to engage with users at a high level and you should be tracking.
Yogesh Londhe: The numbers from 10 years ago are just as true as they are today. And so if your numbers don’t meet the thresholds for critical, do your best. So as we look at this idea of web experience, as well as this idea of content as a whole, we really unpack this through will be called the four pillars. So our next WP, we talk about this four pillar experience as a holistic look, and that holistic look talks with the idea of an experiential.
Yogesh Londhe: So these four experiences, aren’t just focused on any one of these, but rather they’re together interlinked. Um, and we’re going to talk primarily about page speed, but I’ve been cooking mentioned the others as well. You spell it out for us as measured through the concepts of UX and design. So this is a measurable way of understanding how easy it is to [00:11:00] engage the webpage conversion.
Yogesh Londhe: As you probably understand from a forum or booking journey, something that will tell us whether a user actually did the thing. And retention either. Are they continuing to come back to that customer journey experience as we expect them to, or maybe the second or seven or 12 purchase, right. We want to be able to see are they doing the things they want to do, but if we were to pinpoint to a single metric of these four things, the XVP considers to be the sort of critical elements around Patriot experience.
Yogesh Londhe: We see that, I’m sorry. I brought up performance and the experience, the pain space is the critical element. So what that means for us as to how long it takes a user to make a request, to build all this into the background and deliver that back to that browser. And so if you don’t have good page experience, we will see all, all of these four metrics will be slower and lower than with like humidity.
Yogesh Londhe: And so what we find is that if you just focus on page B, just focus on this as a starting element, you can do why the bit to get started with, [00:12:00] because. And so page speed, we find impacts nearly every site metrics. So also things like conversion, things like time on site, bounce rate, things that will go even further.
Yogesh Londhe: And page speed has a ton of metrics, uh, within these different elements you can pull up. Um, however, we’d like to ideally focus on just a tiny subset at least a day, because we know that this has a critical metric, an oven that’s just like to focus on. We talk about these things as the core website. So the court vitals are a little bit confusing, but I promise you by the end of the day, stop, we’ll be able to help you understand what you can do to be able to pull from a further level of what’s there.
Yogesh Londhe: So, uh, Google defines the core bottles as a framework to measure your users page speed experience. Um, that sounds like a big topic, but I promise you it’s relatively straightforward. So previously before 2020. Things such as time to first bite, especially in the context of posting or first Contentful paint, which is how [00:13:00] quickly it’ll take to load something on the screen or the time to interact in that amount of time.
Yogesh Londhe: It takes to load all those obstacles on the page and get all thinking right there. Well, Google bot and Chrome and other power special up to 200 different metrics of a pace speed, uh, on a site as well as all the other. Each of these different elements are kind of confusing because there’s a lot of things that seem to overlap on top of each other.
Yogesh Londhe: And it’s hard to say, well, whether it a good FCP will provide a good experience, if ultimately you want it. I use it to interact after all, a lot of discussion. Google came together inside of the three metrics, the large screen temporal paint, the first input delay and the creative layout shift are actually the three critical things you probably should be focusing on.
Yogesh Londhe: And I know this is going to sound a little bit confusing because there’s a lot of numbers of lumps from a purchase we’re talking about. But let’s talk about this from the user perspective, because users ultimately will tell us what you want to do. And from a user perspective, we like to think about, you know, the idea of core vitals, uh, to be happy and loyal, want users to be happy and engaged with our platforms.
Yogesh Londhe: We [00:14:00] want project product managers who are building platforms with us, or with websites, thus, we’ll be talking about, yes, there’s you have to be in future customers or happy, or, Hey, should we feature? Africans are happy or Hey should be feature. And our suppliers are happy. We’ll want to be ultimately trying to move things on.
Yogesh Londhe: Developers really like to see if the core vitals as a meaningful metric that is actually measurable in a neutral way across all sites. If you have good fast scores and everyone’s happy, then executives, of course, who are paying for these types of things are looking to monitor these things in terms of success.
Yogesh Londhe: So this is, that’s an opportunity for business growth. All of these three metrics. Let’s talk about what they mean and how we define them. So with LCP, we’re focusing on. At a basic level we want to define is the thing that we want to see actually loading in an efficient way. Uh, if LCP is a lower than 2.5 seconds threshold, we know that load is too slow for what users are expecting in terms of FID we’re expecting for the first interaction that a user wants.
