Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: With me today is someone who I think should be in the limelight more than he is, but he'll explain why that is not the way it currently is and what he's doing and why he's noteworthy.
Welcome. Slobudam. Well.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Thank you, Ramkostamk. It's a pleasure to be in this podcast. It's two things that I care about a lot that I've benefited from a lot in my career were press and performance. Problem means not a lot of people care about it if it's easy to make money off of it.
Why I'm not in the limelight. I think I am. I think lately I kind of have been, but I've always been the kind of person that implements stuff, that does the work. I don't like to talk about it until recently. Let me tell you about myself. I've been in WordPress bubble, let's call it that, because it definitely is a bubble.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: For it is a bubble.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: 15 years. We go back to the blue dashboard, the ugly blue dashboard, two point X. So that's when I started. And honestly, I taught myself how to write code, how to do the front end development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, before Jquery even. And back then, all the lessons were make sure the code is up to standards. Make sure you do this. If we only had been doing that for the last 15 years, we would not need to talk about performance right now, because everyone will be doing it properly.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: But that's not where we are.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: So just to let the people know what I do, I also host a podcast. It's called nohex marketing.
We like to call it the only podcast that's strictly about website optimization in broad sense. So that's your that's kind of content optimization, speed, performance, all that. We have guests every week. I'm sure you might be on a future episode if you feel like it.
Other than that, I am a website optimization consultant. I've spent, I don't know, five years as a CRO in ecommerce. CRO consultant in ecommerce, but also performance and technical SEO.
Well, to me, that's about writing good code. Like if your code is messy and can I use bad words on the podcast?
Shitty?
Because that's what it is.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: If it's shitty, it's shitty. There is no other word for it.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: There we go. I guess we are crappy. Yes. If the code is crappy, it needs to be fixed down the line at one point. So that's really what I do. I fix bad web experiences, whether that's for bots crawling the website or for people trying to buy stuff on the website. That's what I do. I just come in and try to fix as much as possible.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: I think you and I have a lot of overlap. I mean, I know you and I have a lot of overlap. When people ask me what I do, I start with I make websites and I make them fast and performant and all that and they go kind of look at me like, what does that mean? And then I switched recently to I help make the Internet faster and better.
For some reason, that's easier for people to digest. Because, like, make a website. I don't know what that is. I interact with the Internet all day, and I know what it means when it's better and faster, but great.
I think there's a few interesting things I'd love to discuss with you.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: And.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: This is what I ask everybody who's on the podcast. What is the one thing that drew you into the performance side of things? Because you and I both come from the WordPress community, and if there's one thing easy within WordPress is to essentially do whatever you like and you don't have to care too much. That is a choice you chose. I chose. There's plenty of other people who chose to not just do the here you are thing, but we both both do the here you are, but the here is a way better version than what you would normally get. So what drew you into that side of the website building game?
[00:04:21] Speaker B: Let me try to come up with an analogy. I know you like cars. I happen to know you like cars. So let's say there's a workshop that builds a workshop that builds a car that looks good. They deliver the car to you. It looks great. It's just your dream car. You start the car, it flow, flaking, oil, all that shit. Is that a good workshop? Is that a good car?
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Is there any what? I paid for it.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, but let's say you paid premium or you paid not too low on that. That's what, in my opinion, what most of WordPress, and it goes beyond WordPress. This is shopify. This is all the CMS where there's crutches to lean on. Basically, we build a website, but it's WordPress fault they do it that way. I couldn't have changed. No, that's not the case. If you're building a website using any platform, you need to care about the end product. You can't just say it's slow because of WordPress, or you can't maybe controversial, but you can't say it's slow because of Elementor and all the add ons. That's the one thing that I don't really approve. Like all unnecessary page builders. Let's put it that way. Like, when you need a page builder, you need it.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: I have a very similar opinion on it.
I will say I'm coming around a little bit, but that's mostly because there are two page builders who are really putting in an effort into making their end product faster. One of them is Elementor, and the other one is Bricks.
There's movement. As long as there's movement, I can see, okay, we can work with that.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. I completely agree with that. And I've noticed I've seen that, like, five years ago, four years ago, Elementor.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Was, oh, that was horrible.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: That was horrible voided at all cost.
