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Episode 55: Alex Lucas - 5 Tips for Speeding Up Your Website
147 Plays5 years ago
We chat about why page load speed matters—hint: a fast website can help improve conversion rates—how you can test your website, what you should look for when running a test, and then 5 ways you can increase your website speed.
A quick warning: We chat about a lot in this episode. For quick reference, I’ve written a corresponding blog post that you can find in the show notes that summarizes what we’ve discussed.
Alex is an entrepreneur, photographer at AL Weddings, and designer for Davey & Krista—but outside of work, his life is consumed by plants. He may have missed his calling as a botanist but he’s doing his very best to turn his home into a jungle. He loves solving problems whether it’s helping brands find more clients or fixing the kitchen sink, and at least once a day he slips up and calls Davey & Krista, “Dava & Kristy."
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Transcript
Choosing a Lightweight Theme
00:00:05
Speaker
We could have a whole episode about different themes, but just going with a reputable, lightweight theme that doesn't have just every bell and whistle possible, because it's like some of those themes, they'll have everything you could possibly think of, and then you'll end up using two of the features.
Introduction to the Show and Guest
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:38
Speaker
Today we are chatting with photographer, plant enthusiast, and Davey and Krista team member, Alex Lucas.
Importance of Website Speed
00:00:44
Speaker
Alex is one of our designers, and he's joining me today for a conversation about how to speed up a website. We chat about why page load speed matters, hint, a fast website can help improve conversion rates, how you can test your own website, what you should look for when running the test, and then five ways you can increase your website speed.
00:01:04
Speaker
A quick warning, we chat about a lot in this episode. That's why it's almost an hour long. For quick reference, I've written a corresponding blog post that you can find in the show notes that summarizes what we've discussed.
Listener Feedback Invitation
00:01:16
Speaker
And as always, be sure to check out the show notes at davianchrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode. And I'd like to hear from you about what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands That Book podcast as we move forward. I'd also like to know what episodes have you enjoyed most so far and why.
00:01:31
Speaker
To leave your feedback, head on over to the Davey and Krista Facebook page and send us a message.
Alex Lucas: Background and Expertise
00:01:36
Speaker
Now, onto the episode.
00:01:42
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of the Brands That Book Show. I have one of our designers with us, Alex. He is talented designer, talented photographer, talented grower of plants. If you follow Alex, so I'll post all his social media links, but if you follow Alex, you know that he's sort of into plants.
Website Speed for SEO and User Experience
00:02:03
Speaker
Sort of is a good understatement. Is an understatement. So he's with me here today. He is a WordPress guru. He helps us with a lot of the WordPress side of our business. And he's going to be here chatting about specifically ways we can improve the performance of our website specifically around speed or loading times. And this is a question, especially since a lot of or some of what we talk about and blog about is search engine optimization.
00:02:31
Speaker
And we work with a lot of photographers. That's, I think, one of their top questions. How can I get my website or pages on my website to load quickly when I'm blogging 100 images? So we're going to dive into some tips on how to optimize your website here. But Alex, this is your first episode of Brands That Book. So you'll have to tell us a little bit about yourself,
00:02:57
Speaker
and your background real quick before we dive into tips for speeding up your website. Yeah, man. So obviously, like you said, I work for you guys. I've been almost a year, I guess, coming up close to a year working with you guys. That's crazy. But before that, I was a photographer. So I'm a photographer. I work with my wife here in Alabama and we run a photo video company. We've been doing that for six years. So
00:03:21
Speaker
kind of following in the Davey and Krista footsteps of VM photographers and then designers as well. But we've been doing that for a good little while and then like you said, the plant.
00:03:32
Speaker
obsession. It takes up my other little bit of time. That's where a lot of people on Instagram know me from. It's not even from the photography or Davey and Krista. It's like, that's the plant guy. Um, so I can tell you how many people are creative or like, Hey, I got this fiddle fig or whatever. And like talking to me about that more than website stuff. So it's kind of crazy, but yeah, and there may be something in the works with, uh, some plant stuff, but I'm just kind of multi creative. Like I feel like I just,
00:03:59
Speaker
I find something I like and I'm all about entrepreneurship and anything that can do like that. So, you know, those are just just anything that kind of comes my way. I just have fun with it.
Optimizing User Experience and Conversion Rates
00:04:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's ultimately a myth. There's a lot of people out there that I think say that you have to focus on one thing or just go and be really good at one thing. And of course, it's important to be good at what you do. But I also think that
00:04:22
Speaker
I've interviewed, especially on this show, a lot of really successful people who have a lot of different interests
Tools for Testing Site Speed
00:04:28
Speaker
and hobbies that kind of turn into businesses and maybe more than what they started out as, as hobbies. And just to get an idea of what Alex is talking about and way of plants and stuff, you got to go follow him on Instagram and you'll get why so many people have started to come to him and be like, Hey, how do I, you know, how do I grow this fiddle fig or, or whatever? So, um,
00:04:50
Speaker
Like I said, there may be something in the works in the future for that plant side of my life. But yeah, I hope so. I hope that'll work out. But yes, for now, working with David and Krista and just doing photography. And I think you're right, like not to like go off into a whole different tangent. But yeah, I mean, like I think starting out, it's good to have like a good focus. But, you know, as you grow, some things can kind of go on autopilot or whatever. And that gives you some space to
00:05:18
Speaker
work for a design company or do stuff with point, whatever it is. So that's kind of where I'm at now. I'm just this like multi creative, just different
Realistic Speed Test Goals
00:05:27
Speaker
things I like to.
00:05:29
Speaker
stay busy and, you know, have fun with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll say one thing that we've learned about Alex and then one thing that we really appreciate about Alex is that you're very much somebody who can kind of teach yourself and learn on the go and sort of just pick things up, you know, through your own research. And I think one, that's just a valuable life skill to have, you know, I think it just makes you more self-sufficient. But again, you know, so it just makes sense that
00:05:56
Speaker
I mean, you do, I mean, even in your photo and video company, you have a good associate program. And I mean, you just have a lot of different cool sort of things that you do from a business perspective that you've just kind of picked up on your own along the way. Yeah, I always joke, I tell people that I have a master's degree in YouTube and Google. Just because I mean, if I don't know something, I'm going to try my hardest to like just research it, figure it out.