Yogesh Londhe: So in this [00:15:00] case, we have an example of a user trying to interact with a search widget or perhaps on a menu or a back button, whatever it might be on that given application, especially in the context of. If the application is not responsive and a facet of experience, the user is going to leave. And the public one to build a bad trust that experts is there in terms of FID, we’re expecting at least a hundred millisecond response or faster to be able to determine what’s going to be good.
Yogesh Londhe: And the most egregious I like to call out is CLS. So you probably have experienced this, this one’s at some point in your, and your time on the internet, you’ve been trying to go to cancel button, but instead you actually ended up hitting. And depending on the submit button by mistake, this is because that CLS has this idea of positioning where things don’t necessarily line up.
Yogesh Londhe: So perhaps you’re trying to engage with content, but you see an ad. Maybe you want to click. Yes. But you see no that the simple. We don’t want you to experience things that are ultimately driving you down the wrong direction. So of these three things, we find that if you have a good [00:16:00] LCP, so a really fast loading site in low FID and easy to interact with score that allows you to interact with the application and the low CLS where they lay out does not shift very frequently and very low altogether within the page painting, you have a good experience there.
Yogesh Londhe: And so, uh, across the board, one of our key partners, Google, we worked with last five or six years at this point, we’ve seen that they’ve seen incredible growth, uh, with various customers. So on this first example with G I G E D I a group, a editorial publisher out of Italy, they saw an incredible increase, um, with these types of scores by decreasing CLSC.
Yogesh Londhe: So by increasing these things we saw in major increase in basic performance, things that were there. So by decreasing CLS, we saw that people didn’t leave a site sending, uh, Lazada, a Singapore based site. We saw by decreasing LCP. We saw an increase in conversion rate [00:17:00] by 17%, pretty high scoring us there.
Yogesh Londhe: And then, yeah, which I believe is a, um, a Korean website. We saw a decrease of LCP with an increase of the rate by a hundred. So pretty powerful scores that we’re able to increase over time with a certain amount of focus on metrics. So if need, ultimately try to improve these basic scores, we should see at basic increase in engagement, but that’s bounce rate conversion rate, click through rate three different metrics.
Yogesh Londhe: You might measure it in terms of success for your given. Well, Y one of the things at a basic level is that core vitals are about user engagement. They’re not just measurements of what it’s pinned on the page, but there are other focused on the things that will show when users. So if you ultimately delay content, when it doesn’t allow users to engage, people will ultimately get away quickly.
Yogesh Londhe: We also find that in terms of publishing content. So this is typically focused on new sites, but it does apply to blog sites. The huge sector within WordPress, we found that people will, will no [00:18:00] longer engage them as that we’re expecting for them. And they give good scores. We usually see a 23% lower abandonment rate in those sites with excellence, core models.
Yogesh Londhe: That’s what we’re after. We want people to be engaging and to be happy with the content they’re getting. So all of a sudden done, I think it’s tips of Google are great for you, but how does that actually matter for your, your website, your site? It’s probably running on WordPress and really focused on content.
Yogesh Londhe: Well, you distill this down to three best practices, uh, and primarily paid speed being our main guidance, because we think that’s probably the first thing you need to care about because it seems that like most sites today, for some reason on the web don’t care as much as they could. First, we want you to understand your current state of your site or multiple sites of.
Yogesh Londhe: Second. We want you to evaluate that and determine how you get your use with the need. And then third, we want you to ultimately transform and to treat performance as your long-term goal. So within these [00:19:00] three, we’re going to spend a couple of minutes here going through each of these processes to determine the best practice of how we ultimately shift these things forward.
Yogesh Londhe: So first, do you actually understand your current state of your websites before. Um, we use a variety of tools, uh, that we think are really useful. So one of them we find that’s really critical. It’s free. It’s easy to do is a tool called page speed insights. So Patriot insights is probably our main tool because it’s a neutral heuristic.
Yogesh Londhe: Anyone can use this. It’s a self hosted, sorry, a cloud hosted version of lighthouse, uh, on the web that who uses that you can, uh, mutually determine a score based on the improvements of lab data. And also synergizes some data from crux, the crumb user experience apart, and will tell us about how fast the website is.