But to answer your question, what drew me into performance? It's really I mean, you're going back to my early days of writing code, like writing HTML and what. I said, if it's shitty, it's going to be shitty for everything, for conversions, for performance. So I just don't get how we got from a light average web page 15 years ago that had basically what it needed to have and that was it. How do we get to let's put in that library, let's put in that tracker, let's put in this, let's put that, let's host this render blocking, third party script. Let's put it in the head. Because why the fuck not? Because that's what the tutorial or stack overflow answer said.
As you can tell, I get annoyed, I get upset and that's why I'm in this. That's really why I'm in this.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: I kind of share again a similar poll, like born out of frustration. So one of the first things that I did differently in WordPress than my contemporaries at the time, and I say this in a very old fashioned way, but I do mean at the time because that is we're talking 2008, 2009, right? When I started.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Really.
[00:07:23] Speaker A: So I came from an enterprise background and building projects which happened to have a lot of website components at the time.
Funnily enough, I built a lot of stuff in Lotus Notes as well.
Don't get me started on how fubard that was. But to come back to the point, so the realization that anybody could essentially build a website not fully understanding the implications of the choices they make along the way, I think really started to take off around 2010. Like, WordPress got custom post types, custom taxonomies.
It just became a very versatile tool allowing to be used for way more than it originally had in mind. Which is not a bad thing in of itself. But it brought the problems. You mentioned it meant that people just kept adding stuff instead of thinking about the consequences. Yeah.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Do you remember the days of how to do X without a plugin like the tutorials? That was amazing. Right? That's kind of what started all this mess because it just showed people like you said, anyone can do anything with WordPress. And that was a very cool thing at the time. It was amazing. But I think it's still but on the other hand, anyone can do anything with WordPress and that's the bad side of it as well.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: Yeah, this is a perfect example of essentially it's a two sided thing. It's a yanis thing, right? One side makes you happy and the one side makes you sad.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Or both sides make some people happy and make some people sad and angry.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: I bet there's folks that get mad on either side.
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: But I guess there's also folks that will be happy about either side.
So you mentioned a little bit about doing optimization.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: And, and since you just mentioned that, a lot of your triggers into why am I doing this, this line of work were around. I'm just going to call it lean and mean because essentially I think that's where it boils down to.
[00:09:51] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: So what is the one thing that you really thrive on? Like, okay, this is a great project, this makes me happy because I get to do XYZ. What is the thing there?
Let's start with this. Do you build sites from scratch?
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Not anymore. Not anymore? Definitely not. I mean, it's been years since I've done that, so definitely not. I find a lot more joy in just trimming the fat from website. Like literally doing that. The kind of probably the project that brings me joy is really just going there and let's say using web page test and seeing like I said, my biggest trigger these days is third party render blocking assets. Because no one in their right mind or any other mind should be doing that ever. So go to a website and see that they have 17 render blocking assets.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Yeah, clearly they've never run Lighthouse well.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Or any tool I would say or anything at all. So when you see something like that, it makes me happy. Like these small changes will make everything better for this client, especially. And again, I need to make this a point. If it's a third party, if that domain goes down or is slow, it's going to white page your website for a minute and then it's going to say, hey, I gave up, I couldn't get anything.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: It's a dependency you don't want and in many cases you don't need specifically not in that place.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Never in that place. Even Google Fonts? Even Google Fonts.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: I would even say especially Google Fonts because there's an extra component there and that's the privacy part.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yes, that's a completely that is a there's not enough time to put as a yes, but, but even the Google Fonts, they don't have an SLA, but they say we never went down. And that's good enough for most people to put that in the head of every page of their website and it just doesn't make sense. And another thing in WordPress that really makes me WooCommerce WordPress, all that space, the entire space. When you go and see that they have every CSS and every JavaScript file from every plugin loading in every single page of the website and things are getting better.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Yes, that's definitely a fact on that particular topic because I am aware that a lot of people are not aware of the fact that there's a solution for this. What is your favorite solution to only load on a page? That what you need besides just hand coding everything yourself.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: The easiest is there's a plugin called, I think it's CSS JavaScript Asset Manager or something like that, where you can just check the boxes like loaded only on this page loaded only this template, like, whatever, that's my go to, because it's by far the easiest one when you're working with a website that someone else built. But when you're building a website yourself, you need to have snippets. You need to have that ready. Yeah.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: I'm always surprised of the amount of stuff that's being added without even thinking about the consequences. So let's take a form, right?
