EP080 Does Performance Matter for Ecommerce SEO - Measure Your Performance with Google PageSpeed Insights
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[00:00:06] Darin Newbold: Good day and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darin Newbold. I'm excited to be here again with Josh Warren to talk about happening in the world of commerce today. And if you notice, I'm speaking a little faster. And I wonder why. Today is all about

[00:00:19] Darin Newbold: performance,

[00:00:20] Darin Newbold: And we're going to come in here Hot and fast.

[00:00:22] Darin Newbold: Anyway, with that, Josh, we're excited. Uh, going to be talking about performance optimization, looking at, uh, Google's page speed insights and some examples. So with that, uh, what's your thoughts?

[00:00:35] Joshua Warren: we said no bits, but apparently today it's all about the bits. So, I'm excited. Um, a lot of this comes from some conversations with some e commerce directors, uh, some interesting conversations on LinkedIn, some controversy on LinkedIn, um, and really started with, you know, The thesis of does performance even matter for e commerce SEO purposes?

[00:00:57] Joshua Warren: And, uh, yeah, it's pretty

[00:00:59] Darin Newbold: uh, I [00:01:00] could take that somewhere, but i'm not going to um, so I'm begs the question josh. Why does performance matters because we know it does and especially in e commerce sites So why does performance matter?

[00:01:12] Joshua Warren: I'm looking at it through the lens of SEO. And a lot of this is because, um, an e commerce expert well known in the industry recently posted to LinkedIn and said, Website performance doesn't matter, stop wasting your time on it.

[00:01:24] Joshua Warren: Yeah, I'm like, Oh, wow, that's kind of a hot take. Um, and as I dug in, really, what he was saying is that we put too much attention on performance for SEO reasons. And so obviously, website performance matters, it greatly impacts your conversion rate, and it does impact your SEO, but kind of the, the The tweak in there, and I wrote a very well researched, detailed, citations all over the place article that proves this from what Google has said over the years.

[00:01:52] Joshua Warren: Google has said performance matters, but it matters most as a tiebreaker. So your site doesn't have to be the fastest site in the world. You don't [00:02:00] have to have a hundred score on a page speed and you don't have to, or on Lighthouse, you don't have perfect core web vitals. You just have to be better than your competitors.

[00:02:09] Joshua Warren: Whenever you, when Google is looking to ranking factors, the flip side of that is I think there's some people out there that are, especially some of the. The shadier ones that are selling some promises of like, we'll get you a hundred and then magically, you're going to rank for all these keywords. You've never ranked for before a score of a hundred and perfect core web vitals aren't going to magically make you rank for keywords that Google doesn't find relevant for your site, but even with that performance does matter.

[00:02:35] Joshua Warren: It's tiebreaker.

[00:02:36] Darin Newbold: all about relevance. And that's interesting, it's about the tiebreaker. Well, let's jump into kind of the big thing here, Google PageSpeed and the insights that it can

[00:02:46] Joshua Warren: Yeah, 

[00:02:48] Darin Newbold: Yeah, 

[00:02:49] Joshua Warren: there's actually, it's a tool called PageSpeed Insights. It's at pagespeed. web. dev. There will be links in the show notes.

[00:02:57] Joshua Warren: You do not have to try to type that in. [00:03:00] We'll give you a link. Um, and you can use that to test your site. And this is something I want to talk about today because I feel like there's a lot of merchants out there that basically end up paying someone to run this tool for them. And I want them to realize that you can run this yourself.

[00:03:13] Joshua Warren: And then also, it's If someone's telling you, Hey, you really need to work on your site performance. I think it's really important for you to be able to verify that. So this is a kind of an independent tool Google's put out there. So you can verify kind of, does your site need help with the performance?

[00:03:27] Joshua Warren: Does it not kind of, where does it stand?

[00:03:30] Darin Newbold: Interesting. Well, I think we put together kind of, uh, an example that you wanted to run through and we were going to, we were going to use the, the Behemoth Amazon as, uh, as that example. So kind of walk us through that,

[00:03:43] Joshua Warren: Yeah. And, uh, I will say, especially for those that listen to this audio only, This may be a little harder to follow.

[00:03:50] Joshua Warren: So, um, hopefully, you know, most of our episodes aren't hard to follow, but sometimes, um, so what I've done is I have pre recorded a video that we will link to in the [00:04:00] show notes that you can pull up on our YouTube or on a, on my LinkedIn that will actually show you, I'm going to do a little screen share and walkthrough so that I don't have to try to.