00:06:22
Speaker
You know cuz i did go to school for design and didn't go to school for photography but you know there's so much education out there and most of it you know there's a free education.
00:06:31
Speaker
So, I mean, if I don't know how to do something, whether it's plants or design-wise
Enhancing Speed with Themes and Plugins
00:06:36
Speaker
or whatever, I'm gonna figure it out. That's just my like thing. I think you're kind of the same way with that. I do like to consider myself very much a self-learner and somebody who's willing to dig in and get lost in research and stuff. And Krista hates that, you know, that I just, I can get myself sidetracked for an entire day just because I come across something I want to do and I want to figure it out on my own. Yeah, good trade.
00:07:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. But let's jump into talking about website optimization. If you come to us for something WordPress related, so maybe we're doing a WordPress design for you or something along those lines, you can bet that Alex has at least a hand in it in some way.
00:07:17
Speaker
A lot of our conversation of what we're gonna talk about today is really optimizing a WordPress website where you have access to managing the hosting, if that makes sense. So you've signed up maybe for your own hosting plan. So some of the things that we will talk about today won't necessarily apply if you're using Show It or Squarespace or Wix. Now with that said,
00:07:43
Speaker
Those companies are already taking steps to do those things for you. I think that's the one of the great things about going with a company like show it is that they're going to take care of a lot of this optimization for you.
Importance of Image Optimization
00:07:56
Speaker
You don't have to think about it. That's not why you got into business to think about it.
00:08:00
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, but for those of you who are, you know, maybe, maybe you'd like having complete control over your website. So you want to also manage the hosting. A lot of what we're going to talk or all of what we talk about today are things that you could probably implement. But there's even there's even a good bit of info on some of this optimization stuff that's, you know, even if you're on show it and
00:08:24
Speaker
you know, optimizing stuff for your blog, or if you're on Wix, like there's things that we can, that people can implement here for sure, that will help out still. So for sure, I don't think those need people, those people need to just like tune out. No, no, no. Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely things we're talking about. I just want to make it clear. If you're sitting there, and all of a sudden, we're talking about a content delivery network, which is a CDN, which is something we're going to talk about here in a minute. And you're like, Oh, well,
00:08:49
Speaker
I can't do that and you panic and you're like, I gotta move my website also show it. That's not the case. They're already implementing one. Yeah. So just want to make that clear getting started. So first thing first, let's start towards the beginning here. Why is optimizing a website for speed performance in particular important?
00:09:07
Speaker
Well i mean i think
Hosting Recommendations
00:09:08
Speaker
it goes a lot of it goes a little bit hand in hand with a good website design like a good website design doesn't do a ton if it takes ten seconds for that website to load so you can have this fantastic website that's there for conversions and.
00:09:23
Speaker
doing all the things that it needs to do, but if it just loads really slowly, I mean, people are gonna leave it. So I'd say number one, website optimization is there for user experience. And if you don't have a good user experience, people are gonna dip out. They're not gonna like it.
00:09:38
Speaker
And I love that you started there because I think, yeah, I mean, everything that we do, right, is trying to provide a good user experience for the people who come to our website. Right. And I think that's going to increase conversion, whatever your conversion is that you're trying to get. Like, if you're not providing a good user experience, people aren't going to fill out the contact form. They're not going to purchase the
Caching Solutions
00:09:56
Speaker
product. Yeah. And it's like, I mean, that's why I put that as number one, because a lot of times, whether you're a store or, you know, you're a photography business or whatever you're doing,
00:10:05
Speaker
This is like their first interaction, their first time like, you know, air quotes meeting you. And so like if that meeting is just this super slow, weird process, you know, there's just a lot of like things that can go with that that just make people not trust you or like this isn't a professional website or company or whatever.
00:10:24
Speaker
Or we're in this
Role of CDNs
00:10:26
Speaker
millennial world where we want information and we want it quickly. And if people don't get that, then they're probably going to go to the next person or next spot on Google or whatever. We don't have a ton of time to get people's attention. Absolutely. I think the number that people throw around a lot is eight seconds. So if your website is taking at least 10 seconds to load, you're just not in good shape. Now, I do want to talk two follow-up questions there. One,
00:10:51
Speaker
where can people go to figure out how long it's taking a page on their website to load? And I asked that very specifically, if you just, you know, you want to test a couple different pages on your website, you know, because your homepage is going to load differently than a single post page in your blog and so on and so forth. So don't just test your homepage and think, oh, my entire website loads at this exact speed. But where can people go to test
Mobile Site Speed and Testing
00:11:14
Speaker
their website?
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a handful of different tools that do this, but my favorite too. I have two favorites. So I have Pingdom. So if you just Google Pingdom, I think it's pingdom.com. It's a really good one. It's really simple to kind of understand. It'll break down like all the different parts of your websites. Like if images need to be optimized, it'll give you like a little grade or whatever.
00:11:37
Speaker
And it can kind of help you explain some of those things like what they are like it'll say you need a cdn and it'll explain what a cdn is so we'll be in this podcast but gt and my other one is gt metrics and gt metrics is like pingdom and still user friendly but it goes a little bit further it gives a couple of different ways to analyze your website.
00:11:59
Speaker
and kind of goes down a little bit more into like diving deep, but it's not so un-user friendly. Like some of them can kind of get really clunky. And those two, those two are great. A web page test, which is the one. Yeah. Yeah. That's your favorite, right? It is web page test.org. I think it's .org.
00:12:16
Speaker
We'll
Gradual Improvements and Analytics
00:12:17
Speaker
link to all of these in the show notes, so feel free to go to show notes. There'll also be a corresponding blog post on this for those of you who, after listening to this episode, need to go and read something. But web page test, it's less user friendly. It looks a little bit more clunky. I like a few things about it. One, there's a few key metrics that I'm looking at, like time to first bite, which I think GT metrics has as well, but I don't think
00:12:38
Speaker
And then it also has grades for different categories. So I'm looking at those grades as well and focusing less on the waterfalls they provide and less on maybe this specific, you know, all of the specific numbers that they show. But like Alex was saying about Pingdom, it's going to give you a couple of categories and give you a letter grade for those categories.
00:12:57
Speaker
Fairly easily, okay, so I'm getting a C in this category. Why? Maybe it has to do with your images or maybe it has to do with caching. So all these things that we're going to talk about, I will say that when you dive into one of these that Alex is talking about, don't get overwhelmed with what you don't understand. There's some base level of stuff that you'll probably be able to understand right away. Focus on making those updates. So don't get overwhelmed to the point where you make no updates because you don't understand everything.