For most websites that's on the contact page only, they may have maybe a form somewhere else. But let's just say for I think this is safe to say, I think about 80% of the sites will have just a contact page with a contact form to then load every single asset that particular contact form uses on every single page all the time. Makes zero sense. Zero sense. And I just don't get how that's not part of their yeah, but do.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: You know why that happens? Because, again, the stack overflow answer or tutorial just said Wpnq script, WP and Q style, and that was it. There's no if this, then that, if this, then that.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I get that.
And still I would argue that in this day and age that if you're not conscious of your impact on that and that being whatever is being loaded, whatever is limiting your performance in one way or another, I think.
At least on the side of Google. There's been quite a bit of push to get us to understand. We need to focus on this. So if you're currently building solutions and you're not taking that into account, I think you're missing something.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, the push you're talking about, of course, is the 2020 Korea vitals announcement and all that that follows. That's what they made it kind of a mainstream discussion, an effort to lower their crawler bot electricity bill. Let's be honest about that. They want to not waste resources crawling the shitty things on the Internet. That's kind of the bottom line here. Which is understandable, which is how it should be.
It kind of made it mainstream. Yes. For a year. Do people really talk about all that stuff that much anymore?
[00:15:10] Speaker A: You're asking me or is that a rhetorical question?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: That's both. I don't know. I mean, it's definitely not as loud as it was.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: I would agree with you, it's not as loud as it was. But I think that it's mostly because I think those in charge there kind of went like, okay, we've been vocal enough. You should know by now it should be part of curriculum.
I don't know. It's my assumption. I think the assumption there on my end is that they figure that the initial push that needed to be given is given, and from here on should be part of any curriculum. Anyone jumping into the world of web development should understand that there's a way to optimize, and that needs to be part of your core stuff that you do. Obviously, it's not, but I think that's what they're thinking.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: We know each other from work camps, and we've seen each other at conferences. How many work camp?
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Norway.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: No, Leiden was the first one.
That was the first one. And then Norway, and then there was.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: Work camp Europe in Leiden, the very first one in 2013. So I was right on the year, just not on the location. Okay.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: Yes. And then Norway and then a lot of work camps after that. Yes. Including my new home, Porto.
In WordPress circles, you are the performance guy. I'm sort of the performance guy among the I'm not in the limelight, but for people who know me, they think of me, this guy cares about performance. They pretty much know that, and I'm that guy. What does that tell you about the entire ecosystem? If the guy that means there's no other guys and girls in the ecosystem.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: I think you're proving my point. The push was done, and from there, considered to be enough of a push.
But I'll answer this differently.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: So.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: My sort of rebranding of my personal site and the stuff that I do, I put performance first, not necessarily just in what I produce, but also how I brand myself. And the reason for this that I don't do it any different than I did years ago. The thing that I do differently is talk about it and share more. So the branding is not just, hey, this is a label, it's a great label, moving on, but it's also.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: The.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Continuation of something that was already there. And I know from that perspective, there are plenty more that are doing similar stuff or doing great stuff. Not everybody touts the way I do it or you do it in terms of performance, but this is very well possible to be a bubble within a bubble, maybe.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah, actually, that's likely, I would say.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm saying it as I'm realizing it, I'm saying it. So I'm like yeah, one thing.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: I was going to say, so I can point out a few folks that do have a performance first mindset, but I also know some really smart developers that are doing fantastic stuff that if you ask them, so what about performance? Or how have you taken performance into account? They go like blank.
I didn't there's a few things I know to avoid, so I avoid just the caching plugin.
I have an opinion about that.
[00:19:03] Speaker B: I don't I don't think I do the whole thing. We're talking about mainly front end performance. This is what I do, front end performance. You probably do both, but I think you're focused on front end as well, right?
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I do both, but okay, I try to be as smart as possible in terms of focusing there where the budget allows me to be most absolutely.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: That makes perfect sense. With front end performance, it doesn't matter what happens on the back end as long as that page is pushed from the server quickly.
If the page is delivered like the response time and the page comes back in 400 milliseconds, but the page has, I don't know, maybe 200 requests on it and it needed to have 50. It doesn't matter that your back end performance is amazing. It really doesn't because it's going to load slowly for most people because of the limitation of their devices.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: I'm thinking mostly of the exception being scaling.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: One of the things I find amazing that people haven't picked up on it yet is as soon as you add something like ecommerce, the best example, as soon as you add something in Cart, everything on the site is no longer cached because you have a cookie.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:20:25] Speaker A: So that cookie means as I am progressing to shop for more items, I invalidate cache. Which means if I'm one of the ten folks doing that in a minute, it's all gravy, doesn't matter.