Yogesh Londhe: We have a couple of other tools with the are really critical, like Google search console will tell you about errors and warnings. Google analytics will tell you about how successful you are getting to certain goals within the [00:20:00] site and how you navigate through these different things that are there to Libra, which we find is really useful for determining the overall health within a site and the lab scores across over time and new Relic, which should tell you about server performance.
Yogesh Londhe: Ultimately, we want to be able to determine a good set of lab scores and a good set of, uh, uh, real user metrics scores, field scores. If you will, within this, we want you to ultimately measure good grades, but also aim for results. You want to find how far gets and to continue to move along. So of all of these though, there’s a lot of tools we’ve talked about.
Yogesh Londhe: The one I’ll mention again, is page insights. So the nice thing about business, that it’s a Google hosted lighthouse scoring that as relatively neutral. So if you poke and prod at this, and here’s an example of xDB the site that we help maintain, you’ll see that we’ve got a pretty good score. It’s because we spent a lot of time caring and concerning ourselves with what our users are seeking in.
Yogesh Londhe: The wild that field data is based off of [00:21:00] real users and what they’re actually seeing in the wild. The overall lab score will be helpful to determine and tell you like how far along the way you’ve gotten. Uh, but ultimately if your scores are good, it’s like getting too many results. If your at scores are low, though, it’s going to give you a huge set of actionable recommendations.
Yogesh Londhe: For example, can you improve the way your fonts are delivered? Can you improve the way your media is delivered in terms of images or videos? There’s a lot you can do typically. Even more so though, if you haven’t actually paid attention to a basic concept of user experience, so take your actual phone. And so for me here, it’s 5.48.
Yogesh Londhe: And again, it’s a real time. I’m here in a live conversation with Hugh out here with you, uh, for work best live 2022. You want to actually examine what your users are. So, if you see that your users are getting lots of ads and the concept of getting is a headline. So here is a pretty terrible example of a fake news experience where the headline is cut off.
Yogesh Londhe: And we [00:22:00] have an ad above an ad above a newsletter, above a prompt. We install and install the app button. Right? Pretty typical of the experience you’re getting across the web. We don’t want. At a basic level, similar to the principles of agile, the agile manifesto. Many years ago, we care more about content than advertisements.
Yogesh Londhe: We care more about integration and attraction that we do about prompts and distraction. We care more about delightful experiences than we do about conversion. If you create experiences that people want to engage with the things they’re presenting, then people are probably going to more likely to present themselves with the corn twins use to practice.
Yogesh Londhe: So, if you can focus on your user, as opposed to your conversion goal, the user will more likely one to convert. And if you fail the critical task of ultimately getting the user, what they came for, they’re going to abandon. And if they abandoned nothing else matters, you failed on a basic premise of what you can do.
Yogesh Londhe: So if you aren’t doing a good enough job being introspective on what things are there, then you use, [00:23:00] those are likely going to leave. And we think that’s a critical thing you should be doing as a review of all of your sites, of all events you’re touching you could be doing in front of you. Um, well that’s the first part of us, right?
Yogesh Londhe: In terms of content, we probably also want to consider the other elements of. Um, I’m going to list here. Just four things we thought over the last couple of years are critical for you to pay attention to. So for products that we’ve ultimately worked on over the last few years, that we think can help with these things along the way, if you thought with the content journey, at least for our some awesome plugins that are free and widely available across.
Yogesh Londhe: The first is jet pack boost. So this is a free plugin that helps you with improving CSS and JavaScript delivery. The second is the amp for WordPress plugin, which helps things like, um, providing critical CSS, uh, within the webpage, uh, that your ultimate. Google scikit-learn should provide in-page analysis in terms of the things you’re doing for analytics, pretty powerful tool built in, uh, to a lot of different aspects of WordPress and the PWA plugin, which makes [00:24:00] progressive web as possible to do things like offline node and a backer and rendering a content in fast way.
Yogesh Londhe: All of these performance related plugins can take your experience even further if you paid attention to that experience of style. So give your users what they want as early and often as possible. You can be. So after hearing all of this, how do you make sure this is going to happen over the longterm?