00:13:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And it's it's just like any of the other systems that work off like, you know, ABCD grade, you know, system or like like Yoast works off the red light green light system.
00:13:34
Speaker
It's not something that you just like have to get all A's in to be fantastic. And you can even get all A's in it and there still be like some slowness issues. So like, you know, you're, that's the goal is to make some of those better. But really you're, when you do those, you're looking for like the D's and F's and trying to just upgrade those as
Conclusion and Thanks
00:13:54
Speaker
much as you can. But there's a lot of these things that we're going to go through and talk about that are pretty easy to implement and will probably give you like, you know, A's, B's, stuff like that.
00:14:04
Speaker
you know just don't get so caught up in just making it like google analytic the google has as a tester too and it's like you're never really gonna make it happy i feel like the gt metrics those are just those are good ones to start with and like just like davey said like uh just take one thing at a time and kind of figure out what each thing means because it can be a lot and it can be boring and it can be daunting i mean it's it's a lot of like trial and just
00:14:28
Speaker
trying to see, especially when you're first diving into this. So hopefully, we'll touch on the main things, but don't get so overwhelmed with it because it can be a lot. Yeah, and there's two things I want to ask right now, and they're intentionally poorly worded questions, or they're intentionally poor questions because of the point that I think you'll make and that I'll make here as well.
00:14:49
Speaker
The first one is how fast your page should load. Going off of what you just said about the scores you're getting, you can get all A's and have a crappy website. Just because, and you remember these are speed tests, they're not necessarily measuring user experience, they're measuring one aspect of user experience, which is how fast your page on your website loads. So you can make your website faster by taking all of the images off your website.
00:15:17
Speaker
But if you're a photographer, creative, somebody, I mean, really anybody, everybody relies on imagery in some way. Yeah. Taking all of the images off your website makes zero sense. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that go ahead. Yeah. Well, I was going to say just like on images, that's usually the biggest one, especially for photographers or just wedding industry. People were that's what we're showing. We're showing images. Sometimes they're big. But that's going to be the main one on most people's websites is that's going to be the one that you get an F in is like
00:15:46
Speaker
Optimize images, optimize images. And just like you're saying, you can take all them images off your website and you can compress them down where they look like junk to make make GT metrics happy. But then, you know, you're losing some of that, like just good design and good work that you're trying to show off. So and nobody's going to book you because they think your images look like like that, right? Yeah, your your images are all pixeled. So, yeah, it's definitely like a middle ground for us. Like those things are grain of salt type things.
00:16:14
Speaker
Yeah. And just to share a little bit about our approach, there's certain baselines we want to hit. There's certain things where we can clearly say, OK, especially as we first launched the latest edition of our website, well, we have to fix this. This just isn't good enough. But then when you get into, we have sort of an acceptable range of page load speed. And when you get into that, then you can say, OK, well, it's good enough for now. And then when we have time, we can come back and we can chip away at things that are going to make it a little bit better.
00:16:43
Speaker
And remember that if you're a photographer, you're competing against other photographers website. So everybody's dealing with this, you know, this issue, you know, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't deal with it at all. You shouldn't optimize your images. That's not what I'm saying, but everybody's dealing with it. So just remember that as you go through any of this. My second poor question here is what website platforms are best when it comes to website speed? I felt a really loaded question there. Yeah. Well, you know, like just like we mentioned in the beginning, like,
00:17:14
Speaker
Any website can be optimized, whether it's already done for you for the most part and you don't have any control over it. Most of these big web platforms, they're gonna do, especially the drag and drop builders, they're gonna have some sort of optimization built in for you. You're just not gonna have much control over any of it except for sizing your images properly. And I think some of them will even help size your images for you.
00:17:39
Speaker
But WordPress is one of the ones that's just going to give you the ultimate control over just literally everything, especially if you have a good hosting environment that's going to let you do some stuff on that side. You know, and I want to also say we're talking about WordPress dot org account. So like a self hosted WordPress account, not WordPress dot com, where you can like just log in and create a WordPress account, WordPress dot org, self hosted.
00:18:03
Speaker
WordPress account. So you're going to have all the control that you could possibly need to do some of these things that we're going to talk about. So again, just like you said, it's kind of loaded. But if you're one of those people that wants to like really dive in and take some of these steps and have full control over it.
00:18:18
Speaker
my experience is going to be WordPress is going to be the one that's going to give you the most options to be able to do this. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I asked that question really just to make the point that, again, if you're, we think our philosophy at Davian Cresta is the website that you're going to update or that you feel comfortable updating and making changes to as you go, that's the best website for you. You know, and so if that's a short website, that's the best website for you, just because
00:18:43
Speaker
I mean, there's all sorts of ways you can get more control over things. But if you're going to get yourself into a website where you don't feel comfortable making any updates, that's not the website for you. So what Alex was saying is true. For the most part, regardless, as long as you're on a reputable website platform, so something like a show it, you're going to be able to get yourself into a fast website, right? Yeah.
00:19:06
Speaker
So don't beat yourself over that just thinking, oh, well, if I go to something like WordPress, I'm going to have control over absolutely everything. Well, it doesn't do you any good to have control over everything if you don't know or you're not going to take the time to actually go in and configure everything, right? And so that's, again, the beauty of something like a builder.
00:19:24
Speaker
But we're going to dive into here chatting about some of these things specifically, how people can speed up their website. So let's talk about number one. Let's talk about how it's built and maybe some considerations for just from the from the very beginning, you don't have a website, you're building a website. How does how it's built affect website speed? Well, so, I mean, from the get go, if we're talking about specifically WordPress here,
00:19:50
Speaker
Starting with like a quality theme is going to be the biggest thing because I mean, that's most of the code on your website is going to be key. So like if you don't know much about themes, there's we could talk. We could have a whole episode about different themes, but just going with a reputable lightweight theme that doesn't have just every bell and whistle possible because it's like some of those themes like.