But if I am one of the 10,000 people who just got an email and the tracking parameters, for instance, that are used by MailChimp or any of the other or advertising, for instance, all those tracking parameters also invalidate cache. So anybody visiting through a link like that sees an uncached version of your site, and then the problem you just mentioned becomes a problem for everyone because you can cache the shit out of it. But if you bypass cache, then you are looking at Raw and then back end smart things, they become important.
[00:21:22] Speaker B: Back end stuff doesn't matter to me because I don't do it. Let's put it that way. It does matter, but it can be perfect. Like it can be incredible, it can be 100 milliseconds to deliver the page to get it back, and then that page is going to be ten times bigger and have ten times more assets than it should have had.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: And as the volume of not matters.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: And as the volume of traffic increases, that becomes a bigger issue.
No matter how you look at it. The time to first byte is the best indicator, I think is the best indicator of letting you know how efficient your site actually is.
[00:22:01] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: If that's provided by cache, that only tells half the story. But when you test on cache time, the first bite, and it's fast, you're generally not going to have a problem if there's more people. But if your cached version is fast but your uncashed version is not, you're going to have a problem if you send us a newsletter, which is why help. My site went down because I sent out my newsletter to 10,000 people. Yes, but of course it did, because everything was uncast that they saw and you had a great offer. Everybody wanted to check it out.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Right.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Here we are.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: That's definitely a huge issue, but we mentioned core web idles and all that stuff.
People need to know that has nothing to do with the server. That is everything.
Not nothing, but close to nothing, let's put it that way. That is everything to do with the device the user is on. I had a client recently, I made their website faster last summer.
It was very bad. Now it's very okay, let's put it that way. And their core web vital started failing again. They bought traffic that happened to be 3G traffic from slow devices, from markets where it's just slow Internet, slow devices, slow everything. And then Google monitors that and they say, okay, this is not loading fast enough for most people. You need to take that kind of stuff into account when you're building the website and the pages. I mean, a plain HTML website can be slow as hell.
[00:23:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
In the same way, and I love this example, I generally am of the opinion that caching shouldn't happen inside WordPress. I think front end optimization shouldn't should happen inside of WordPress. I think front end optimalization in the most hardcore way. And I know that's how you build your sites or optimize your sites. You said you didn't build anymore, but.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: I'm retired from that.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm full retired. Nice. I like the sound of that.
There is a scenario where caching your site by a plugin actually slows down your site. Because just consider this the whole application needs to load first that's Word percent, every single plugin and theme. Then we have one particular plugin that needs to do some checks.
Do we have this as a cached version? That's a quick check, but it's a check nonetheless. Then from that, oh yes, I have a cached version of this page. I'll then serve you this page that's quite a lot of that needs to happen before caching is actually served. So if you're looking at high, high traffic sites that are having bursts, caching will hurt.
So you should in my opinion, cache on server level and micro caching the best way, I think combined with whatever you can do on I should say whatever you can afford on Cloudflare.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Well done.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah, everybody wants enterprise, but nobody wants to pay for it.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: It's not cheap for most people.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: No, I think it starts at five k or something.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: It's not cheap.
Eloquently put one thing that and this is something I haven't tried, but I think has potentially has future in WordPress space as well is Cloudware has those ESIS or Edge side includes I haven't worked with that. But if you can cache the entire page on Cloudflow on their servers and then have those includes just replace the dynamic parts of the page. Yeah, that is definitely something I haven't had a time to really even try that I've seen some people write about it where they basically deliver a fully static version of the page and then they combine with the dynamic version and just replace some things, I think with Edge site includes you need to build your rep, then you that way.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Of course I've seen those. So I have a few clients that I need to say it clients. So one in particular that uses A that only blogs in Dutch and blogs a lot in Dutch. So anyone visiting from Russia, China, India really they care less about it. So what I have implemented for them is part of their web application firewall inside of cloudflare. If you are from that region, you then see a okay, just let me show you're human.
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: And if you are you move on. So that check that. Let me show your human is built as a variable inside a static version of their site in the same way that you just mentioned.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: That's really smart.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Yeah, but moving on from that is super interesting. Like how much could you do interesting?