Yogesh Londhe: Well, it becomes about strategy. You no longer need to worry about the remediation problem, but rather the strategic long-term problem. So the elegant experiments should be ultimately focused on the realities of technology and, you know, uh, in an era where we’re trying to be conservative around energy.
Yogesh Londhe: You consider it that lower bandwidth and also lower processing power means that your users will get a faster experience. If you could consider it, the ultimate render that experiences, that means less better that’s being consumed. It means less network. Topic is less storage, all that content and data it’s.
Yogesh Londhe: Ultimately all the users are getting a faster experience. In addition to this, one of our, one of my [00:25:00] favorite, uh, colleagues, uh, Mike , one of our lead, uh, front end developers spends a lot of time with, but this idea of cognitive. If you have a smaller, simpler, faster initial paint, your users will experience a much more lighter experience at mobile expected.
Yogesh Londhe: Meaning don’t load all the stuff above the fold. Don’t cram all the things that are there, give your users the experience to expecting, right? If you give your users experience are going to engage, but if you give them a negative experience, they’re going to bounce as quickly as possible. We don’t want the.
Yogesh Londhe: Going one step further. What we’ve found is that everyone on your team probably cares what the idea of performance results. This means conversion, retention, page experience, and so on and so forth. So if you haven’t actually considered what your engineers are thinking about, when you’re preparing a design, you’re failing at a default setting to be true under or now analysts or SEO, NRLS, talk to your team.
Yogesh Londhe: Who’s focusing on this. You want to ultimately design with performance rules in mind to [00:26:00] ultimately consider how your scores will improve over the long run. You want to be rerunning your test early and often and consider how you can ultimately improve those experiences over there. Meaning if you ship a feature and you haven’t rerun those tests, you don’t know if that’s actually going to help you or her.
Yogesh Londhe: And sometimes the feature you thought was going to be good might actually do the opposite or maybe not be as big as you thought it would be. So we find that you need to not just measure them once, rather than considering them over the long-term. And also not just measure things in terms of initial page views, per se, but also consider conversion metrics across the board.
Yogesh Londhe: Right. So consider the entire lens. What things will work by. And the idea of the long-term goals are critical. If you ultimately consider what is the metrics look like over the proactive long-term metrics, you can ultimately be doing things that will help you feel good about these things. So the one funnels we talked about are focused on user research and these user research metrics are focused on what’s considered natural, according to the researchers at Google, [00:27:00] and then the positions I’ve thought about there’s metrics locally across.
Yogesh Londhe: And as the goalposts move, we want you to be focusing on continuing to make them obsessed even faster. So you can optimize with performance mindset across the board website would be lighter, more nimble across the board. So at a basic level, if you’re given a choice to remove the barrier in a way, your customers wouldn’t you do it again.
Yogesh Londhe: The hardest part is the research which Google and other hospitalizations across the board with the white have done. So listen to the research and focus on what you can do about getting. So all things said and done. I have a couple of items for you to think back to your teams or maybe onto your website and to be asking about what we can do to improve the overall performance website.
Yogesh Londhe: So the first thing you should be doing is at least the measuring things in terms of page speed. And if you haven’t actually done a good job in understanding your current state, your page speed start. So we’re view this with the tools we talked about earlier at a basic level of using lab tests. Like the ones we talked about as well as [00:28:00] field data.
Yogesh Londhe: So you can use Patriot insights, Patriot insights, reveals a little bit of crux data. You also pull the press reports directly and give your users what they need. So at a bare, bare, bare minimum, consider meaning the industry best practices, thresholds, or performance. We also want to talk about other things too, right?
Yogesh Londhe: So not just support vitals are probably considered a time interactive and time before. Time interactive is, is important because if you’ve bought lots of third-party JavaScript loading your page, it’s probably providing a pretty negative experience. It’s their time to first bite. It’s also critical because if you haven’t considered how the hosting experience folds into these things with lots of PHP, for example, a floating in the background, it’s going to end up hurting your scores.
Yogesh Londhe: You should be considered things like object caching, or perhaps a better host. If you haven’t done the things, the correct way to ultimately improve the experience across the board. Next up, we also want to talk about conversion rate metrics. If you don’t get Christian metrics are lower than Israel, we’re expecting do more to improve it and see what you can do to match those best practices.