[00:04:08] Joshua Warren: describe every page as we go through it. But, basically we have used, PageSpeed Insights to test Amazon's homepage. Um, one of the fun things about PageSpeed Insights is you can generate a shareable link that will show that exact same run of that test. And so I'll also put that in the show notes. So if you want to click on that and kind of scroll through it as we talk, but you're going to see,

[00:04:32] Darin Newbold: sorry to interrupt real quick, just to clarify, I think it was, it's Amazon's homepage, but it's on mobile,

[00:04:37] Joshua Warren: It is. It is. Well, actually the report will give you both mobile and desktop, but I don't want to read two reports to y'all and y'all don't want to listen to that. So we're going to just talk about the mobile report for today. Um, but that is an important distinction and that's even where Google has said that, this factors in a lot more on mobile.

[00:04:54] Joshua Warren: If you have a really poor, slow mobile performing site and someone is searching on [00:05:00] mobile, you're a lot less likely to appear. So if you look at your analytics data and you're saying, wow. We're getting a lot of desktop traffic, but we're not getting the mobile traffic that, you know, we hear we should be getting.

[00:05:10] Joshua Warren: That's an indicator that, oh, maybe you're actually not ranking as high on mobile as you do on desktop because of a poor, uh, mobile performance.

[00:05:18] Darin Newbold: Well, what are some of those, uh, the key metrics that we're going to. We're going to see come up here in this.

[00:05:23] Joshua Warren: Yeah, so the report actually is broken down into two different sections, and if you have a smaller or newer site, you may not get the first section.

[00:05:31] Joshua Warren: And that's because this very first section is, Core Web Vitals assessment based on actual traffic to your site. So Google is recording what people, especially people running Google Chrome, It's recording their actual experiences as they interact on your site. So this isn't hypothetical data. This isn't a synthetic test.

[00:05:49] Joshua Warren: This is the real, um, user data. And so if you have enough traffic and Google's recorded enough traffic, you will see the core web vitals and there are actually six and Google does [00:06:00] sometimes change these, but. At the moment, we have Largest Contentful Paint, which is basically how long it takes your largest content element to load and be displayed.

[00:06:09] Joshua Warren: You want this to be below 2. 5 seconds. Amazon's doing pretty good at 1. 4 seconds. you have, Your first input delay is another notable metric they look at and basically the time from when a user first interacts with your site to when you're when the browser responds. You want that to be less than 100 milliseconds.

[00:06:30] Joshua Warren: Um, Amazon's gotten it down to 24 milliseconds. A lot of that can be basically if you're running a ton of JavaScript, if you have, and actually we were looking at a merchant site recently where all the JavaScript that could ever possibly be needed for Any function anywhere on their site was being loaded on every page.

[00:06:49] Joshua Warren: And so their first input delay was a lot higher just because the browser's like chugging through all that JavaScript, trying to figure out, all right, does this apply, does that apply before it can actually [00:07:00] react?

[00:07:00] Darin Newbold: That's crazy. That's crazy. And then one of the last ones here that I, or not the last one, one of the third one I should say, Cumulative Layout Shift.

[00:07:09] Darin Newbold: What's this one all

[00:07:10] Joshua Warren: Oh, and this one, um, this is where some marketing teams can get themselves in trouble. So this basically is how much the layout of the page shifts. So once it loads, is it jumping around, especially if all of a sudden you have a giant pop up take over the screen, um, that can really hurt you here.

[00:07:30] Joshua Warren: And so, um, Amazon is doing pretty good on this one. Um, you really want anything below 0. 1. They are down to a 0. 01 on Amazon. So basically once their homepage loads, what you see is what you get. It doesn't change a lot.

[00:07:44] Darin Newbold: And that is awesome. I gotta say, that's one of the things, cumulative layout shift is something that drives me crazy about certain sites.

[00:07:51] Joshua Warren: And you've always called it that, right? That's what tell your friends. You're like, man, this website's terrible because it's cumulative layout shift, so. [00:08:00] Who comes up with these terms? Well,

[00:08:01] Darin Newbold: we've got, uh, we've got some other metrics. There's a total blocking time and speed index. Yes. Uh, that gives us some more, a bigger picture on the site's performance, Josh?

[00:08:12] Joshua Warren: And that's basically, as you scroll down on this report, there's a tool called, um, lighthouse that you can run within the Chrome browser, but then also page speed insights does a version of that test as well. That gives you a performance score of, um, zero to 100. The interesting thing and actually I am in the article I posted to LinkedIn, I mentioned rum vision, which is a service you can pay for that monitors the real user metrics on your site.