[00:27:10] Speaker B: You could do everything when you're loading pretty much any web app these days. And there's the loading edit when it's just flashing. You can just show that until you get the include and just populate. Let's say you want to personalize your ecommerce stores and you want to show different popular products depending on the user and that's going to be your include. Just have that section reserve the height so you don't mess the CLS going back to core web vitals. Just push that to the edge cached version of the page and just include.
[00:27:41] Speaker A: That and you have not built anything with that yet.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: But you never again. I'm kind of trying to move myself away from web development and more into building tools and I don't know, CRO is still fashion of mine. I love doing that. So I haven't had the time but I will try something soon ish for sure. I think that is a lot of making WordPress work with that or allowing it WooCommerce let's just say. Because ecommerce again is where the money.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: And where the personalized stuff is allowing WooCommerce to do that and work with cloudsflare. I think that could solve a lot of problems.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: It's a wonderful example.
This started with me explaining that caching can hurt your performance.
This is mostly a thing of volume, right. But cloudflare is something that needs to be in the mix. If you're not thinking in terms of moving stuff to the edge already then this is your wake up call. Start thinking in can I move to the edge? And cloudflare to me is a perfect example. There are other examples. If you don't want to if for whatever reason cloudflare doesn't rub you the right way, I guess that can happen. But I'm all in on cloudflare.
But yeah, this is a great example of where I think optimization should go rather than fully headless type of stuff because that's a different approach to sort of the same problem.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: But.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Headless WordPress is kind of a sexy idea and it has been a sexy idea for like eight years now.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Which kind of tells you that it's not really ever going to hit mainstream because I think it's niche WordPress.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's super niche.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: I think it's great. I think it's great.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: I think there are a few scenarios where it makes sense, but on the.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Whole.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: In fact, my newsletter goes out today highlighting this particular fact. And when I wrote out that in my newsletter, I figured I need to write a proper blog post about it because I think the locations where this makes sense are few and far between, for the most part, because you need great hosting and proper application architecture before this actually becomes an issue. Like the amount of stuff that you have to do to fix being headless.
It's just worth it for me. There's other ways to do it.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: That's what I think as well. Yeah. There's other tools, other ways to go back to Headless and why it's a niche WordPress is, what, 40 something percent of the web?
43 something, yeah, 43 something. And let's say there's 100% of people that built those 43% of websites. What is the percentage of website creators, let's call them assemblers, developers, whatever, that even know that Headless exists? I would say it's under five, for sure, and probably much lower.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's quite possible if you're including the Elementor crowd, the page builder crowd, everyone.
[00:31:10] Speaker B: And people who just set up a WordPress website on their own without necessarily.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: They'Re not going to know. They're not going to care.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Are they included in the 43%?
[00:31:21] Speaker A: So the 43% is based on the number of sites for the top 10 million, right? 10 million most popular sites.
[00:31:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:30] Speaker A: I think I was at Clouds list this weekend and there were two interesting talks, both mentioning the number of active WordPress sites and the variance in percentages is quite different because I want to hear that. So it depends on what you count as an active site. It depends on how you calculate what it is you're using.
From there, you're subtracting not subtracting, you're calculating with an assumption that the rest, outside of what you know, that you just measured by, you know, by bots doing their thing. You're, you're you're assuming that the rest is going to work the same way, but you don't know that it's an assumption.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: You don't know that that's correct.
[00:32:26] Speaker A: No.
Yeah. There were two folks sharing different numbers.
And I don't have the right answer in terms of what I think is the best approach, but because we've been using the BuildWith statistic for years now, even though BuildWith changed their source of data from Alexa to Google.
[00:32:59] Speaker B: I still.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Think we're just going to have to use that because it doesn't make sense to come up with a new percentage now. But in terms of what is a site, do we look, if we have.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: To ask the question, what is a website? That means we don't know. How we're measuring it. Let's just be honest about that.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: So what is a WordPress site? Is a static version of a WordPress site still a WordPress site? Yes, it is, but when you scan it, it doesn't tell you it is WordPress, right.
That percentage that we're just discussing in terms of how many people actually use headless versions of WordPress, we don't know, because we can't happily measure those.
But yeah. Is it necessary? Probably not.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Probably not. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I guess if you really care about performance and you want to build your own stuff, maybe that's an easier way to go when you control literally everything. Headless work? Not necessarily, but maybe.