Yogesh Londhe: And if you haven’t done a good enough [00:29:00] job, there’s more, you probably can be doing. And if by any sense, you haven’t actually met these metrics. We want you to go back and focus on mediation before you move into the long-term, etc. Finally, in the blonde combined set goals, we want you to talk about this idea is a basic level of what we could do with property.
Yogesh Londhe: So as you ship a new feature, as you ship a new update, whatever it might be, you should be acting on this idea of how we can improve these integration experiences across the board. Have you actually done a good enough job to determine whether you’d be retesting the scores across. And over the long-term, what we’ve seen is that Google and other organizations being and so on have actually measured the scores in different ways over time.
Yogesh Londhe: So at core vitals ships, the new feature, which we know that was mentioned a couple of times have less fence. How will you respond to. So at the goalpost moves are requires new things. You’ll ultimately want to be measuring new things along the way for these page page experience metrics. [00:30:00] So this approach we’ve talked about is relatively neutral, regardless of what page experience metrics are measuring for.
Yogesh Londhe: But the idea of caring about your users is the consistent part of the seasons. So all that sudden done. I want to say thank you for all coming today to talk about this awesome, uh, topic here at the Big Orange Heart, uh, session at WordFest live 2022. And I’m going to move into questions. If anyone here in the audience has any questions for us.
Leo Postovoit: Hello? Hello.
Yogesh Londhe: Hey, thank you very much for that amazing session. And, uh, Yours was the first station in Asia region and a very, very good morning to you. Did you have your coffee or not yet?
Leo Postovoit: I I’ve had a tea. It was a delicious turmeric tea.
Yogesh Londhe: Wow. Wow. Well tell me, tell me tea and a good t-shirt. [00:31:00]
Leo Postovoit: Yes, unfortunately cleaned.
Leo Postovoit: Okay. Uh, so, uh, yep. Hi Lux. And, um, so we got a few questions for you,
Lax Mariappan: uh, before, you know
Yogesh Londhe: yeah, of course there will be ma many questions for you from, you know, once you enter the community tent or something, But, uh, we’ll take a few questions here. Okay. Uh, you discussed a lot of important points and it was very comprehensive the talk. Could you discuss this lighthouse score and that, uh, Chrome user experience score? Uh, what is the. Can you compare them and what does each one should, tell us more? Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Postovoit: So lighthouse is the name of a tool that comes with Chrome, Google Chrome, inside your browser. It’s a tool that you can set up and we’ll run on instance.
Leo Postovoit: So lighthouse [00:32:00] measure is a tool based on whatever the environment is. Lighthouse can be measured with a specific set of frames. So you can measure it as a mobile score or based on network conditions. Um, it would be very different if running 5g network conditions on a, you know, a nine core, sorry, an eight core or 20 know 28 core computer in a major developed city versus the same one in an emerging market.
Leo Postovoit: Those different scores are critical because we won’t understand what those things look like. A small device with low spec hardware is completely different experience measuring a device on an aspect. Um, also we find is that it’s a reality of a problem. So as I said earlier on in the meeting here, I’m currently based in Germany, we actually have terrible internet and what the city that I’ve been now, I love it.
Leo Postovoit: But in reality, I actually have slower internet here than I’ve had in certain developing markets. That reality of what it’s like to be and even inner cities. So what that means is that I’m getting, um, 2, 3, 4 minute bits down, which is slower than you [00:33:00] might find in certain cities. So even though network conditions I’m at currently, even in the idea of a so-called developed.
Leo Postovoit: You might find that you have these spotty connections and having things like Peter ways or having reconnect or other features that are there. These ultimately provide a faster experiences there. So lighthouse tries to mimic the experience of not being on a perfect condition and crux measures the experience of your users in the wild.
Leo Postovoit: In fact, one of the things we’re doing right now, actually BP is trying to explain the idea of your Chrome user experience report in terms of what your users being, seeing in the wild. And so Google measures this idea of a 75%. So of all your users on a bell curve, the seventh, the percentiles, what did they actually see as the real score?