00:20:11
Speaker
they'll have everything you could possibly think of and then you'll end up using like two of the features. So like when we build our themes, our WordPress themes, uh, we usually go with like, you know, something that's got some basic like typography, you know, features, but all the other bells and whistles will either add that in later or, you know, stuff like that. But then plugins are going to be probably the next thing that's going to just slow down your website. If you have a billion plugins,
00:20:36
Speaker
that's going to really affect some of your website speeds and can conflict with a lot of things. So really figuring out what plugins are a good, those two things are going to be a good start. Yeah, we went through that process with our website, right? I mean, especially when we launched, we were like, we used quite a bit or
00:20:52
Speaker
a few more plugins than maybe we wanted to use. And so really going through and deciding, okay, which of these do we really need? And where can we get rid of certain plugins? And I've been in the backend of websites where people over the course of 10 years have just collected plugins and many of them are deactivated or they conflict.
00:21:11
Speaker
two plugins offer the same functionality. I think from a security standpoint, it's really important to make sure that one, you're updating your plugins, deleting plugins that you're not using, and then from a speed standpoint, making sure that you really need that plugin.
00:21:28
Speaker
Yeah. And weighing features too. I think there's a lot of cool stuff and we kind of fall into marketing traps where people are like, oh, you really need this feature on your website that does X so that you can increase the time people spend on your website by one second, you know, but really walking through, okay, do I absolutely need this on my website? Is it worth maybe my website not loading as quickly? Yeah, exactly. And there's a ton of those that like, I mean, like one of the ones that I always thinks funny is there's like a Google Analytics dashboard plugin.
00:21:56
Speaker
And all it does is just keep you from having to log in to Google Analytics. It just shows you like your like traffic, which is a cool plugin, but it slows down your website. It does absolutely nothing on your website other than like the back end. Like, so you log in and it slows down your website. And, you know, anytime I see that on someone's website, I'm like, usually in a bookmark, you know, Google Analytics and login each day, if that's what you want to see, because that plugin is not worth the speed that you're going to lose in it. You know, we might be talking about, you know, fractions of seconds here.
00:22:25
Speaker
you know, point three seconds. But if you have like three plugins that do that, you know, you're going to really start to add add up. So sure. That's why I say those first two. But before you start building and you're trying to figure out some of these functions that sometimes can only be reached with plugins, you really just need to make sure that you're getting quality ones that are updated and that work well together.
00:22:45
Speaker
And just trying to keep that number low. Just to recap here. One, choosing the right theme. Two, plugins. So limiting plugins to absolutely what you need. As far as themes go, if somebody's building their own website from scratch, what themes do we like? Well, there's two that I'm really big fans of. I'll say three.
00:23:04
Speaker
If you're sticking with Elementors, the page builder that we use, there's a really good lightweight option called Hello. It's the one that Elementor makes and it actually offers no settings. It's literally like you just have to have a theme to run WordPress. And they literally made the bare minimums of a theme to run. And then because something like Elementor, you can do everything that you want to. So that's a really good one if you're not going to get in there and like, you know, mess with some of the other crazy things that themes can do.
00:23:33
Speaker
but there's Astra. Astra is a really good one. That's the one that we use on the DK site. It offers a little bit more features of like setting typography and just some other little add-ons that work well within the theme without adding a plugin. So Astra is a really good one. And then like I said, there's, there's a few, but like WP ocean, a lot of these, when you go into WordPress and you go to like the themes section and click add new, it's like the ones that are on the front page usually.
00:24:01
Speaker
I say that lightly because there are some other ones, but usually those are really good. Those three that I just listed are fantastic, especially for us with using Elementor. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of you, we wouldn't recommend building your website from scratch. Unless you're a designer, there's not really a reason to do that. But for those of you interested, that's going to be helpful stuff. If you are not a designer, then you should either be hiring a designer to build your website for you
00:24:26
Speaker
or purchasing a template from a reputable designer who's aesthetic you like, for sure. One more thing I want to talk about on that front, and then we should probably move on just because we have a lot more to talk about, is the page builder itself. So we've been talking about a mentor. So Show It, for instance, is its own
00:24:47
Speaker
standalone page or website platform builder, Squarespace, same thing. Well, on WordPress, you can essentially install a plugin that helps you build pages. There's a number of them out there. One is Elementor, another one would be Divi, and a third one would be Beaver Builder. All the ones that I've just mentioned are pretty reputable, pretty well-known. We build our websites using Elementor because we think of the three, at least that I just mentioned, it's the best. In addition to that,
00:25:15
Speaker
as far as lightweight goes. Now, I wouldn't say it's not the lightest weight. Anytime you're using Builder, there's a little bit of bloat, so to speak, in there. But I would say that it's better than something like Divi. I mean, would you agree where Divi is just a collection of shortcodes?
00:25:31
Speaker
Yes, and I used to be a divvy builder myself before Elementor, and there's a noticeable difference, at least for me. I mean, the features that it comes with, and then just like you said, all the short codes and all the bloat that it has, I think Elementor is a world better. But before we did move on, I did want to just like quickly list out just some key takeaways of like quick ways to, and maybe we can expand on some of these if you feel like we need to, but
00:25:53
Speaker
just good ways to get some quick wins with some website speed. Yeah, and I think that and that's fine. We can stay here because I think this is going to be the kind of stuff that applies to most people. Yeah, yeah. And some of these are pretty simple. So I don't know if they'll take up too much time, but feel free to
00:26:09
Speaker
you know if you want me to expand on some of these like sure but we talked about you know starting out with a good theme and plugins and kind of limiting those but beyond that when you start building or even before you start building I mean your hosting is going to be a key thing which I think we'll talk a little bit more about different types of hosting is going to be a good key and then images images just like I said earlier that's going to be something that a lot of us struggle with but there are a ton of different options of how to like size and
00:26:36
Speaker
compress images to be they can still be large images as far as like how far they spread across the screen. But there's a lot of junk in images, you know, like your camera settings and all that that you don't need on a web page. And so I think using something that compresses it. One of my favorite tools is JPEG Mini. It's a premium plug in.
00:26:54
Speaker
But there are a ton of like, there are some plugins that will strip some of that data on upload of WordPress. And we can talk about some of those, but just making sure there's even free ones online, just making sure that you're sizing images and then compressing them and stripping out some of that like junk that's saved into images.