I want to share something that literally came up. It came to my inbox this morning. It's Rankmat. They have a page builder now, I think, WP Spectra, because it's an email from Rankmat that just talks about that and comparing it to other page builders. But I'll just read the numbers real quick.
I never heard of it before, but they brag about how it's better than Elementor, Beaver, and all those other assuming that even right.
[00:34:32] Speaker A: I guess they would be marketing themselves.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: But there's a table that reads the data from Pingdom about performance and page speed and GT metrics and all that stuff. So basically blank WordPress 26 requests. I don't know what page this is. Maybe it's homepage, whatever it is. Elementor Pro, probably two megabytes, 52 megabytes and 50 requests. Beaver builder 1.8 and 29. And then they brag about Spectra being 1.8 and 22. Even to go from six to 22 is like, I will never approve and understand that if one plugin makes you go from six requests to 22 requests.
[00:35:13] Speaker A: So the number of requests, I will say this with http two. I'm less concerned about it.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: It's more about the recklessness. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. Absolutely. It's more about the recklessness of how many of those are necessary in this particular page.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: Well, if we're talking page builders, my logic is still that if I can do it without a page builder, I don't need to load a whole plugin to take care of something that is already inside WordPress itself. So full site editing, I've been using it exclusively for about seven, eight months now.
Are there bugs? Oh, hell yeah.
Some are not even funny anymore.
I had a bug where if I added a hashtag so hashtag 55, right? The number 55, if I added that somewhere, it got added as a tag, like a literal tag inside automatically. And I'm like, It's not supposed to be a tag, so why are we doing this? Because it made no sense. That's a funky, quirky bug. There's more. This was one that sent out to me.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Like, why did this happen? Yeah, that's the question there the main problem, in my opinion, the biggest problem with WordPress performance in general is people using shit they don't really need because they saw the demo and it looked cool.
How many websites have a page builder that looks like the demo? Because if you don't even know what your website should look like and you get inspiration from a demo of a plugin, you don't need a plugin. Maybe you need simple layout, simple pages. And maybe we're just old and we're just yelling at clouds saying that, dude, you can't just load elementor because you saw the demo and that one page looked nice. That's not how the website should be designed.
[00:37:17] Speaker A: I think you're right. I also think that's a very difficult one to solve because of how because you're essentially asking people who have no idea what to look for. They bego. Let me see if this oh, this looks good.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: Great.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Do it.
[00:37:33] Speaker B: Is that a good way to do anything?
[00:37:35] Speaker A: No, that was not rhetorical, that was a question. Yeah.
So I think that's a difficult one to solve. So you just said, this is something that I worry about, or something like that. But what would you consider the biggest challenges we have going forward? Is it that is it exactly people not fully understanding the implications of their choices and the tools that they use? Is that it?
[00:38:04] Speaker B: That's exactly what it is. Do you want this super size? Do you want fries with that? We're in that WordPress evolution. That's where we are. That's literally where we are. Because do you want these 20 CSS files extra with my plugin and people.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Don'T even know want as a menu or just a burger?
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. I think that you want the menu.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Do you want to supersize that? Yeah, that's a great analogy.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: We have a special promotion today. Yeah, all that stuff.
That has been the biggest problem for, I would say at least the last five years, probably longer. That the junk that's pushed to the browser because of irresponsible development. Mostly by plugin authors. Mostly by plugin authors. And then, I mean, if you're just a person, non developer, assembly website, you're not going to know that. And then by agencies not auditing and vetting every single plugin they install, we're not going to get there, like today. We're not going to go there today. But that is also a problem. That is also very big problem in the entire ecosystem.
[00:39:08] Speaker A: So I'm invited to speak at work, Switzerland next weekend.
Not this weekend, but weekend over.
My talk is titled WooCommerce but faster.
Why make things complicated in titles if they don't activate?
[00:39:24] Speaker B: Exactly. Make it.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
One of the things I mention as it's all optimized, it's great, wonderful. Thank you for putting thought and energy into that.
But from there, most folks just kind of go, okay, wonderful, it's done. Yeah, I have the Cachings plugin turned on. It'll do whatever it needs to do. And I'm like, no, every single update, every single thing you add, test.
It's so simple and even if you don't want to use it fully.
Continuous development and integrations and stuff like that. You don't need to go all and.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: You should, and you should.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: You should, but you don't need to if that's not your wheelhouse, if that's too complex, this will sound horrible in the context of what we just said, but there's a plugin for that, right? You can install a plugin, which is at minimal cost, but it will tell you certain pages like, okay, so we went from 0.4 to 2.4. Something's off here. You want to know you need to be testing.