Leo Postovoit: So sometimes your lab’s quarter and lighthouse, especially on mobile, especially on inspect hardware on mixed network traffic, you might find that it’s actually faster than your users or even slower than users, depending on locations. Look like if that score is different than your crux, use the scores, you’re not measuring for how your users are experiencing those things.
Leo Postovoit: [00:34:00] So if you find that your scores are faster or slower than your crock scores, go get advice, go see what things are looking like in that actual number, condition and experience what it’s like to be there. So this means building ads or loading a web video. It might be looked experienced these things together.
Leo Postovoit: We want to see what these things are actually like in the wild. And in fact, I’ll give them going one step further and say that your lab scores don’t matter. Your crux scores and your real user measured scores matter unit. Um, one of the things I’ll call up a real user metrics because it’s pretty much mentioned.
Leo Postovoit: We use a tool at Sopp that actually attaches your real users scores in the wild, and it passes that as a parameter for Google of licks. So there’s a couple of techniques on the wild, where you can read about this. You can pass through your growing vitals as an accustom parameter into Google analytics.
Leo Postovoit: It makes it much easier to have this as real user metric data as part of each individual session. So you want to be ultimately seeing what you’re used to seeing in the wild. Otherwise you’re not doing the right.
Leo Postovoit: Well, that was a very elaborate and very good answer. So [00:35:00] when you talking, I was, uh, I know it brought back memories of some of my own clients.
Leo Postovoit: They came up with, they had this legacy, what pre-site and, uh, some agency had developed a custom theme and they had a few Krause’s too many on the front. And you don’t like the front page loading time. It was very long, but, uh, they had, they had a loyal followers, so they had a very good hips and they didn’t know much about Google analytics school and they didn’t know the Google console, nothing.
Leo Postovoit: So I installed that Google analytics and showed them that they are getting not a fish from around the world because you are. Children’s publishing site and that was popular. But, uh, the problem was they were getting, um, investors and investors had a few [00:36:00] engineers and they were, they wanted technical details.
Leo Postovoit: They wanted, uh, the page speed and they know the first rendered object and all those things. They, they were looking for that. So that was, it brought, brought back memories of all that, uh, when you were talking. Let’s do you want to take the next question?
Leo Postovoit: Yes. Uh, so you said about, uh, for example, you read the, you make sure you, you, where you read that popular article from smashing magazine about the, uh, it’s a recent one, right?
Leo Postovoit: I think January or something like, so they talked about the field data and they found out, even though they are like a static site, like they, they found out that they had more audience from India and India. Poor internet connection and that give them like, um, the goal replied a lot. Their scores were less, uh, even though they’re the tech stack or everything was pretty optimized and it’s good.[00:37:00]
Leo Postovoit: So, um, my question. Um, so you’re smashing magazine is a popular site. Like a lot of visitors are going there. Let’s say if someone like a lot of people who come to WordPress are affiliate site owners, niche, blogs, or whatever. So if I’m going to launch a new site, I may not have the field data. Right. I may have just the page speed insights, lab data.
Leo Postovoit: So what’s your take on that? Like what advice would you do? Like I should go wait for field data or just lab data is fine. How do take it from there. Yeah. So a lot to unpack there. First things first, I think it’s a core responsibility of every website to be tracking real field data as much as possible.
Leo Postovoit: So crux is fine. The crux is 30 days late plus 30 days on top of that, it’s really, really slow to get back to you. Things that aren’t useful. So Google analytics is. Um, Hotjar is great. New Relic is great. And there’s a ton of other tools that are there as well. [00:38:00] You want to be ultimately measuring to see what your users are getting in the wild.
Leo Postovoit: And so as you try things and any different hospice, we want to see how far you can get to ultimately see what you can do from those scores. So you need real numbers to tell you whether you’re doing a good thing or bad thing, or a neutral thing. We don’t, we don’t necessarily know if it’s a good or bad thing, always.
Leo Postovoit: Right. Um, first things, first scores and measurement has to be valid. Um, as a, at a high level, we want to, um, consider what field data means across the board. Um, I find that, uh, it’s a really interesting problem. So if we talk about a website in a traditional big Western city, so a city say like one day.