00:27:12
Speaker
And I think that... Go ahead. Well, let's talk about images next then because images are... So of the things that we have remaining to talk about, we are going to talk about hosting, choosing the right host. We're talking about caching tools, content delivery network, and then images as well. So maybe we just jump to images here. And you said you really like JPEG mini. We use on the DK site short pixel.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yes. Well, short pixels are a little different, but yes, we do use short pixel. So let's start with JPEG mini. Some of the things that it's going to do or going to help you do in terms of optimizing images. Yeah. Yeah. So basically the first step with a photographer or wedding planners, any of you guys out there that are listening is going to be just sizing them appropriately, whether you're in Lightroom or, you know, you have any of these little programs on your computer of just making sure they're not
00:28:00
Speaker
you know we have these fifty megapixel cameras out now like we don't need a fix in fifty megapixel file so just making sure that it's roughly sized appropriate sometimes that's twelve hundred pixels wide you know just putting on what it's used for but just making sure it's close to possible.
00:28:14
Speaker
to the spot that you're gonna use it for. And I will post a tutorial. It's 100% free. It's something that's on our blog that Chris has actually gone through our entire workflow for sizing images. So I'll post that and then so we can skip over that. Yeah, yeah. That's gonna be a good thing. And then like I said, JPEG mini is an app on your computer. I'm on Mac. I'm sure it's on PC and everything, but it's just an app. You literally just drag the image over into it and it just compresses it and it's like,
00:28:42
Speaker
takes like three seconds and it tells you how much you've saved in that image. And usually it's a lot. And does it strip away all that other, that junk that you were talking about that doesn't need to be an image? Yeah, usually it'll strip out as much as it can within its lossless compression. Okay. So, so this is it. I mean, it's even a tool that we use when we deliver wedding galleries that just strips out some of that junk so we can fit them on like a USB or it doesn't take as long to upload. So it's a really great tool, not just for, you know, website and coming handy on a ton of different things, but it's lossless. So that means,
00:29:12
Speaker
going to just drop it in there, it's just going to strip away what it can without losing any image quality.
00:29:18
Speaker
And so that's why I like it. It's just click and drag, and then you can upload. But there are, like I said, or just like you're even mentioning, there's plugins like ShortPixel. There's, I don't know how to say it, E triple W or image optimizer. I can't quite, I don't know how to say it, but that's another plugin, Imagify. Those are all plugins. And that's an Imagify, I think, is WP Rocket's plugin, which we're going to talk about here in a second. So going back to ShortPixel, any considerations in, you know, whether people in addition to JPEG mini should look at ShortPixel?
00:29:47
Speaker
Yes, so the if people google there's two different short pixel plugins we use the short pixel adaptive height or adaptive images or something like that I can't remember in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, I think it's called adaptive images but there is just like a short pixel image optimization one that does what we're talking about just stripping away stuff but the adaptive images is really cool because what it does is it will take like if you have a space on your website that needs an image and
00:30:16
Speaker
800 pixels wide by whatever, and you upload a thousand pixel image, it's going to dynamically size that image to perfectly fit that box and deliver that to the person that's viewing your website. So that error that you get in GT metrics that says lower, it'll look in GT metrics. It'll tell you every image on your website that needs to be on that page that needs to be sized and what size it needs to be. That's going to be very daunting to go in.
00:30:42
Speaker
This one needs to be 586, not 585, you know, whatever. Adaptive images will literally do that all for you. But it is like a premium thing. Like you have to go in and like buy some credits each like, you know, that you can use per month and stuff like that. But it's not that expensive. And that's a very easy one. You literally like, you know, install that plug in.
00:31:05
Speaker
log into your account and then it just works. Yeah. And it's kind of like CDN based. We'll talk CDNs in a minute, but it kind of works off of short pixel CDN, but it's like literally you plug it in, you give it just a little while to run through your site and you run a scan again.
00:31:19
Speaker
and that error is gonna give you an A plus. It's fantastic. So that one is really worth the money. And I believe we actually got our short pixel license through AppSumo. If you've ever heard of AppSumo before, it's like a lifetime deal. Go to AppSumo, it'll explain what it is, but they offer lifetime deals on different tools. And so we scoop that up through that. But yes, great tool. So as far as images, anything else that we should keep in mind when optimizing images?
00:31:48
Speaker
No, I think that pretty much covers it. I mean, I think Christa's blog, I've read it. It's going to go over, you know, making sure DPI is correct and, you know, image size. Like, I think that's a perfect tool and she probably explains it a lot better than I will. So just check that blog out. That's going to be a big key. And then these extra little steps that will just refine that a little bit more are great steps to really, you know, get those page speeds up.
00:32:15
Speaker
and you know like I'll say really quickly one thing that people are probably going to run into is that you know a lot of plugins won't optimize images that you've already uploaded that's that's that's a struggle there where that might be something where
00:32:30
Speaker
Some of these premium plugins come to play where like a magic files, one little, you can pay for them just one month of it and it'll compress all the images on your website that are already uploaded. And then you won't have to pay so much after you've compressed all those. You can compress as you go each month or whatever, but that's going to be one struggle that a lot of people deal with where a magic file or short pixel kind of does everything that's already uploaded to your website.
00:32:56
Speaker
Yeah. And there's probably a lot more we could say about image optimization. I will encourage you again, like we have already, don't overthink it, do what you can, then come back to maybe trouble spots. I will say for photographers,
00:33:12
Speaker
You probably don't need to blog 100 images in an engagement session, right? I mean, I think there's something to be said just from the marketing perspective, just from our business perspective, you know, choose the absolute best images from a session and then blog those. And again, that will help those blog posts load more quickly. Yeah, blog posts are struggles. Yeah. It's just a page full of images. Yep. And so every photographer is going to have to deal with that. So let's move on to hosting, choosing a good host. What are our recommendations for that?
00:33:41
Speaker
Well, I'll say it's probably easier for me to say what we don't like. Sure. And that's pretty much any AIG company and you can literally Google AIG hosting companies and it's pretty much all the big dogs. And I hate to like point fingers and stuff like that. But like your go daddies, your host skaters, stuff like that, those are all essentially the same company. It's just AIG is a company that owns all these big branded hosting companies.
00:34:08
Speaker
And they're not just horrible, but they're really not good. I mean, that's where a lot of people, like they get stuck with and they're like, why is my website running slow? And it's literally a hosting problem. So, and most of them only backed AIG. So what I personally love is SiteGround. For the price, the tech support, live chat, you really just cannot beat SiteGround. And I think they pretty much dominate a lot of the hosting environments for WordPress.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah, so SiteGround is a great one. There's a couple other two, if you want to get into more managed WordPress hosting, that could be good. I hear a lot of good things, for instance, about Kinsta. What else? WP Engine, I hear good things about WP Engine as well. Flywheel. Flywheel, yep. But SiteGround is the one that we generally recommend for all the reasons that you just mentioned. You know, 24-7 live support, it really doesn't get better than that, right?