You raised a good example of things that are going the wrong way.
I'd like to add to that, that most folks think it's a set and forget and oh, okay, I heard I need to do my updates. Okay, great, I'll do my updates.
But you need to test. You can't assume the whole assumption game is so strong.
It hurts in so many ways, and then they complain it's not fast anymore.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: But the reason that is, again, just an opinion. The reason that's happening is because WordPress is a crutch.
We just rely on it doing all the heavy lifting, and that's why it's there. It's doing its thing. It's fine. I don't need to worry about anything. And that's not to say WordPress is bad. WordPress I never want to hear WordPress is slow because it's not install on the shittiest server you have. It's going to be fast, do it super size and with fries, it's going to be slow. And like with any other platform, that's going to happen. So I don't like the fact how easy it is to slow down a WordPress website. I did a Meetup presentation here in Porto at WordPress meetup, and one of the slides was, one of the easiest things to do in life is to slow down a WordPress website because you just let it be. You literally just let it exist. It's going to find a way or give it to a client and give them admin access.
[00:42:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to give an example. Vikas from Insta, WP was at CloudFest, and he mentioned that I think it was a brother, but he built a WooCommerce site for stuff he needed to sell, and the items were about 50,000, so not a small site.
And he quickly ended up with an extremely slow site. So Vikas said, well, let me log in and see what's going on. So VicAs went in, goes in, and he said, and I see like, 120 plugins installed. None of them are doing what they're supposed to be doing, but they're loading everything everywhere, all the time. And he goes, the end result of that is that the client itself and I say client because from WordPress's perspective, that's a client loss, because he now is on Spotify Shopify.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: I do it every time, spotify Shopify, I've never got any right.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: So I think this was my first one. I think this was my first one, but I'm sure it's going to happen now that you've cemented it in my brain.
So that's a good example of someone having the best intentions, even having the resources in terms of his brother who knows stuff.
You end up with a situation where nobody really should be going adding 100 plugins.
I'd even say maybe we should have a filter inside of WordPress that says, look, buddy, you're at 50 plugins now.
You're sure you want to add number 51?
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that would be good. Also, maybe this is a business opportunity for developer out there. Just build a plugin that lets the site owner thinks they're installing a plugin and just block the plugin completely. Just make sure you want to install that. Yeah, it's working great. Just make it fake. Do something.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: I will add to this that the whole discussion of too many plugins plugins is a wrong thing. I kind of disagree because it's more about what is being loaded and done during those plugins. Right? If you have 100 monster plugins, sure not good thing. I maintain a site that has about 110, I think.
And it's fine, it's working fine because.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: You need those 110. Well, if you don't need the 50.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: So 50% is custom, right? It does something small, something here and there and the other stuff that is just needed for whatever purpose it serves. But yeah, it's not a black and white thing. Like don't have too many plugins.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: It's not about the number. It's a number of unnecessary things. Like if you do everything everywhere all at once in WordPress, it's going to fail. It's just not going to work.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Be cautious what you're adding exactly.
I think that filter would be good.
50, like, let's say I think it's arbitrary number somewhat, but it'd be nice to have some sort of fill like, yo, dude, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. You're asking me to add a 51st plugin? What's wrong with the 50 ones you have? Fill out the survey first.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
Upload your passport like Doug.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Yeah, no, we'd like to see you be sound of mind and body first, please. Thank you.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: Confusion. You know what the problem is there? Because it's easy.
You can't talk about us and other WordPress people. We know that 120 plugins is a lot like whether you need them or not, it's a lot of plugins. Someone just installing the plugins and running a website. They don't know if others have five or ten or 200 or 1000.
Maybe just say, you know, that an average user has 17 plugins installed.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: That's a good filter.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Maybe that's a good filter. That's something that should be part of the core.
[00:46:20] Speaker A: You're a smarter man than I. I would have gone for a hard number, but yeah. So you have an Ecommerce store. Okay, great. So the average is about 35 plugins.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Are you sure because you're adding more and more. Yeah, that's a good one.
I have the name for the plugin. Are you sure?
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Are you sure? Yeah. That's good. That's not bad.
Or don't drink and install.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: I might build it. I might build it. It sounds fun. Are you sure?
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, hello. Dolly still has legs. So why.