Leo Postovoit: Cisco or Los Angeles or New York we’ve done that scores are faster than the lab scores in field data. But occasionally we find that the opposite problem is true. Um, we actually just started applying at XRP a couple of days ago. Really interesting site that has a 97 97. That actually has slower scores on lab because of how these things work.[00:39:00]
Leo Postovoit: So sometimes the problem is actually an inverted problem as well. Um, we know that that lab data isn’t actually relevant for measuring what real users are seeing well, and if we know that algorithms are measuring the 70 percentile as a concern, the question is what are your users experiencing? And are you using that as a real metric to guide you what you want?
Leo Postovoit: So I’ll say it one step further. You need to be ultimately trying to ship code and ship features that are going to improve what your users are getting in the pile. The vast majority of users, according to Google, it’s 70% say 5% of your total Comodo users across the board. And, uh, and the cases of, you know, India being a really critical, uh, concern within smashing magazine.
Leo Postovoit: I would say that special magazine probably should have a geo cluster for is at CDN within India or a close region and doing a better job. What’s that? And ask them the question, can they reduce their CSS size? Can they offer an alternate style sheet, anything to ultimately buy a faster experience it’s there.
Leo Postovoit: And I’m willing to bet that there’s a ton more they can do. Um, and we’ve actually not talked to the [00:40:00] special magazine team XVP, but if they want to talk to us about how maybe we can play faster, I can almost guarantee you, we can make it even faster and you can be even better for the audience. We know this is where you can do within that.
Leo Postovoit: Um, and we can squeeze out even more, right? So it’s, it’s a worthy pursuit and we know that helps with conversion across the board.
Yogesh Londhe: Hey. Great. Thank you very much. Yeah. Great. Okay. So next question. Um, you discussed this in your talk, so let’s discuss the delightful experiences versus conversion from this different aspects, from the aspect of the users and users who are visiting your website, the website owner developer, and sometimes the investors.
Leo Postovoit: Yeah. So, um, in terms of delightful experiences, I would say that we want these things to feel smooth and natural. So one critical part of how we approach the problem. The next to the BP is that we identify each persona and then we name [00:41:00] them. We say, one is Bob, what is Jim was Joe, or might be, we want to navigate through the experts.
Leo Postovoit: So a user might have a different experience if they’re on their mobile device, again, on a train, on a bus, navigating through a place maybe on terrible hotel wifi, um, you never know what your experience is going to be compared to what someone else’s view. Um, and sometimes it’s actually really funny, right?
Leo Postovoit: So maybe. Especially in this ecosystem here, we might have heard about the client stakeholder who was on internet Explorer, 11 on a computer. That’s like many years out of date, but they happen to be, you know, they hold the purse strings. They happen to be the most important person at the company. And maybe they’re really senior.
Leo Postovoit: And you know, it has nothing to do with developing markets. Shop is good. That’s the stakeholder. You have to ultimately shape your answer. What’s there. Delightful experience is a true question of all of your users and each of your users. Sometimes it’s that strange one-off example of a a hundred percent or like an investor other times, it’s going to be the question of you’re both users.
Leo Postovoit: What I find is critical is your users [00:42:00] need to be the things you measure by that. So, So consider that entire bell curve that you’ve got and make that experience be as reliable and elegant as possible. And not just some random anecdote. In fact, I would say the investor that’s on nine 11, as much as he might care about the considerations that are there.
Leo Postovoit: I would say Google’s idea of centile, all the things that are there matter even more, that’s the cohort you want to care about and to do more than an audience.
Yogesh Londhe: Great. Uh, okay Lex, you got a. You have a question for the Leo ? I, I,
Lax Mariappan: yeah, so, uh, uh, it just, no matter how, so just a simple question though, like you answered already, like let’s summarize, we have another two minutes left or so it’s like, uh, how can I make my website faster?
Lax Mariappan: It’s come to everyone’s mind. So your question, your answer. Be.
Leo Postovoit: Yeah, TLDR you somehow managed totune in for only section high [00:43:00] Leo from XWP, run your site through a page speed insights or similar tool, pay attention to recommendations, probably install plugin that makes your website faster. That’s probably not going to be enough. You’d probably want to remove stuff, actually pay attention to what your releases are doing and do even more. Your real users are probably going to be different than we expected, and you probably can do even more than. So this is going to be, you know, optimizing video, forensic images, throwing fonts, and asking the questions around letter blocking experiences.