00:35:02
Speaker
because you will run into issues with the website and it's nice to be able to reach out and actually talk to somebody and not just have to submit a ticket. And I think some of these other companies that we're talking about, one of the hard things is it feels like support's not even that helpful. And just as far as choosing a hosting plan, as far as plans that you might want to stay away from and plans that you might want to choose, know that price differences are there for a reason.
00:35:28
Speaker
I mean, if you're paying 10 cents a month for your hosting plan, it's probably not a very good plan. In general, we'd recommend staying away from shared hosting in a lot of cases. Because again, if you're wondering why you're paying $9 a month for hosting, there's probably a reason. And you're probably sharing server resources with a ton of other websites, which again is going to affect speed.
00:35:52
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's usually where most people land. I mean, even on site ground, you know, I mean, they're, they're shared hosting is, is, you know, it's better than, than go daddies, but essentially shared hosting is the most basic hosting that everybody sees when they go to a hosting website. It's like hosting plans starting out for 99 a month. And they're essentially just like what you said, they're shared. So they're anywhere from hundreds to a thousands of people on one hard drive, essentially like,
00:36:21
Speaker
It's kind of like an apartment complex, like everybody's living in that one building sharing, you know, the washer and dryer, the parking, sharing the hot water, you know, yes, they're sharing everything.
00:36:33
Speaker
That's a perfect example. They're sharing the hot water. If everybody's taking a shower in that apartment complex, you're going to run out of hot water. If everybody on the shared hosting platform is on and they're working and lots of traffic, you're going to see that slow issue on your website and you won't even know why. Sure. That's one of the reasons we say if you can afford it and it's in your budget to step up to something a little bit more dedicated,
00:36:59
Speaker
or some of the resources are a little bit more specific to your website and you're not sharing them with everybody because it's a huge pain to log onto your website and you're like, it was fast yesterday. Like it was doing good now. Why is nothing working? And there's a couple of other like security reasons and stuff like that. But, you know, I mean, like shared hosting, just like you said, it's $5 a month for a reason. Um, when, when you can jump up a little bit and get some of these other services that we'll talk about.
00:37:25
Speaker
that are gonna be pretty big wins really quickly. And if you're going with shared hosting on SiteGround, which again, is fine for some people, right? We'd recommend one of their higher, their two higher plans. I think they have three shared hosting plans. And I think we'd recommend one of the two higher ones and you can compare the plans. And of course, if you have questions,
00:37:45
Speaker
Leave a comment on the show notes here. Happy to answer those specifically. And, you know, hosting another subject where we go a thousand levels deep. We could talk about DigitalOcean as another company that I have some experience with and have really liked, but for most people, it's just going to be, you know, too technical to set up. So SiteGround, I think, is a great place to go if you're looking for somebody you just want to be reliable.
00:38:09
Speaker
But we've talked a little bit about building your website considerations, choosing the right host. Let's jump into the next thing, caching.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah. Sound good. Yeah. Well, I did want to just say if you're trying to one step up, SiteGroundal has a different plan. It's a cloud hosting environment. It's a little bit more dedicated. Look into that. It's going to be worth the money. That's what we use. Yeah. Yeah. So as far as caching goes, what's caching? What tool do we use? Why do we recommend it? So caching is basically, it can get really technical, but it's really just a way of just compressing a lot of the code and
00:38:45
Speaker
just all the stuff that's on your website by using a plug in. And so that's really just the basic form of it, because it does a lot of different things. But without boring you and making this podcast a way to put people to sleep, that's essentially what it does, is it's just it's it's compressing more than just images. It's compressing code and files and delivering them in a little bit better way for for browsers to read it. But so one of our favorites is WP Rocket. It is a premium plug in.
00:39:14
Speaker
It's not that expensive, but some of these other free free plugins, they work good. They'll get the job done. But WP rockets, very user friendly, does have some good support. It's not 24 or seven like live, but it's really good support where if you're just having like some issues.
00:39:31
Speaker
that will help you out, that will log into your website and help you, but it's just fantastic. And like I said, it walks you through all the different things that you can do with caching. And it really has like tool tips that'll tell you like what this is doing.
00:39:44
Speaker
It's just very user friendly. So I would highly recommend WP Rocket. And if you're looking for a good free option, WP Super Cache, that's a good one. But there's a thousand of them. But WP Super Cache is a decent free one. Yeah, as far as WP Rocket goes to, if you are on show it, WP Rocket supposedly
00:40:05
Speaker
works okay with show it we did what while our website was on show it it ran into an issue where occasionally when we when we updated wp rocket it would crash our show it website or unlock us out of it which was annoying even though again it should be compatible with show it but just kind of beware if you're going to use that with show it you might want even want to reach out to the show it team and just double check on whether you actually just in general they don't recommend caching tools because wp engine
00:40:35
Speaker
already has their own proprietary caching tool in play. WP Rocket was one of the few plugins that apparently was supposed to be compatible with the stuff that WP Engine was running. It was kind of hit or miss though. So just a warning if you're on show using caching tools.
00:40:53
Speaker
And that's, that's a really good, like a third option too is like some of these hosting providers are offering like site off their own, like built in caching plugins that they don't call quite as into depth as like WP rocket or something like that. But they do have a few options, even some image optimization with, with side grounds plugin, but just few easy wins that usually won't break your website or do anything crazy that
00:41:18
Speaker
We'll help people get started, not having to jump fully in yet, but SiteGround's caching plugin actually works pretty good. Yeah, and if you're on a budget too, if you're already paying for your SiteGround plan and you don't have money to pay for another premium plugin and you want to limit plugins, this would be something like the SiteGround Optimizer. SG Optimizer is a good alternative there.
00:41:43
Speaker
But caching is going to help. One thing I love about WP Rocket too is they do get back to you with very specific steps you can take in terms of the settings that you can turn on or off. It does a pretty good job of configuring itself in a lot of cases. But if you reach out to them and you're like, hey, I'm thinking about turning this on or off or whatever, they'll come back to you and say, hey, this is what we recommend. This is what we don't recommend and why. And so we really have appreciated that about them.