[00:08:38] Joshua Warren: You can see how your site's performing. and remember their leadership team kind of commented and mentioned, Hey, lighthouse scores don't even really matter at all. It's really the core web vitals. And this is such a good example because Amazon's performance score on lighthouse is red because it is a 46.

[00:08:56] Joshua Warren: And yet I doubt that Amazon is having a hard time [00:09:00] ranking in Google. Seems like they still show up. So, and a lot of that comes from, um, yeah, the total blocking time. And that basically they have a total blocking time of over 1500 milliseconds. So, I mean, it's just kind of sitting there for 1500 milliseconds and you're wondering, What's happening on this website.

[00:09:17] Joshua Warren: Um, they also actually give. So in core web vitals, we talked some about the largest contentful paint. in lighthouse, what matters kind of a lot is also the first contentful paint. So how long until something is appearing on the screen. And in this run of, um, PageSpeed Insights, it took 3. 6 seconds. So the first 3.

[00:09:41] Joshua Warren: 6 seconds, this theoretical user is just kind of staring at their phone, saying, well, I went to Amazon, but nothing's happening. 

[00:09:48] Darin Newbold: Wow, that seems odd. the other performance pieces, first input delay, as well as the cumulative layout shift, my favorite one as it is now, these are all making impacts on [00:10:00] how that performance is going to look for for the site, and some things to Definitely be looking out for and to make changes.

[00:10:07] Darin Newbold: So kind of speaking of that, what are maybe your tips and recommendations around these as, as we're getting these? And I know they're a little complicated. fortunately we're not using the, uh, the three letter acronyms for each one of them, cause that would be really crazy, but, but we will have this on our, uh, on the show notes, but kind of your practical tips and recommendations.

[00:10:27] Joshua Warren: so one thing I really like about PageSpeed Insights, um, because I am a fan of all e commerce practitioners need to at least know enough to not get taken advantage of to kind of not have to be completely dependent on vendors and agencies. And so what I love about PageSpeed Insights is as you scroll down, it will actually give you some detailed diagnostics and even some recommendations.

[00:10:52] Joshua Warren: And so, um, those recommendations for Amazon in this case, um, they talk about how They have javascript [00:11:00] that is taking seven seconds to execute, and so there are specific javascript scripts that this report calls out and says, Hey, you really need to look at these scripts are taking a long time. And on merchant sites, lots of times what we'll see is, I mean, um, More than half the time, there will be at least one of these scripts that they're not even using the service anymore.

[00:11:21] Joshua Warren: I talked to somebody recently who their previous agency had installed, um, a really smart tool that measures anytime an error occurs and logs that error into this service so that the agency can say, oh, there's an error on her. Client site. Well, they weren't even working with that agency anymore. That agency had actually canceled that account that javascript effectively did nothing, but it was still running every single time somebody loaded the page and it was taking multiple seconds and just slowing everything down.

[00:11:50] Joshua Warren: So sometimes it's literally as simple as, hey, let's go in and it may not even require a code change. It may just be, let's just turn the setting off in the admin panel [00:12:00] so that this javascript is not running anymore.

[00:12:01] Darin Newbold: anymore.

[00:12:02] Darin Newbold: So it's that easy just to move a JavaScript out?

[00:12:05] Joshua Warren: of them.

[00:12:05] Darin Newbold: Okay. I was

[00:12:07] Joshua Warren: them. I

[00:12:08] Darin Newbold: genuinely curious there if you didn't have to do the coding. I know there's some other tips that I think we've talked about and we've kind of put down here. Optimizing images is always a huge thing and making sure you have the smallest but obviously the best quality.

[00:12:24] Darin Newbold: of images you can and then browser caching. How can we leverage that and, help with the whole process?

[00:12:31] Joshua Warren: a lot of this depends on what kind of e commerce platform you're on.

[00:12:34] Joshua Warren: And if it's something you're self hosting versus something that's cloud based or SaaS,

[00:12:39] Joshua Warren: There are, especially if you're hosting it yourself or you're hosting it with a hosting company, some of these platforms, there's either server settings or software settings to basically allow things to be cached that people forget to turn on.

[00:12:53] Joshua Warren: I've seen agencies that they will launch a site and a lot of these platforms, they have a developer mode and they have a production mode. [00:13:00] Well, in developer mode, it will intentionally tell browsers, don't store anything, don't cache anything. That way, when a developer changes the code, They see the change immediately on the site, but it's a lot slower.