Leo Postovoit: We want you to lighten everything, right? So, um, I I’ll mention a quote from the great team out of the UK many, many years ago in the 1960s, it seems from Lotus. I said, simplify, and then add lightness. That’s how you win races. Right? So consider that for your website. Is there a faster way for you to do it? Well, the answer is probably.
Lax Mariappan: Yep. Yes. So I can just take it as a performance is a process, not just plug it, right?
Leo Postovoit: Yeah. It’s a hundred percent. Yes.
Yogesh Londhe: Yeah. A hundred percent. So, uh, yeah, I think let’s take one more [00:44:00] question. I’ll I’ll combine few more, few things. So, you know, we are talking about performance. So once we have a website, a WordPress site, so should I have AMP or PWA? The AMP or PWA. And then can you go ahead and tell us, uh, how does CDN affect any of those two are without the.
Leo Postovoit: Man. I don’t have enough time to answer the question, but I would say, I would say about, uh, after they experience update in, uh, last year, amp is still a useful thing, but it’s shifting in a different way, but for customer page has been, so it’s there, first of all, I’m up.
Leo Postovoit: So I focused on in sambal technologies and offline a lot you can do within PWAs. Um, I think he was just, don’t be useful. I would also say the CDNs are great, but you have to measure where your real users are. And if that’s, again is ultimately going to help. Um, what we find, for example, um, we work a lot with customers that are in Asia, for example, uh, things like Singapore or China or India, there’s [00:45:00] sometimes restrictions within content networks.
Leo Postovoit: Um, there’s also a huge discussion happening today within Russia and Ukraine, which I’m not going to get political, but even sometimes we talk about networks and accessibility is a huge concern. Sometimes actually accessing your customers might be challenging because of now Netflix work. So we want to ultimately be able to access your users.
Leo Postovoit: Are the world. And so do you, the network might be actually blocked for a variety of reasons. You wanna make sure that your CDNs can actually get around these things to connect with the customers for your audits. So, um, China’s is probably the biggest concern because sometimes getting around the so-called great firewall of China makes it hard to get this audience of there, that your audience is actually there.
Leo Postovoit: You wanna make sure that you’re either noted from an ad standpoint or the actual cluster for your website. That’s there, that’s hosted on a utilized, but WordPress house can actually access that client directly. So. Uh, long story short, probably his AMP probably use PWA, probably use a CDN, make sure it matches up for users.
Yogesh Londhe: Right. Thank you very much, Leo. It was amazing session and really engaging a [00:46:00] Q and A. And uh, how do people reach you if they are looking for resources, other things, how do they reach you? Are you on.
Leo Postovoit: Yeah. Yeah. So XWP has a great blog https://xwp.co/blog, tons of resources that are there. I, Leo I’m found on Twitter at, at literally @PostPhotos.
Leo Postovoit: Um, and I’m also available at [email protected]. So super easy to find on the web. I’m happy to answer any questions people have and again, check out WordFest. Uh, I’ll be hanging around for a little bit, uh, here this morning and good to see. Well, and we’ll talk.
Yogesh Londhe: Okay, thank you very much again, have a great day. Yep.
Yogesh Londhe: So, okay. That was a fantastic session. And our thanks to our sponsors, Bluehost, Cloudways, GoDaddy Pro, Nexcess, Yoast. And Weglot, please be sure to visit the tents and chat with them. You might even win some prizes. [00:47:00] Okay.
Lax Mariappan: Yeah, we have Photo Booth. Don’t forget to get your photos snapped in the photo booth and it’s sponsored by Multicollab and Dreamhost and feed it with a hashtag wordFest Live. And also thanks to our media partners and micro sponsors.
Yogesh Londhe: Okay. Um, in the, in the community tent in the next hour, Cloudways have their hourly giveaway with a special guest activity and you all make our Big Orange Heart full.
Lax Mariappan: Yeah. We’d love your support. Consider donation where donate button or. On the screen or go to our website, https://bigorangeheart.org and then you can make a donation.
Yogesh Londhe: So now we go for 10 minutes per week and, uh, we come back in, let’s see, eight minutes. Okay. It’s not a 10 minute break. Seven to eight minutes. They come for the [00:48:00] next session.