00:42:09
Speaker
Yeah, and like with with wp rocket and a lot of these things like they can do some funky things to your website, like they'll take away like icons or very random things. Yeah, like our search search icon for a little while. So like there's a lot of very rare is going to like just crash your website. But but this stuff is a little bit more trial and error. It's checking that box, clicking clear cash.
00:42:34
Speaker
and seeing what it did, making sure that nothing is missing or your fonts are jacked up or anything like that. But for the most part, you're not just going to ruin your website. It might lock you out for a second or something like that, but usually it's pretty simple stuff. It literally is just as simple as enabling browser caching or something like that and seeing what it does and running that speed test at GT metrics to see how much it affected it. Sometimes you have to run Pingdom and GT metrics. It's good to run those two or three times.
00:43:03
Speaker
Because usually the first time is like trash and then the second time and third time are like really good You can kind of do an average of those but that's literally the way to do this is check one box and then run a test and then check the other run a test and just make sure On the nothing's messing up along the way. It's not overly complicated. It's just a little a little time-consuming Yeah, normal people can do this tedious for sure
00:43:24
Speaker
And what Alex was saying too, sometimes it takes time for those changes to take effect. So if you run a test right after you made a change and nothing seems to have changed, maybe you just need to wait an hour and come back to it, for sure. So caching tools, we do recommend WP Rocket or look into, if you're choosing a reputable host, a lot of them are going to have
00:43:46
Speaker
their own built-in caching tools. Again, if you're on Showit, you probably don't need one. You could play around with WP Rocket, but I'd only do that after talking to the Showit team. And then if you're looking for a good free alternative, again, look into your hosting tools.
00:44:03
Speaker
The next thing that I think does, or we saw, made a pretty considerable difference in the way that, or the speed in which our website loads is implementing a CDN, which is a content delivery network. So could you talk a little bit about what a CDN is, a couple reputable CDN providers, and where to go from there? Yeah, so after we kind of, you do some of these steps that we've done previous here,
00:44:29
Speaker
A CDN is a good place to look at because it's another quick win and it's not overly complicated. But a CDN is basically a way of like if you go with SiteGround, it's going to tell you like when you set up SiteGround, it's going to say, hey, what's the closest server location to you? And that might be like Chicago or, you know, something like that. And basically, that's where your website is going to be delivered from when someone types in your URL and they're in California.
00:44:55
Speaker
It's basically going to have to ping Chicago and then send that information back to that person. In other words, your website actually physically lives somewhere. You know, I think a lot of people don't realize that, but it's so it physically lives somewhere. So even if it says cloud, it's a cloud is not really a cloud. It's a server somewhere. It lives somewhere. And so, yeah, that's a good point. It's on a hard drive, essentially somewhere.
00:45:21
Speaker
And so what a CDN does is kind of divides that up and puts it on these other servers.
00:45:26
Speaker
closer locations to other people and this is specifically important for people if you have international business or stuff like that you have people that are reaching your trying to reach your u.s. website that are in Australia they get really bad sir like that you their site speed is gonna be horrible on your website if you don't have a CDN enabled and so and you can even on these like GT metrics and stuff like that you can search your site speed in different locations so if you want to see what your site speed is
00:45:54
Speaker
in London, you can do that. Usually, it's going to be really bad if you don't have a CDN enabled. Like I said, if they live in London, it's going to reach a server in London versus having to go all the way to Chicago. But that's essentially what a CDN does.
00:46:09
Speaker
Your second question was some good ones to look at, right? Yeah. And we can stick to the one we use and the one that a lot of other people use. Yeah. And I think those are going to be the two ones anyway. We personally use a company called StackPath and it's a little, it's not much as known. I believe they bought out another company. Maxine, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Which was very well known. So, but we use them again, very user friendly.
00:46:33
Speaker
Something that i think is worth paying for is having support at your fingertips like live chat support anytime. Is fantastic and stack path has it like there's always a guy.
00:46:45
Speaker
that speaks English, that can help you really quickly. And they'll log in and kind of configure some things for you. So I would first and foremost recommend them. The second one is Cloudflare. That's probably the one that most people have heard of or maybe are using. And they're a great option. They have a free option. StackPath is premium, but Cloudflare does have a free version and it works decent.
00:47:11
Speaker
but it just, it has a little bit of limitations. And again, there's the support's going to be all email based and stuff like that. So it's a little bit more to set up and CDNs offer a lot of different types of settings. And so if you don't know exactly what's going on, like for instance, Davey, like with running an e-commerce website, you don't want to enable a static caching because like that would mean if I logged in to buy something on the DK site, um,
00:47:41
Speaker
someone else, if they're on there and something's added to their cart, I'm gonna see that.
00:47:46
Speaker
So does that make sense? Like it's going to cash that cart. And when I go in, I'm going to be like, why do I have Positano added to my, even if there's changing product variables, you only have a certain amount of products in, in stock at the time. Yeah. So there, there are definitely for e-commerce, a lot of different settings that you want to be aware of. Um, but one of those, you know, just to speak to Alex points, as far as like maybe some of the, even the differences between cloud flare and stack path, when we were doing some research on the two,
00:48:16
Speaker
And again, I take this with a grain of salt because I think there's always updates to both platforms. But one of the takeaways I got from StackPath and looking at different speed tests was that StackPath did a little bit better job, at least in the test that I came across on delivering web pages more quickly, whereas CloudFlare probably had maybe some more robust security-specific features.
00:48:42
Speaker
You know, not that security specific features aren't important, but a lot of these security specific features were for big enterprise companies, you know, not necessarily the small team, you know, solar premiere website. So security is important. That's a whole nother podcast. We'll do probably. And I was just about to say that like both of them will offer some security options. So even from that standpoint alone, having a CDN is great. We don't even
00:49:08
Speaker
Yeah i don't think we use very many of or at least we probably just scratch the surface in terms of the security features we use from stack path specifically because we've invested in security tools elsewhere you know specific companies that that specialize in that.