[00:46:58] Speaker A: There'S a Samuel L. Jackson version of it? I don't know if it's still available, but there used to be a Samuel L. Jackson version.
[00:47:04] Speaker B: I did one like eight, seven years ago. Hello, Chloe. It was quoting Kardashian.
[00:47:10] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:47:11] Speaker B: Was actually available. You could download not in the repo, of course. It was on.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: So so the Samuel Jackson thing, I think, was in the repo.
I installed it on my brother's side, and we're both Pulp Fiction fans, like, to the core.
And I've never heard him laugh so hard when he first saw, like, dude, I got Samuel Jackson, like, everywhere in my site. That's awesome. Wait, front end as back, but everywhere, right?
Yeah. That's cool.
So, yeah, that sort of stuff, that made him very exciting.
So in terms of exciting, there's a lot of stuff that we've talked about, things that you don't like, but what do you like? What do you see as a bright future ahead of us in terms of performance? Is there any performance, any tool, any any movement, any focus you see happening? You go like, yes, that's me, I'm bringing on.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: I don't like ending weeks on a sad note, but I don't. I just don't. I think it's going to get worse. I think it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: For those of you listening, it's a Friday.
[00:48:21] Speaker B: Recording this on a Friday.
I don't see it happening.
We're boiling the planet as a humanity and no one cares about that. Who's going to care about extra plugins? Yeah, I just don't see that happening.
There's more individuals caring about it. I think that's a good thing. But there's also infinitely more people who just are going to assemble websites and not care about it. Yeah.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: And then here's the thing that if we're being cynical, here's the thing that I would like to add to that.
Here we are optimizing the hell out of a WordPress site in any way, shape, form possible.
And here we have YouTube asking us to add way more shorts. Here we have Instagram asking us to upload more shorts. Here we have TikTok, like the amount of data that needs to move from A to B for a TikTok for a YouTube video. Yeah.
Your website pales in comparison.
[00:49:27] Speaker B: If we're being cynical, it's completely unnecessary. Yeah, that's a good point. But don't add to the fire. There's no need.
[00:49:38] Speaker A: So I should not be uploading this.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: Podcast, 240 P or something like that. Just beats all sorts of stuff. No, but I had guests on my podcast and we talked about Marcus and Marcus from the German SEO guy, like a really Marcus Tandler, I believe, yes. And we talked about that.
The impact of Internet and all the supporting devices in 2020. I believe it was 2019. So before the pandemic was as high as the airline industry, we've reached that spot and it's going to double by 2025. It's going to get worse and worse and worse and worse. We are crying about Leonardo DiCaprio flying private to pick up a new model. That's not the was she 25 again?
[00:50:33] Speaker A: The old one was 25, turned 25 again. Is that what it was?
[00:50:37] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:50:38] Speaker A: I understand his problem. I understand his problem.
No, look, I'm turning 50 this year.
Just like my age. Half my age. We're not going to do that.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: I know, of course.
But it's a bigger problem that people realize the carbon emissions caused by Internet and supporting devices. Let's put it that way. Because that's what it is. And that's every TikTok that every snap.
[00:51:12] Speaker A: I said it jokingly, but you are right. This is a thing.
[00:51:16] Speaker B: It's a huge problem. It's a huge problem.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: So I do want to try to get on to end on a positive note. So what is the best tip you have for anyone looking to do some kind of optimization for their WordPress site? That is just simple, easy click and you're done. What would that be? One thing.
[00:51:40] Speaker B: One thing is, and this is because I believe most people don't know this, know what the Dom looks like, what the page looked like. That's generated by WordPress. Just do the waterfall chart in web page test and see how many unnecessary.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: Assets you have and what's being loaded.
[00:51:57] Speaker B: Yeah, what's being loaded and what doesn't need to be there. Remove the unnecessary. Let's start with that. We'll make internet twice as fast, at least just by doing that. First you need to remove, then you need to optimize what's left. That is really the formula you need to follow. If you just remove you're doing great. You're doing really well.
[00:52:18] Speaker A: That's a great first step.
[00:52:19] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you asked for one step. You asked for one.
[00:52:23] Speaker A: I did.
[00:52:24] Speaker B: And that's easy. That's super easy.
[00:52:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And on that bombshell, thank you so much for being on the podcast. And I think think there's a few more things we can talk about. So we'll try and organize a second one. But thank you for today. Thank you and see you all on the next one. Bye.