[00:13:10] Joshua Warren: Right. Absolutely. So, seen sites get launched by other agencies where they forgot to go into production mode. And so, basically every time anything gets loaded, the site is telling the browser, don't cache anything, don't cache anything, and it makes the site slow. And again, it's something where, go into the admin panel, click a button, it's fixed.

[00:13:28] Darin Newbold: fixed.

[00:13:28] Darin Newbold: So also, we talk about, and we just mentioned this even in the Java piece, minimizing these third party scripts or scripts that load automatically, that you may or may not need. And then, you also mentioned here the CDN, we'll have one acronym, Content Delivery Network. How can that You know, where you really talk about that can significantly speed up your site.

[00:13:51] Darin Newbold: How does that help?

[00:13:52] Joshua Warren: So Content Delivery Network will actually take things like your product images or even your JavaScript and instead of just serving them off of your server, it will [00:14:00] distribute it around the country or around the world. And so then when a user loads your website, let's say they're in New York and your site's hosted in Texas.

[00:14:09] Joshua Warren: Well, yeah. It actually takes longer to pull some you wouldn't think you think everything on the internet's instantaneous, but not there's little delays here and there. So it takes longer to get that than if they were getting it from a server in New York. Well, with a content delivery network, they'll have servers basically located all over the country, so that that person's browser connects to the closest server gets the data from there.

[00:14:31] Joshua Warren: It also greatly can reduce the load on your server and speed up your site that way too.

[00:14:37] Darin Newbold: Interesting. That's pretty cool. Well, one quick question for you. You had mentioned, you kind of had me thinking about the whole JavaScript thing and, and having those kind of situations. Is there anything out there that can go and, besides the, this excuse me, the page speed that we're doing here, with this process, the, the PageSpeed Insights, is there something that can go and look and try and find those kind of Java [00:15:00] things, JavaScripts that maybe are just, they're there, but they're not tied to anything?

[00:15:03] Joshua Warren: If you want to get technical, you can look at it in your, um, every web browser has a console mode and you can go into that and you can look, usually you have to turn on developer tools, but I, and this is where being part developer, part salesperson is always fun.

[00:15:17] Joshua Warren: I'm going to tell everyone a secret that salespeople don't want you to know. Um, there is a site called builtwith. com and that is what all the sale, all the cold emails you're getting that say, Hey, you should move from X platform to Y platform. That's where they got that information. You can go to builtwith.

[00:15:35] Joshua Warren: com and for free, you can punch in your own site. and have it give you a report and it will list what it thinks all the third party services you're using are. And so if you see something on that list where you're like, I don't remember that, or we're not using that anymore, then there's a really good chance that that JavaScript is still running on your site.

[00:15:51] Joshua Warren: And that's why built with is saying that you're using it. And that, that can be a way without having to contact an agency or dive into the developer tools or anything [00:16:00] like that to find those third party tools. Interesting.

[00:16:03] Darin Newbold: That is awesome. That is awesome. Well, folks, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. It's all about, uh, all about PageSpeed and putting it all together. Kind of to, uh, to close it out. Josh, how do you want to How do you want to kind of wrap this up in a bow?

[00:16:17] Joshua Warren: So I've talked about how you can do this yourself and you definitely can if you start doing this and you're like, wow, either my site is really slow and it's slower than my competitors and I need to fix it.

[00:16:27] Joshua Warren: Or if you're like, wow, this is just, I don't want to have to deal with what the difference between the largest contentful paint and first contentful paint and cumulative layout shift is. Um, we have launched a performance auditing service. Um, you can actually just purchase it straight off of the creativity website.

[00:16:43] Joshua Warren: Don't even have to talk to a salesperson or anything, although I'm our salesperson and I don't bite, I promise. Um, so we definitely encourage y'all to consider that. And if you reach out to me, tell me you listen to this episode, I can even, you know, knock the price down a little bit for it. Um, and we can definitely help you out with that.[00:17:00] 

[00:17:00] Darin Newbold: We'll definitely, definitely take, take that opportunity, connect with Josh Joshua Warren on LinkedIn. And as always, we love to, uh, we love to hear from you, share your thoughts and experience that you've had with performance on, on LinkedIn and Joshua's, uh, Joshua's LinkedIn page, and we definitely look forward to connecting with you each and every time.

[00:17:23] Darin Newbold: Until then, hope your site. is as fast as possible. Take care. 

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