00:49:24
Speaker
Maybe that's a podcast for oh, yeah, I think that's another one is doing is talking about those security tools But what you know what Alex is saying is it just allows you were and the other thing about Cloudflare I think Cloudflare does have more data centers, but stack that still has a bunch, you know, so in other words, you know
00:49:42
Speaker
you know, the more data centers that your CDN has in general, the more locations that your website is cached at. And so more people will be nearer to a data center, right? Yeah. Yeah. And just to give people like an idea of what some of this stuff will do when we were designing our website,
00:50:02
Speaker
We were, I mean, when we got done with it, it was something like 12 seconds, a load time. We were like, we got to get this, we got to get this fixed. And just implementing a few of these little things that we've talked about, like the CDN and WP Rocket and stuff like that. I mean, we mostly average around that three second mark, which is kind of where you want to be. I mean, some of those were, were beating that three second mark. Some of those were a little after that, but like,
00:50:25
Speaker
You kind of want to be aiming for that that three second mark. You know, like if your website's loading 10 seconds, most of the time it's even worse on mobile because people, you know, networks and stuff like that aren't that great with mobile. You know, it can be even worse on that end. And I don't know about specifics on the DK website, but I mean, at least on my wedding photography website, 70 percent of my visitors are from an iPhone. Yeah. So like just because it works good on a thousand megabit per second Internet.
00:50:55
Speaker
doesn't exactly mean that it's great on a tablet or an iPhone or something like that, which is really where you need to be looking at. Yeah. Yeah. To give people listening a good benchmark somewhere around that three second mark. It's not always going to be perfect on like single like blog pages and stuff like that that are very image heavy.
00:51:13
Speaker
For the most part, you want it to kind of be somewhere around that mark. Yeah, for sure. And I think what Alex just said about iPhone versus desktop, making sure that stuff is working and loading on the iPhone, I think, because we're probably sitting at our computer making most of these updates. We're easy to check for desktop and then maybe forget about a mobile thing. And we just ran into this yesterday where the mobile version of one of our subdomains wasn't working. And it's one of those things where
00:51:42
Speaker
It's just easy to overlook. And it was partly because I made an update to that subdomain. And so when I made the update, of course I go and I visit the page and everything looks fine, but I'm on my computer. I should have gone the extra step and made sure that also loaded on our iPhone and iPad as well. The actual device, not like shrinking your screen size down or any of that, like literally the actual device.
00:52:09
Speaker
Can display a lot differently than I mean there are a lot of tools that will display Air quotes display like different screen sizes on your computer for you, but nothing's gonna be you know actually using an iPhone to test that so And like you can even do some of these speed tests yourself like if you if you open an incognito window on your iPhone and Type in your website or something you can kind of like judge some of the speed stuff You know so that way if you're like well my website says four seconds, but like
00:52:39
Speaker
Sometimes it's just, I don't know, it's kind of hard to explain, like just literally watching your website load. Sure. Asking friends to do the same, you know? Yeah. And remember too, we talked about a lot today, but like, and a CDN is going to be important or it's so easy to set up and there are free options out there that it's one of those things that you just might as well do if you're, you know,
00:52:59
Speaker
manage your own hosting and have a WordPress website or a website in general. But if you're in Alabama, let's say, and you're a wedding photographer, most of the people who are searching for you are also going to be in Alabama, right? And so a CDN that delivers your website really quickly in Australia, not as important necessarily.
00:53:19
Speaker
Right. But with that said, so, again, just a lot of different factors here. And, you know, I say all that just to say this, which I should have just said, based on what you were just talking about, which is go to Google Analytics. Like, if you feel like people aren't converting in a certain area, page speed is one of those things to look at, right? I mean, if you have a page and it's converting really, really well, maybe you don't mess with your page speed because it's obviously, you know.
00:53:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's working because people are filling out that form on the website or they're buying that product. But again, we're not just trying to make our websites fast for the sake of making websites fast, right? Yeah, not for the green lights and the A pluses. Yeah, exactly. There's a reason behind it.
00:54:02
Speaker
Yeah, you want and you want to focus on whatever that conversion goal is. And so using that conversion goal as a guide to troubleshoot issues on your website, I think is really important. Because otherwise, you know, like if your website's converting fine, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to spend some time, you know, on page speed, then all of a sudden you're, you know, down the rabbit hole and you spend hours on this thing where you didn't really have to just because you wanted an A instead of a B on a certain page score test.
00:54:29
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you definitely have to wait with those options of like, is the, is paying a little bit for a plugin or paying a little bit for a premium caching is the time that it's going to save me. I'm just set all this stuff up and maybe I get some support with it. Is that going to be worth the time that I'm going to save setting all this stuff up? And in my opinion, it's, it's yes. Cause.
00:54:51
Speaker
I mean, time's a very valuable thing. Absolutely. And these things can be very tedious. So just take one at a time and figure out some of these. If you're on a budget, maybe it's just optimizing your images upon upload and just making sure that part's running good and they're sized appropriately.
00:55:06
Speaker
Maybe it's swapping hosting providers. It's a stepping stone thing. It doesn't all have to be done tomorrow. Absolutely. And I would encourage you if this is not your thing. Some of you, if you're like Alex or myself, you might listen to a podcast like this and say, okay, hey, I'm going to go see if I can do this myself. And through maybe the corresponding blog posts or some YouTube tutorials, you figure it out. And that's great. If you decide that you don't want any part in
00:55:33
Speaker
in figuring this kind of stuff out but you're not on a platform that takes care of some of the stuff for you, then there's people that you can reach out to that might be able to help you with that. For instance, whoever built your website, sometimes they'll also offer services around further optimization around that website, getting some of these third-party tools set up. I know that's something that we do for our clients who request it.
00:55:57
Speaker
reach out to them and see if they'll take care of these things. Like Alex said, kind of decide, is it worth your time to do this or should you just get somebody to take care of that for you? But like so many other things, I think one of the big takeaways from this is don't get overwhelmed with it. Do what you can, make small improvements and over time, it's going to make a difference.
00:56:17
Speaker
Definitely, definitely. Well, Alex, I want to thank you for joining us on the podcast. I'm sure there'll be more episodes in the future where you join us. I had a feeling that this is going to be one of our longer episodes. Yeah, sorry about that. I tend to talk and there's a lot of information on this, but I appreciate you having me and I'm happy to be back anytime, man.
00:56:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think we'll have to talk about security at one point, too. And this just happens with our conversation, right? I feel like sometimes I'll call you and it'll be like, hey, I got five minutes and all of a sudden, 20 minutes later, we're still chatting about something. So it just seems to be the case with our conversations. That's right. That's right. Well, thanks again. And until next time.
00:56:59
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.